Category: Creation
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On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit
Top o' the Stack. This entry examines Richard C. Potter's solution to the problem of reconciling creatio ex nihilo with ex nihilo nihil fit in his valuable article, "How To Create a Physical Universe Ex Nihilo," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, (January 1986), pp. 16-26. (Potter appears to have dropped out of sight, philosophically speaking. PhilPapers shows only three articles by him,…
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If Someone is Walking, is He Necessarily Walking? DDS and Modal Collapse
In an article I am studying by Daniel J. Pedersen and Christopher Lilley, "Divine Simplicity, God's Freedom, and the Supposed Problem of Modal Collapse," (Journal of Reformed Theology 16, 2022, 127-147), the authors quote Boethius: . . . if you know that someone is walking, he must necessarily be walking. (Consolation, v. 6) They then…
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Creation out of Nothing or out of Mere Possibles?
I wrote: On an Avicennian scheme, creation is actualization of the merely possible. If so, God does not create ex nihilo, but ex possibilitate. He doesn't create out of nothing; he creates out of possibles. This does not comport well with divine sovereignty. If God is sovereign, he is sovereign over all orders, including the order of…
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Is Existence Completeness?
Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662: . . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds. The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark of existence or…
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The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation
God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness…