Word: adler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...proofs of God's existence, long pursued in impenetrable books and journals, are engaging wider audiences. Last week Mortimer Adler, popular philosopher and guru of the Great Books Program, published How to Think About...
...classic cosmological inquirer was Thomas Aquinas (1224-74), and the classic modern innovator is Canadian Jesuit Bernard J.F. Lonergan, whose "transcendental Thomism" in Insight (Philosophical Library; $10) justifies Aquinas to the modern world through a complex philosophy of human understanding. Chicago's Mortimer Adler has long been interested in Aquinas' thought. Though not formally religious he nonetheless pondered the God problem for most of his 75 years before writing his readable How to Think About...
Aquinas reasoned that each effect must have a cause and that an endless chain must proceed back to a primordial First Cause or Prime Mover. In How to, Adler rejects that starting point because a universe with a beginning presupposes the Creator that it seeks to prove. Therefore Adler assumes that the universe had no beginning. He also rejects the idea that a higher cause underlies and explains all phenomena in the universe, on the ground that natural processes provide sufficient explanation...
...time Adler embraced Aquinas' proof, then for decades he thought it did not work because although everything in the universe is contingent, nothing ceases to exist absolutely (e.g. burning wood only changes form), so no God is needed to explain the existence of contingent things. Last May he suddenly changed his mind again after applying the "possible worlds" approach. Adler speculated that the universe is only one of many possible universes, any of which -including this actual universe-can just as easily not exist as exist. The universe is "radically contingent," the only thing capable of not existing...
Other scholars use what could be called the cumulative argument: they contemplate the comparative plausibility of various arguments and evidences using Adler's favored standard of judgment, the jury's proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." This permits atheists to avoid having to disprove God absolutely, which is as hard to do as prove his existence, and lets theists cite human phenomena that strict empiricism used to rule out. In The Existence of God (Oxford; $37.50), Richard Swinburne of England's Keele University concludes: "The experience of so many men in their moments of religious vision corroborates what...