Anselm of Canterbury: “God really exists because we have the concept of God”
Proving the existence of God is one of the main tasks of Christian theology.
And the most interesting argument in favor of divine existence was put forward by the Italian theologian Anselm of Canterbury. Its essence is as follows. God is defined as the totality of all perfections. He is absolute good, love, goodness and so on. Existence is one of perfection. If something exists in our mind, but does not exist outside it, then it is imperfect. Since God is perfect, it means that from the idea of his existence his real existence must be deduced.
God exists in the mind, therefore he exists outside of it.
This is a rather interesting argument, illustrating what philosophy was like in the Middle Ages. Although it was refuted by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, try thinking about it for yourself.
Rene Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”
Can you say anything with absolute certainty? Is there at least one thought that you do not doubt at all? You will say, “Today I woke up. I am absolutely sure of this." Sure? What if your brain an hour ago fell into a flask of scientists and now they are sending electrical signals into it to artificially create memories in you? Yes, it looks implausible, but it is theoretically possible. And we are talking about absolute confidence. What then are you sure of?
Rene Descartes found such unquestionable knowledge. This knowledge is in man himself: I think, therefore I exist. This statement is beyond doubt. Think about it: even if your brain is in a flask, your very thinking, albeit incorrect, exists! Let everything you know be false. But one cannot deny existence to something that thinks falsely.
Now you know the most indisputable statement of all possible, which has become almost the slogan of all European philosophy: cogito ergo sum.
Karl Marx: “All human culture is ideology”
In accordance with the theory of Marx and Engels, the history of mankind is the history of the suppression of some classes by others. In order to maintain its power, the ruling class distorts knowledge about real social relations, creating the phenomenon of “false consciousness.” Exploited classes simply have no idea that they are being exploited.
All creations of bourgeois society are declared by philosophers to be ideology, that is, a set of false values and ideas about the world. This includes religion, politics, and any human practices - we, in principle, live in a false, erroneous reality.
All our beliefs are a priori false, because they initially appeared as a way of hiding the truth from us in the interests of a certain class.
A person simply does not have the opportunity to look at the world objectively. After all, ideology is culture, an innate prism through which he sees things. Even such an institution as the family must be recognized as ideological.
What is real then? Economic relations, that is, those relations in which the method of distribution of life's goods is formed. In a communist society, all ideological mechanisms will collapse (this means there will be no states, no religions, no families), and true relationships will be established between people.
Karl Popper: “A good scientific theory can be falsified”
In your opinion, if there are two scientific theories and one of them is easily refuted, and the other is completely impossible to undermine, which one will be more scientific?
Popper, a methodologist of science, showed that the criterion of scientificity is falsifiability, that is, the possibility of refutation. A theory must not only have a coherent proof, it must have the potential to be broken.
For example, the statement “the soul exists” cannot be considered scientific because it is impossible to imagine how to refute it. After all, if the soul is immaterial, then how can you be sure whether it exists? But the statement “all plants carry out photosynthesis” is quite scientific, since in order to refute it, it is enough to find at least one plant that does not convert light energy. It is quite possible that it will never be found, but the very possibility of disproving the theory should be obvious.
This is the fate of any scientific knowledge: it is never absolute and is always ready to resign.
