God's Not Dead Analysis

Brenda Chavez Metaphysics and Epistemology
PHI 2010 February 15, 2018
Dr. McGowan
Film Review: God’s Not Dead
In the film, “God’s Not Dead,” the main plot revolves around a strong atheist college philosophy professor, Mr. Radisson, who is challenged by Josh Wheaton, a freshman student and believer of God. According to the author and philosophy professor, Winfried Corduan, “a religion is a system of beliefs and practices that provides values to give life meaning and coherence by directing a person towards transcendence,” (Corduan, Winfried. Pg. 21). After Professor Radisson persuades the class to write “God is dead” on a sheet of paper on the first day of class, Wheaton believes that it is his right to stand up for what he

Pg. 63). The general principles of a cosmological argument are: effects have causes, things happen and things exist for a reason, it’s trying to explain things, and all our sciences, studies, and lives are based on it (McGowan, Michael. N.p.). During Josh Wheaton’s speech in defending his belief, he uses this type of argument and talks about the Big Bang. He talked about how in the 1920s, Belgian astronomer and theist, Georges Lemaitre, said the entire universe jumping into existence in a trillionth of a second, out of nothing, in a flash of light, is how he would expect the universe to respond if God were to actually utter the command in Genesis 1:3, “let there be light”. Dominican philosopher and theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, created the “Five Ways” of God’s existence – motion, causation, contingency, gradations, intelligence of design – in which the first two are cosmological arguments. Aquinas’s argument from motion states that it’s obvious some things in the universe are moving, and if they’re moving, something else must have caused them to move, and something else must have caused that to move… and so on. However, the pattern of movements can’t go on forever since there wouldn’t be that one thing that started the whole series. Therefore, there must be an “initial mover, an extraordinary being that started the universe moving but is not itself moved by anything else – and this being we call God,” (Vaughn, Lewis. Pg. 65). In his first-cause argument, he states that everything we are able to observe has a cause and that nothing can cause itself. In order for something to cause itself, it would have to exist prior to itself, which is impossible. Nor can something be caused by an infinite regress of causes. (Vaughn, Lewis. Pg.