Heavens Natural Religion

According to the beliefs of many peoples, earthquakes originate in mountains. In areas of Africa where the concept of mana is particularly strong, many believe that the dead in the underworld are the causes of earthquakes, though in the upper Nile basin of The Sudan and in East Africa an earth deity is sometimes blamed. In some areas a bearer who holds the world up—a concept that probably came from Arabia, Persia, or India—is believed to cause an earthquake when he changes his position or when he moves his burden from one shoulder to the other.

World bearers often are giants or heroes, such as Atlas , but they also may be animals: In the Arab world, on the east coast of Africa and in North Africa, an ox generally is viewed as the bearer, sometimes standing on a fish in the water. Generators of earthquakes also may be the gods of the underworld, such as Tuil, the earthquake god of the inhabitants of the Kamchatka Peninsula , who rides on a sleigh under the earth.

The earthquake is driven away by noise, loud shouting, or poking with the pestle of a mortar. Among peoples with eschatological last times views, earthquakes announce the end of the world Europe, western Asia. The view that the tides are caused by the moon can be found over almost all the earth.

This regular natural phenomenon seldom gives rise to cults, but the ebb and flow of the coastal waters have stimulated mythological concepts. Not infrequently the moon acquires the status of a water deity because of this phenomenon. The Tlingit of the northwestern United States view the moon as an old woman, the mistress of the tides. The animal hero and trickster Yetl, the raven, is successful in conquering with the aid of the mink the seashore from the moon at low tide, and thus an extended area is gained for nourishment with small sea animals.

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Sacramental ideas and practices in preliterate societies. This indicates a special and intimate relationship between humans and animals that transcends and overcomes the boundaries between different realms of being….

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Nature worship aspect of Mesoamerican culture In Mesoamerican Indian: The concept of the sacred In Middle Eastern religion: Stages of religious development prehistoric culture In prehistoric religion: Hunting rites and animal cults Wicca In Wicca use of ritualistic objects In ceremonial object: Places of worship and sacrifice sacramental rites In sacrament: Help us improve this article!

Contact our editors with your feedback. Introduction Nature as a sacred totality Heaven and earth as sacred spaces, forces, or processes Heaven The father of the family The withdrawn god The first among equals Heaven and earth deities as partners The god of heaven viewed dualistically The god of heaven viewed monotheistically Earth Mountains Earthquakes Tides Celestial phenomena as objects of worship or veneration The sun The sun as the centre of a state religion The sun as a subordinate deity The sun and moon as a divine pair The sun as an attribute of the highest being The sun as a mythical being The moon Eclipses of the sun and moon Stars and constellations Elements and forces of nature Water Water as primal matter Water as an instrument of purification and expiation Water as a vivifying force Water as fructifying Water as a revealing or judging instrument Fire Weather Worship of animals.

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There are species of each of these. A priori arguments are those that do not require an appeal to particular sense-perceptual experiences in order to justify their conclusions. An early and now-canonical formulation of the ontological argument is found in the second book of St. One of those ways is as the object of an idea—i. And surely that than which a greater cannot be thought cannot exist only in the understanding.

For if it exists only in the understanding, it can be thought to exist in reality as well, which is greater. Adams, and Alvin Plantinga. In what follows, a number of the relevant moves in the early modern discussion will be considered, as well as some contemporary developments of the 17 th century modal argument. Johannes Caterus, for instance, objected to Descartes that by a precisely parallel form of reasoning we could prove the real existence of the object of an idea of an existent lion AT 7. The objection aims to show that, like the idea God, the idea of the existent lion and the idea of the maximally perfect island include existence, and thus the existence of these objects can be established via an ontological argument.

Note that this parity argument via a reductio ad absurdum , if successful, would show that the ontological argument is unsound, but without indicating which premise or which step in the reasoning is at fault. A second objection, anticipated by Descartes in the Fifth Meditation, is that truly predicating a property of something without indicating any conditions or intentional contexts seems already to presume that the thing exists.

This suggests that premise 3 above is in trouble: A third problem, raised in the Second Objections by Father Marin Mersenne, is that the argument would be sound only if a maximally perfect being is really possible or, equivalently, only if there is a genuine divine essence. But this, Mersenne complains, has not been established AT 7. Only some of our ideas are ideas of things that have TINs.

Moreover, TINs themselves exist in some way, although they need not exist in concrete or empirical reality. In any case, the kind of existence TINs have is sufficient to undermine the second objection above: And that would then make the inference to 6 a valid one. In the Fifth Meditation Descartes maintains that TINs are different from fictitious ideas in that TINs are in some sense independent of the thought of their conceivers.

A List of All Religions and Belief Systems

The problem, however, is that it is not clear how this criterion would rule out the natures of a most perfect island or an existent lion. Later, Descartes AT 7. As for the maximally perfect island, I can conceive of it having fewer coconut trees but one more mango tree, and so on. But although Descartes does not seem to recognize this, it also seems that I can conceive of an omnipotent being that is lacking maximal benevolence.

So by this standard it appears that the idea of God also fails to correspond to a true and immutable nature. To the third problem, concerning the real possibility of God, Descartes replies that our clear and distinct ideas of TINs—produced in us by reason—are reliable. These can be grouped as follows:. In this way we supposedly avoid altogether the premise that existence is a perfection. In some writings Leibniz bypasses problem B by presenting an argument with a different conditional as its conclusion:.

Leibniz offers several types of arguments against this.

Natural religion

One relies on the fact that other things are clearly possible, together with the claim that only a necessary being provides a satisfactory ground or explanation for the possible existence of contingent beings. So on the assumption that contingent beings possibly exist, it must be at least possible for a necessary God to exist for more on this kind of argument from possibility, see section 2.

Two properties are incompatible only if they are logically incompatible, according to Leibniz. But on the assumption that all the divine perfections are positive, simple, and thus unanalyzable, neither of these scenarios can obtain.

There is clearly a technical sense in which saying that a concept applies to something does not enlarge the concept or change our conception of the being it refers to. But it might still remain open that a being that has all perfections but does not exist is not as great as a being that has all perfections and also exists. Adding necessary existence to our concept of a being would presumably involve changing it and thus enlarging its concept. This is effectively a modal version of the ontological argument see section 2. The implication for the ontological argument is that we cannot know whether it is really possible for the divine perfections to be jointly exemplified even if we know that they involve no contradiction,.

Versions of the ontological argument discussed by Leibniz and Kant have been elaborated by Robert M. Adams , Alvin Plantinga , Peter van Inwagen , and others. These versions employ contemporary modal semantics and metaphysics to motivate the following two assumptions:. Critics have resisted numerous aspects of the argument for comprehensive discussion, see Oppy But that assumption is only legitimate on some models of how modal talk works. The most significant disagreement, however, is again the one that Mersenne raised against Descartes. How can the possibility claim in 1 be justified?

Others argue that no such presumption of possibility is justified, especially regarding supersensible things. Since necessary truths would be true even if there were no finite minds to think them, such truths cannot be true in virtue of facts about human psychology. Against the Platonic suggestion that they are true in virtue of Forms existing outside of any mind whatsoever, Leibniz argues that some of the truths are about abstract entities, which are not the kinds of things that could have mind-independent existence.

The only contender that remains, then, is that these truths are true in virtue of the ideas in an infinite and necessarily existent divine mind Leibniz []: Note that if the truths about what is possible are necessary truths, as they indeed seem to be, then this might be a more specific version of the argument from necessary truths see 2.

Kant maintains, for instance, that it is impossible for a material being to be conscious, even though no logical contradiction exists between material and conscious Kant [—], 2: It follows that this impossibility is not grounded in divine thought, for God can think any proposition that does not involve a contradiction. So facts about some real possibilities and real impossibilities can only be grounded in a necessary being that somehow exemplifies rather than merely thinking every combination of fundamental properties whose joint exemplification is possible. That being, of course, is supposed to be God.

One way out of this argument is simply to claim that some real possibilities are primitive or ungrounded. This appears to be an option for Kant in his critical period insofar as he is no longer committed to rationalist principles such as the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Still, even in his critical period i.

An a posteriori argument involves at least one premise whose justification essentially appeals to some sort of empirical fact or experience. Cosmological arguments of this sort are found across almost every human philosophical tradition, and find prominence in the West in the writings of Aristotle, numerous medieval Islamic authors, Maimonides, Aquinas, Locke, Leibniz, Samuel Clarke, and David Hume. Here again we will focus largely on the early modern period.

For Leibniz the world is the collection of all the actual contingent beings -- that is, all of the actual beings whose existence is possible but not necessary Leibniz []: Suppose that in fact the world has no beginning in time, and that each being in the world has an explanation in some previously existing being s. Two demands for explanation might still arise: Why is there a world at all rather than none? Why does this world exist and not some other world? Neither explanation can be provided on the basis of entities within the world or within time. This being is God.

Heaven's Natural Religion

A similar cosmological argument is advanced around the same time by Samuel Clarke , see also the entry on Samuel Clarke. David Hume advances three objections to the type of cosmological argument offered by Leibniz and Clarke Hume , Part IX, and the entry Hume on religion. The first is that the notion of absolutely necessary existence is problematic.

Suppose that some being is absolutely necessary—then its nonexistence should be absolutely inconceivable. He replies that an analogous point can be made about matter: This would show that the existence of matter is not contingent after all, and that it does not require an external explanation. Thus the cosmological argument cannot establish that God is the necessary being who is responsible for the rest of the cosmos. In reply, it seems quite possible to conceive of a non-temporal causal relation, and thus to conceive of God, from outside of time, causing a series of contingent beings that has always existed.

Indeed, this view is common in the theological tradition.