Category: God
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World + God = God: A Mathematical Analogy
The Big Henry offers the following comment on my post, World + God = God? "World + God = God" is (mathematically) analogous to "number + infinity = infinity", where "number" is finite. If God embodies all existence, then God is "existential infinity", and, therefore, no amount of existence can be added to or subtracted…
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World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World ‘Relation’
Fr. Aidan Kimel in a recent comment: I just started reading Philosophy for Understanding Theology by Diogenes Allen. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of creation. These two sentences jumped out at me: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone."…
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Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism
Dr. James Barham writes, I have just finished reading your most instructive and thought-provoking book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence. On p. 257, you write: "(We will have to consider whether our view also undercuts realism.)" However, I did not see any discussion of this issue in the rest of the book. …
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Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms? Reply to a Comment
Dr. James Anderson writes, I appreciated your recent post with the above title. However, I note that you didn't connect your comments there with your ongoing discussion with Dale Tuggy. From point 3 of your post: Ryan seems to think that to believe in God is to believe that there is a special object in…
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Being Itself: Continuing the Discussion with Dale Tuggy
I admire Dale Tuggy's resolve to continue this difficult discussion despite the manifold demands on his time and energy. (This Gen-X dude is no slacker! If one of us is a slacker, it's this Boomer. Or, if you prefer, I am a man of leisure, otium liberale, in the classical sense.) The core question, you…
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Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God
Joseph B. Soloveitchik's The Lonely Man of Faith (Doubleday 2006) is rich and stimulating and packed with insights. I thank Peter Lupu for having a copy sent to me. But there is a long footnote on p. 49 with which I heartily disagree. Here is part of it: The trouble with all rational demonstrations of the…
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Evil as it Appears to Theists and Atheists
In the preface to his magnum opus, F. H. Bradley observes that "Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct." (Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893, p. x) The qualifier 'bad' is out of place and curiously off-putting at the outset of…
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Does the Divine Transcendence Require that God not be a Being among Beings?
Herewith, a second response to Aidan Kimel. He writes, The claim that God is a being among beings is immediately ruled out, so it seems to me, by the classical understanding of divine transcendence: if all beings have been created from nothing by the self-existent One, then this One cannot be classified as one of them, as…
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Is it Obvious that God is not a Being Among Beings?
At his weblog Eclectic Orthodoxy, Fr. Aidan Kimel references the discussion Dale Tuggy and I are having about whether God is a being among beings, or Being itself. Fr. Kimel writes, That God, as conceived by Christians (and Iām not really interested in any other God), is not a being among beings is so utterly…
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God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?
This is another round in an ongoing discussion (via face-to-face conversations, podcasts, and weblog posts) with Dale Tuggy on whether or not God is best thought of as a being among beings, albeit the highest being (summum ens), or rather as self-subsistent Being itself (ipsum esse subsistens). In this entry I will respond to just…
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God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?
Last Wednesday morning, just as Old Sol was peeping his ancient head over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition range, I embarked on a drive down old Arizona 79, past Florence, to a hash house near Oracle Junction where I had the pleasure of another nice long three and one half hour caffeine-fueled discussion with Dale…
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The God of Christianity and the God of Islam: Same God? (2015)
For Dave Bagwill, who posed some questions in the near vicinity of the ones I will be addressing. This is a heavily revised version of a 2011 post. The MavPhil doctrine of abrogation is in effect. This is a hairy topic; expect a hard slog. If you prefer a 'leiter' read, a certain gossip site…
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A New Probabilistic Argument for God
A reader sent me an argument expressed in an idiosyncratic and unnecessarily technical terminology. But his idea is a very interesting one. I'll present and then evaluate my version of the reader's argument. 1. There are several actual and many possible positions on the nature and existence of God. Call them God-positions. One who occupies…
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Plantinga Reviews Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism
Here. The wild diversity of religious doctrines suggests to Kitcher that they are all almost certainly false. Plantinga makes an interesting response: But even for whole systems: there is certainly wide variety here, but how does it follow that they are all almost certainly false? Or even that any particular one is almost false? Kitcher's…
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God as an Ontological Category Mistake
John Anderson's rejection of God is radical indeed. A. J. Baker writes: Anderson, of course, upholds atheism, though that is a rather narrow and negative way of describing his position given its sweep in rejecting all rationalist conceptions of essences and ontological contrasts in favour of the view that whatever exists is a natural occurrence…