Lectures

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  1. Ancient Paths to God

  

  In our introductory lecture, Dr. Orr opens our study of the philosophy of religion by exploring fundamental questions of existence, meaning, and divinity across philosophical and religious traditions. We examine the rise of sophisticated religious thought during the Axial Age (8th–4th century BCE), when civilizations independently developed complex frameworks such as Confucianism and Daoism in China, Vedantic philosophy in India, and Abrahamic monotheism. The lecture also addresses key philosophical challenges, including the nature of ultimate reality, the relationship between God and creation, and the limits of human language in discussing the divine.

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  2. The Nature of God

  

  In lecture two, we explore the classical conception of God as a perfect being possessing all perfections—omnipotence, omniscience, and necessary existence—and examine how this view shaped medieval philosophy and science. We discuss three categories of objections to classical theism: challenges to individual divine attributes, tensions between multiple attributes, and conflicts between divine perfection and worldly facts like evil. Dr. Orr contrasts classical theism with modern theistic personalism, which views God in more anthropomorphic terms, while noting the recent philosophical trend returning toward classical conceptions of God.

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  3. Arguments for God

  

  In lecture three, we examine classical theistic arguments for God’s existence, focusing on three main types: ontological arguments, which reason a priori from the concept of God as a maximally perfect being; cosmological arguments, which infer God from features such as motion, causation, and contingency; and teleological arguments, which appeal to apparent design and fine-tuning in nature. Dr. Orr stresses that these arguments are not mathematical proofs and may be reasonably rejected, yet together they pose enduring challenges to atheism. The lecture concludes by highlighting the fine-tuning argument and the Kalam cosmological argument as especially strong modern versions informed by contemporary scientific discoveries.

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