Philosophy and God -edx version

• God in Design 

• William Paley gave the argument in 1800s. He argued with examples of Watch in desert and squirrel natural things. Can be contradicted by Darwin theory esp. for squirrel "survival of fittest"
• To counter this Fine Tuning Argument from Roger White in MIT - Why is G constant ? why can't some of the constants change ?

• Against God : The problem of Evil

• Ghengis khan problem - Murders and rapes happened. An omniscient, omni benevolent, omnipotent God would not have prevented the terrible things from happening because although these things were individually terrible,looked at in isolation, these events were awful, the terrible things actually enabled good things to happen.Carbon levels improved because of his killings.1/200 people are his descendants 

• There is no best possible world response

• A world in which terrible things happen and we have free will is better than a world in which no terrible things happen and we don't have free will. Free will is a thing of tremendous value. And if God-- God had the power to make Genghis Khan so that he was a really nice person who didn't go around hurting anybody.But if he'd done that, if he'd created Genghis Khan in such a way as to ensure that Genghis Khan would not hurt anybody, then Genghis Khan would not have had free will. In order for God to create Genghis Khan with free will, God have to give up some of his-- God's-- power to influence the actions of Genghis Khan.
• May be God used these powers of  omniscient, omni benevolent, omnipotent to make the world better. Infinite days heaven logic.

• Pascal's wager

• It is in our interest to believe in God. Its a bet.

• Different options that people have  - Believe in different versions of God, weird God and No God. People select the one with best expected value or utility for them in after life. Its a rational decision and most people take the highest expected value. According to him, people derive the max. expected value by believing in God (Infinite) than not believing in God (Finite value)

"No one has the ability to decide to believe something at will and believe it."