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This chapter argues that a theistic natural sign pointing to God's existence lies at the core of cosmological arguments; this sign is called “cosmic wonder” and is sometimes elicited by considering questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The author first explains some of the different types of the cosmological arguments, argues that the Easy Resistibility Principle explains why we should not be surprised that they fail as conclusive proofs, and considers the thesis that Cosmic Wonder is the source of the persistent intuition that undergirds the arguments. Finally, it is argued that traditional theists, non‐traditional theists, and non‐theists often sense the force of Cosmic Wonder. This fact indicates that it is widely accessible as a sign.

This chapter documents and examines Hume's account of the implications of his deterministic ‘doctrine of necessity’ for the moral status of any first cause or designer. There are two main conclusions. First, Hume embraces the argument from determinism against duties to God. According to this argument, if there is some such original cause or designer, then it has in effect foreordained every human action, and so cannot reasonably be aggrieved at or offended by those actions. For Hume, the deity cannot then enter into the sort of moralized relations that presuppose the possibility of legitimate grievance or moral offense, and we cannot owe duties to God. Second, it is also argued that, contrary to a popular line of interpretation, Hume's determinism does not commit him to the conclusion that the first cause is the author of our sins in any sense that need compromise the deity's moral character.

Without a good argument as yet for the existence of God or anything else that might count as the universal first source of being and assuming that there is an answer to the question, why is there this sort of world rather than another sort, or nothing at all—the working hypothesis is adopted that there is an ultimate explanatory principle. Aquinas's arguments that focus on immutability and causality are examined. Aquinas expressly grants the possibility of an infinite regress of generating causes, but denies it with sustaining causes. He assumes or considers self‐evident, some form of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. We arrive at an entity that can and must be identified with an altogether immutable, beginningless, endless, and independently existing entity ‘necessary through itself’, first cause, first mover, first sustainer, and first necessary being.

Identifying an acknowledged first cause as God requires further argumentation to show that this extraordinary entity must have characteristics that pick out the supreme being of the monotheistic tradition and to show that it must be the transcendent, personal, omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good creator, and governor of the universe. By means of the exclusive application of the eliminative method to an immutable first cause, Aquinas's account leads to eliminating the distinction between its nature and being, to its essential nature being identical with its own unique, necessary, and ultimately explanatory being. Through Aquinas's perfection argument, the ultimately explanatory being is also shown to be universally perfect.

This chapter considers Hobbes’s treatment of religion in the early chapters of Leviathan, especially in Chapter 12, “Of Religion.” In that chapter, Hobbes presents an account of the psychological “seed” of religion in anxiety and ignorance, an account of God as the mysterious first cause, an analysis of the political differences between pagan religion and biblical religion, and a sketch of the “resolution” of religion back into its first seeds. An examination of these argument brings to light key aspects of Hobbes’s critique of religion and provides evidence of his atheism and antireligious intentions in Leviathan.

This chapter discusses Hobbes’s account of “the kingdom of God by nature” in Chapter 31 of Leviathan. Hobbes here develops a new natural theology that contains an implicit critique of traditional natural theology. The chapter considers Hobbes’s arguments about the limits of what human beings can know about God, and it examines Hobbes’s doctrine of God as the first cause and its complex relationship to Hobbes’s mechanistic materialism. The ultimate argument of the chapter is that Hobbes did not think the existence of God could be either demonstrated or refuted by reason alone. The chapter therefore points ahead to the following chapter, which considers Hobbes’s confrontation with Scripture.

Chapter 2 turns to colonial British America, surveying the flood of sermons that issued forth as clergy pondered the meaning of the New World’s violent weather. Colonial Americans inhabited a world of wonders in which natural events were interpreted as judgments or mercies from God, directed toward either individuals or the nation. In explicating these divine messages, the clergy drew on a biblical vocabulary replete with meteorological images of God’s power. The clergy also helped popularize more scholastic controversies about the relationship between the divine First Cause and secondary natural causes. These Enlightenment discussions, combined with biblical imagery, set the parameters of American understandings of providence for at least the next two centuries. Echoes of the clergy’s anxiety over the “atheism” of the Age of Reason are still heard in modern debates about whether storms are acts of God, acts of nature, or some combination of the two.

Kaminey is intended as a ‘dark’ film about criminality in everyday urban life and teems with gangsters, drug dealers, and crooked politicians, but the curiously celebratory approach of the film leaves one in doubt about the darkness of its vision, especially considering the endorsement of illegality in many of the earlier films as a legitimate component of enterprise. The film traces the trajectory of urban crime in Hindi cinema and examines how the film is different from Satya (1998) or Deewar (1975). It provides evidence that the weakening state has actually represented ‘opportunity’ to many from the entrepreneurial classes and this is fundamentally the discourse in its celebrations.

A. E. Taylor argued at length against an artificial dichotomy between fact and value, in an effort to carve out evidential space for morality. Divorcing facts and values is like trying to separate the sounds of a great symphony from its musical quality. More important than what we do is who we are, and what’s needed is an adequate account for the sort of external assistance we desperately require to be radically transformed (even transfigured)—after all, Taylor said, we can’t pull ourselves up by our own hair—so we can enjoy a good never left behind and never superseded. The inherent features of moral guilt point in the direction of a personal and perfectly loving God as our first and final cause. Taylor counseled close and sustained attentiveness to the moral evidence and (as we’ve seen in others) modeled a laudably expansive epistemology.

In medieval times a metaphysical conception of God was developed from Greek and Islamic ideas. According to this, God is the unchangeable necessary being who is the ultimate cause for everything that contingently happens in the world. This chapter raises some doubts about the intelligibility of this conception.