Probability arguments are all modern as are fine-tuning arguments.

"Existential" arguments for faith in God do have old religious credentials but they don't really get off the ground philosophically until Pascal.

Kant's argument is modern.

Hegel's argument is... hard to follow, but it's modern.

Modal arguments are generally modern.

Tomislav Ostojich wrote:

"iwpoe" wrote:

"Existential" arguments for faith in God do have old religious credentials but they don't really get off the ground philosophically until Pascal."

I would argue that this was first developed by King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Of course, but it didn't enter deeply into consideration in the philosophic tradition until much later. Indeed, it takes the modern focus on epistemology to make it a philosophical imperative.

I've heard good and bad things about Kierkegaard. Does anyone here have an opinion to share about him?

iwpoe wrote:

Seán Mac Críodáin wrote:

I've heard good and bad things about Kierkegaard. Does anyone here have an opinion to share about him?

Mmm. He's wrong about Hegel, but that's Schelling's fault, and he's too wary of systems of all kinds to see that his attitude to reasoning with respect to God is illegitimate, and that reason ought to be as authentic a mode of life as the others he presents. This idea that the life of reason isn't *really* a mode of life if strange indeed. Nietzsche suggests it also, so clearly it's in the air, but it has no ground.

Otherwise, I think he's a great writer. One of my core ethical thoughts is that the modern age contrasts with the ancient age in that our key vices are not excesses like lust or hubris but deficiencies like cowardice, but most especially acedia (ἀκηδία: "sloth"/negligence/depression), and I think that what Christians often take (because of the focus on the ancient context of the gospels) to be excesses are really kinds of deficiencies. The young college girl who sleeps with dozens of men in this age is is not usually lustful; she's apathetic and negligent. She doesn't even feel enough to know what lust is. She's so desperate to feel something that she'll shoot for what are traditionally acts of high passion just to feel something stronger than eating a bag of crisps. Kierkegaard, as all romanticists before him, and many of the "existentialists" after, sensed this and poured all his efforts into awakening a fuller affective life.which is intellectually necessary today if anyone is to do anything like philosophy seriously.

I think you're on to something there. It certainly lines up with my experience, both of observing others and myself. Is that what his ideas like the "knight of faith" are about, then? Trying to make the faith romantically engaging?