TPE

Feuerbach – God is a projection of our needs and our desires

FREUD - Understands religion in terms of mental health – ideal authority (God) is bad for you due to repressing your needs and desires

MARX - Understands religion in terms of social control – one group having control over another in society

Descartes – mind-body dualism – mind and body are essentially different

Dennett – mind is merely a description of matter, and we are essentially physical bodies

Turing test – if a machine and a human behave identically then there is no evidence to say that one is a person and the other is not. Machines can be persons.

Searle – Chinese room – even if a person behaves like a Chinese speaker by following rules, they lack understanding and so a machine is not a person (because it simply follows rules)

Aquinas – ‘cosmological argument’ or ‘first cause’ argument. This claims that everything we see has a cause, and this can be traced back to a first cause seen to be God. (Guinness, domino)

Paley – design or teleological argument - analogy between a watch and the world – both have order and just as we explain the order of the watch in terms of a maker, we must explain the order of the world in terms of a maker (God)
Problem of Evil – a series of if … then statements
If God is omnipotent (all-powerful) then he could stop evil.
If God is all-good then he would want to stop evil
If God is all-knowing (omniscient) then he knows about evil.
Given that God is all three he would decisively end evil. We experience evil so God does not exist.

Miracles Breaks laws of nature Purpose & significance Event with religious interpretation [A miracle sometimes can involve all three characteristics (e.g., Jesus walking on water in the Christian Gospels has