Category: Cosmological Arguments
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An Insufficient Argument against Sufficient Reason
This is an emended version of an entry that first saw the light of day on 21 May 2016. It is a set-up for a response to a question put to me by Tom Oberle. I'll try to answer Tom's question tomorrow. ………………………….. Explanatory rationalism is the view that there is a satisfactory answer to…
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Does Everything Contingent Have a Ground of its Existence?
What is it to be contingent? There are at least two nonequivalent definitions of 'contingency' at work in philosophical discussions. I will call them the modal definition and the dependency definition. Modal Contingency. X is modally contingent =df x exists in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds. Since possible worlds jargon…
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Why Something rather than Nothing? The ‘Why not?’ Response
According to a presumably apocryphal story, Martin Heidegger asked G. E. Moore, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Moore replied, "Why not?" A reader finds the 'Moorean' response cheap and unphilosophical. Let's think about this. Suppose we ask a related but more tractable question: Why does the universe exist? and we get the response:…
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Contingent Existence Without Cause? Not Possible Says Garrigou-Lagrange
A reader claims that "to affirm that there are contingent beings just is to affirm that they have that whereby they are, namely, a cause." This implies that one can straightaway infer 'x has a cause' from 'x is contingent.' My reader would agree with Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange who, taking the traditional Thomist position, maintains the…
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An Insufficient Argument Against Sufficient Reason
Explanatory rationalism is the view that there is a satisfactory answer to every explanation-seeking why question. Equivalently, it is the view that there are no propositions that are just true, i.e., true, contingently true, but without explanation of their being true. Are there some contingent truths that lack explanation? Consider the conjunction of all contingent truths.…
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Two Senses of ‘Contingency’ and a Bad Cosmological Argument
Fr. Aidan Kimel asked me to comment on a couple of divine simplicity entries of his. When I began reading the first, however, I soon got bogged down in a preliminary matter concerning wonder at the existence of the world, its contingency, and whether its contingency leads us straightaway to a causa prima. So I…
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Did the Universe Have a Beginning in Time?
Some of you may remember the commenter 'spur' from the old Powerblogs incarnation of this weblog. His comments were the best of any I received in over ten years of blogging. I think it is now safe to 'out' him as Stephen Puryear of North Carolina State University. He recently sent me a copy of…
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McCann, God, and the Platonic Menagerie
I am reviewing Hugh J. McCann's Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Indiana University Press, 2012) for American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. What follows is an attempt to come to grips with Chapter Ten, "Creation and the Conceptual Order." I will set out the problem as I see it, sketch McCann's solution, and then offer some…
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Do Physicists Bullshit?
To be precise, my question is whether or not there are any written specimens of bullshit produced by physicists. I submit that there are such examples. Herewith, one example. First a simple point of logic: To show that there are Fs, it suffices to adduce one F. And note: a person who produces a specimen…
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On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence: Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument
Cosmological arguments for the existence of God rest on several ontological assumptions none of them quite obvious, and all of them reasonable candidates for philosophical examination. Among them, (i) existence is a ‘property’ of contingent individuals; (ii) the existence of individuals is not a brute fact but is susceptible of explanation; (iii) it is coherent…