The Incredulity Of St. Thomas

A person’s doubts can cloud their judgment on certain tasks at hand. On the other hand, a person’s certainty can blind someone from the truth. The argument ofDoubt versus Certainty is relevant today in the sense that it is the main argument for and against religion. The theory of doubt can also be used in literary works for a number of reasons. In John Patrick Shanley’s movie/play Doubt, the theme of “certainty versus doubt” is shown throughout the story to signify the importance of characterization and to symbolize the importance that a person must be cautious of the people around them.

There are three forms of doubt presented are sense doubt, defective nature doubt and dream doubt. Sense doubt refers everything observed by the five senses: taste, touch, smell, sound and sight. For example, in Meditation Two, when Descartes is examining a piece of wax, he determines that his senses have deceived him and therefore he cannot trust them in the future. He also determines that he cannot believe the principles and ideas that his senses have implanted inside of his mind. In defective nature doubt one assumes that everything that he or she had been taught from the beginning is immoral. Therefore,

“What do you do when you’re not sure...” so begins Father Flynn’s sermon near the beginning of the play Doubt. Father Flynn delivers his sermon to the people of St. Nicholas Catholic church in the Bronx in the year following President Kennedy’s assassination. His sermon builds upon a story of a sailor lost at sea who has doubts about the course he has set and his doubt becomes the metaphor for the community who has lost its certainty. So, in other words, when someone loses certainty they doubt about someone or something and want to belief the uncertain is true. To do so they make anything in their power to find out that their doubt is a belief even if it means to lie.

In the late 1500s to early 1600s, philosophy experience the revival of radical skepticism because of the ideology of Michel de Montaigne. Skeptics held that men cannot agree on anything, and it is almost impossible to understand if something is true, since everything can be an opinion or an interpretation (Lecture 2, 2016). However, a man named René Descartes was determined to disprove skepticism by using skepticism itself (Stewart, Blocker, & Petrik, 2013). To disprove skepticism, Descartes first doubted everything he had ever learned or believed until he discovered something that was ridiculous to doubt (Stewart, Blocker, & Petrik, 2013). Descartes resolved to doubt the core foundations upon which all of his belief rested upon: sense experience and intellectual intuition (Stewart, Blocker, & Petrik, 2013). External world skepticism was one area that lead Descartes to write his famous essays, titled Meditations, and this topic

“‘You have no passion. You are not going to make it… I can say to you that the state championship is a month and a day away…”’ (Wojnarowski 227). This what Coach Bob Hurley said to his somewhat deflated St. Anthony Friars in The Miracle of St. Anthony. The Friars were undefeated at this point in the season but there seemed to be a lack of energy in the team with the New Jersey State Championship looming. Because of this, Hurley would give a speech that would bring the team back together for an undefeated championship season. I could relate to this because this summer my sailing team was in a similar situation with the Maine State Championship Regatta just a few weeks a away. My coach gave a very similar speech to Hurley’s which also brought our team together. As a result the team did very well in the state championship.

The St Marys Saints caused a minor upset when they toppled the Peninsula Seagulls 38-22 in the Sydney Shield second Qualifying Final at Campbelltown Stadium last Sunday.

ira nudged Thomas when the Singer started to begin the next verse of the Song, “Did you see that Thomas? Those things holding down on the Singer?” she muttered as she pointed at the robe. Thomas glanced at Kira with a doubtful face. “No, what are you talking? Why would the Singer be chained up?”

Discovered in the twentieth century, The Gospel of Thomas was founded by peasants that were digging for fertilizer close to the village of Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The peasants revealed a container containing thirteen leather-bound manuscripts that were buried in the fourteenth century. The container contained fifty-two tractates that represented “heretical” writings of Gnostic Christians. Dated back to 200 A.D., there was not much known about the Gospel of Thomas besides that there were only three small fragments from Oxyrynchus. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of literary works that contains 114 ‘opaque sayings’ of Jesus that were collected and written down by St. Didymus Jude Thomas, but nobody knows if St. Didymus Jude Thomas wrote the

Montaigne and Descartes both made use of a philosophical method that focused on the use of doubt to make discoveries about themselves and the world around them. However, they doubted different things. Descartes doubted all his previous knowledge from his senses, while Montaigne doubted that there were any absolute certainties in knowledge. Although they both began their philosophical processes by doubting, Montaigne doubting a constant static self, and Descartes doubted that anything existed at all, Descartes was able to move past that doubt to find one indubitably certainty, "I think, therefore I am".

Nelson Pike shows that St. Thomas Aquinas presents three possible solutions to the problem regarding the incoherence between God’s inability to sin and His omnipotence, or ability to do anything. Only the third solution will be discussed in this paper. St. Thomas’ goal is to prove that God can coherently be both omnipotent and impeccable. In this instance, impeccable means perfectly good and lacking evil. At this point, it may be helpful to specify how the terms “good” and “evil’ will be used moving forward. In his discussion, Pike defines “evil” as “Any situation which is such that if one were to (knowingly) bring it about (though it is avoidable), that individual would be morally reprehensible” (212). This definition should suit our purposes,

The University of Saint Thomas is the largest private university in Minnesota. The Saint Paul campus sits on 78 acres. The size of the campus is both a challenge and an opportunity for Laundry Doctor. The unique logistics of the “Drop Lock” system is advantageous and financially feasible to place lockers despite the size of the campus.

René Descartes was an extremely influential 17th-century philosopher and came up with many ideas that still persist to this day. One of those ideas was Cartesian skepticism, which states that “the view that we do not or cannot have knowledge in regard to a particular domain,” knowledge, in this case, is justified, true, beliefs. He first comes up with his idea of skepticism in the first part of his work “Meditations On First Philosophy,” aptly named “Of the things which may be brought within the sphere of the doubtful.” In his first meditation, he discusses his doubts with sensory illusion/error, possible dream states, and regarding deception by an evil demon. However, after dissolving his first two doubts, he gets stuck on the third and

René Descartes was a French philosopher that firmly believed in meditation and reflecting inside himself. Descartes’ was ultimately searching for something pure that he could find no doubt in. He uses the metaphor of rebuilding a house. He decides he needs to tear down the old house of all the knowledge he thought he knew to be true and rebuild it consisting of only knowledge without doubt. In order to build a foundation without any doubt Descartes’ needed to use skepticism or the Cartesian doubt, a systematic process of being skeptical about the truth of a belief, to secure what he was searching for.

In the book, The Proslogion, written by Saint Anselm, we find the Ontological Argument. This argument made by Saint Anselm gives us proofs that he believes helps prove the existence of God. Anselm gives many reasons as to why the simple understanding of God can help prove that God himself exists, as well as mentioning how the idea of God cannot be thought not to exist. Though this argument has been looked at by people such as Guanilo, a monk, whose response to Anselm 's proofs was trying to say that there were flaws, there are more reasons as to why Anselm 's proofs work well with his argument. From the understanding of God existing, and the idea behind greatness Anselm 's argument is one that is strong and can work as a proof when trying

There always seems to be a debate about the relative values of certainty and doubt. People often misunderstand that they have to choose only one, certainty or doubt, to achieve their goals. Some people believe certainty can help reach their destination, while others think it impossible, and having doubt is an obstacle in their way of achieving their goal. Others think having too much certainty can make people ignorant and close-minded and, a healthy measure of doubt will help them stay on the right path. However, in enlightened people, doubt and certainty coexist. A person with both certainty and doubt can stay on the right path while making the right choices to accomplish what he or she wants.