Mccloskey Argument Analysis

Several years ago, an atheist named, H.J. McCloskey, published an article in the journal Question One, and the article was called “On Being an Atheist”. In this article, McCloskey explains why the argument of God fails. I thought the paper was very well written; however, some of his assumptions about all theists were wrong and he spoke very poorly of anyone with a theistic opinion. During this paper I will argue why some of McCloskey’s arguments were invalid, and I am going to try and explain the different arguments from a theistic worldview. Before I can really go in, and talk about each argument McCloskey lists in his article, I would like to talk about the word choice he used in this article. Multiple times in the paper McCloskey refers to the arguments as “proofs” instead of theories. By substituting the word theory for proof in this article, he is trying to make every one who believes in theism, prove that their argument is the one hundred percent true. However nothing can be one hundred percent proven. In modern times there are several wildly accepted truths, but even those cannot be one hundred percent proven. No matter one …show more content…
McCloskey makes three separate arguments in his article, “On Being an Atheist”, these three arguments are, Cosmological, Theological, and Moral arguments. The Cosmological is about the claim for the existence of God, the Theological would be considered the intelligent case, and finally, the moral case is about being morally perfect. If you combine all three of these arguments they make up the Cumulative case, which is to be consider the argument of personal, moral, and intelligent creator of the universe. If you were to take the three arguments and argue them separating, they would not do much. However if you combine all the arguments, then it makes a pretty strong argument in the favor of God does