Week 9 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 9 — Order, Evil, and Proof: Testing the Arguments about God — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Philosophy Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 8 of the term — credit this week's arguments to their sources, key an argument about design for validity, reconstruct the ontological argument, weigh the design argument and the problem of evil at their strongest, and explain the problem of evil to someone new to philosophy.

This week you learned the ontological argument and the island objection, the cosmological argument of Aquinas's first three ways, Paley's watch on the heath and Hume's objections, the logical and evidential problems of evil with the free will defense and soul-making, and Pascal's wager recalled from Week 8. In Week 2 you learned standard form, validity, inductive strength, and the valid and invalid forms, and in Week 5 you learned the difference between a priori and a posteriori. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Philosophy Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together. You never have to say what you personally believe about God; you are judging how arguments work.

The task

You will use this week's pinned sources, Dataset G (the arguments about God), and Dataset B, the argument set (illustrative). Dataset B's premises are written for teaching and are not claims the course endorses; the course keys its arguments for validity only, never for soundness, because the premises are open questions. The everyday cases below were written for this assignment; they are illustrative and describe no real person or place.

Part A — get the sources right, then reconstruct. A post on a study-group forum reads: "Hume's watch on the heath proved that God designed the world. Aquinas wrote that God's existence can be proved in four ways, and Pascal's wager is the fifth proof." Do four things:

Correct the post. Name whose case the watch on the heath is and the work and year it comes from; name the work in which Hume pressed objections to the design argument and when it was published; give Aquinas's line from Dataset C word for word, with the translators who wrote those English words, and say which of the ways are the cosmological argument; and say what kind of argument the wager is and what Dataset G lists as its direction.
Key argument 6. Write Dataset B's argument 6 in standard form ("If the universe was designed, it shows order. The universe was not designed. So it shows no order."), name its form, key it for validity with a one-sentence reason from the definition of validity, and build one same-shape argument of your own, on a new topic, whose premises are true and whose conclusion is false.
Reconstruct the ontological argument. Write Anselm's argument in standard form, mark any premise you add as "(added)", name the form the key step uses, say whether the argument is valid as you reconstruct it, and say whether it is a priori or a posteriori and why.
Press and reply. State the greatest-possible-island objection in one or two sentences, then the strongest reply from the argument's side.

Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published in 1779, and Paley's Natural Theology in 1802. How many years separate them?

Part B — weigh the arguments. Work this problem first, showing your reasoning:

Pascal's Pensées were published in 1670, and Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in 1779. How many years separate them?

Then do two things:

State two arguments at their strongest. First, state Paley's design argument as its best defenders would, as an argument from analogy judged for strength, then give Hume's two objections and a reply from the design side. Second, state the logical problem of evil in standard form as Mackie presses it, then give the free will defense, then the critic's reply from natural evil.
Name the disagreement. End with one plain sentence naming exactly where defenders and critics of these arguments disagree, without announcing which side is right.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker who has never taken philosophy says, "The problem of evil is an argument that religious people are bad." Write a 3–5 sentence message in everyday words that explains what the problem of evil argues, why it is about whether a set of claims fits together rather than about anyone's character, and one honest limit of what the argument shows by itself. Explain any term your coworker might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a roommate who asks whether an inductive argument is only a guess. Model answer: "An inductive argument does not promise that its conclusion must be true. It says its reasons make the conclusion likely, the way many dark clouds make rain likely. So we ask how strong it is, not whether it is airtight. One limit: even a strong one can turn out wrong, so it gives good reason, not certainty."

Use that pattern for your message to your coworker, with your own explanation of the problem of evil.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 9. For the correction, check each author, title, and year against the chapter's record, and check Aquinas's line word for word against the chapter; for each reconstruction, underline any added premise and check the form's name against Week 2's list; for your counterexample, confirm that its premises are true and its conclusion false; for each argument, ask whether its best defender would sign your statement of it; and check that your coworker message keeps the argument apart from anyone's character. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

(a) Which change made your sourcing or one of your reconstructions more exact, and which definition or pinned fact showed you it was needed?
(b) Which change made your statement of the design argument or the problem of evil stronger, and what had you left out at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

your Part A forum-post correction with your first year gap, your keying of argument 6 with your counterexample, your ontological argument reconstruction, and the island objection with its reply;
your Part B year gap, the design argument and the problem of evil with their objections and replies, and your plain sentence;
your message to your coworker;
your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the correction, the reconstructions, the evaluation, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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