Biting off more than I can chew...
...that's the feeling I get a lot when pursuing my work for my Philosophy of Religion course this past term. And I am distinctively getting that feeling again, doing research for my 10 page (double spaced, so technically 5 page) argumentative essay, which I've decided to do on Descartes and his two seperate arguments for the existence of God, one through his "I think, therefore I exist" (cogito ergo sum) philosophy, and another which is more ontological in nature, similar to Anselm's ontological argument.
It's not that I'm horribly bad at Philosophy (I think). It's just that all these people write in such cryptic manner and expound such arguments that are either 1. Hard to understand or 2. Easy to understand but damn hard to disprove, even more so because I'm actually pretty against the idea of God as they put it and can thus be narrowly defined as an atheist (broadly I'm a theist though, possibly agnostic... the particular Buddhist beliefs I have don't necessarily point to the existence of a God per se), so the inability to disprove arguments which just feel wrong is essentially depressing. I don't think even I (purportedly having the ability to turn 500 words into 1000 by being terribly long-winded) can write 5 pages just describing the arguments and then saying, yeah, it's wrong, because it feels wrong. >_<
The only reason why I'm not panicking just yet is because I do have the help of other clever atheists on my side: J.L. Mackie's book and his two chapters on Descartes and Ontological Proofs are my lifesavers, only if I can understand Mackie first though. >_< *sweats* The saddest part is ultimately, I still have a closed-book final exam on this subject. And that is kind of freaking me out a bit more than the essay. Eeks.
It's not that I'm horribly bad at Philosophy (I think). It's just that all these people write in such cryptic manner and expound such arguments that are either 1. Hard to understand or 2. Easy to understand but damn hard to disprove, even more so because I'm actually pretty against the idea of God as they put it and can thus be narrowly defined as an atheist (broadly I'm a theist though, possibly agnostic... the particular Buddhist beliefs I have don't necessarily point to the existence of a God per se), so the inability to disprove arguments which just feel wrong is essentially depressing. I don't think even I (purportedly having the ability to turn 500 words into 1000 by being terribly long-winded) can write 5 pages just describing the arguments and then saying, yeah, it's wrong, because it feels wrong. >_<
The only reason why I'm not panicking just yet is because I do have the help of other clever atheists on my side: J.L. Mackie's book and his two chapters on Descartes and Ontological Proofs are my lifesavers, only if I can understand Mackie first though. >_< *sweats* The saddest part is ultimately, I still have a closed-book final exam on this subject. And that is kind of freaking me out a bit more than the essay. Eeks.