Category: God
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Russell’s Leaky Teapot Revisited
Gary Gutting recently interviewed Alvin Plantinga in the pages of The New York Times and brought up the business about Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot. The following response of Gutting to Plantinga comes early on in the interview: G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need…
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On Conceiving that God does not Exist
In a recent post you write: The Humean reasoning in defense of (3) rests on the assumption that conceivability entails possibility. To turn aside this reasoning one must reject this assumption. One could then maintain that the conceivability by us of the nonexistence of God is consistent with the necessity of God's existence. I’m not…
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An Anselmian Antilogism
Philosophy is its problems, and they are best represented as aporetic polyads. One sort of aporetic polyad is the antilogism. An antilogism is an inconsistent triad: a set of three propositions that cannot all be true. The most interesting antilogisms are those in which the constitutent propositions are each of them plausible. If they are more…
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Judgmentalism, Moral Judgment, Moral Relativism, and God
This from a reader: I still read your blog conscientiously, but sometimes stare at your words in ignorant awe. I have a question for you this morning which may be of interest. In a recent conversation with someone who described himself as a "gay" Christian (or is it a Christian "gay" ?), I gave reasons…
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A Misunderstanding Of Divine Simplicity
London Karl refers me to this piece by Stephen H. Webb in which we read (emphases added): I recently reviewed Hart’s new book, The Experience of God, at First Things. Hart defends three basic points: First, there was a consensus among ancient philosophers and theologians regarding the simplicity of God. Divine simplicity can be stated…
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Man and God
To believe in Man is to believe in what is necessarily nothing; to believe in God is to believe in what is at least possibly something. …………. See this post for explanation and exfoliation.
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Is Natural Causation Existence-Conferring?
When I reported to Peter Lupu over Sunday breakfast that Hugh McCann denies that natural causation is existence-conferring, he demanded to know McCann's reasons. He has three. I'll discuss one of them in this post, the third one McCann mentions. (Creation and the Sovereignty of God, p. 18) The reason is essentially Humean. Rather than…
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Vallicella on the Argument for God from Logic
James Anderson responds here to my critique of his and Greg Welty's The Lord of Non-Contradiction: An Argument for God from Logic. Professor Anderson's combox is open.
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Allan Gotthelf on Ayn Rand on the Existence of God
In January and February of 2009 I wrote a number of posts critical of Ayn Rand. The Objectivists, as they call themselves, showed up in force to defend their master. I want to revisit one of the topics today to see if what I said then still holds up. The occasion for this exercise is…
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Could God and the Universe be Equally Real?
Not by my lights. God is self-existent. The universe is not. As Hugh McCann puts it, unexceptionably, "the universe is directly dependent on God for its entire being, as far as time extends." (Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Indiana UP, 2012, p. 27.) God is a sustaining causa prima active at every moment of the…
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From the Laws of Logic to the Existence of God
James N. Anderson and Greg Welty have published a paper entitled The Lord of Non-Contradiction: An Argument for God from Logic. Having worked out similar arguments in unpublished manuscripts, I am very sympathetic to the project of arguing from the existence of necessary truths to the necessary existence of divine mind. Here is a quick sketch 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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The Strange World of Simone Weil: God Does and Does Not Exist
In the chapter "Atheism as a Purification" in Gravity and Grace (Routledge 1995, tr. Emma Craufurd from the French, first pub. in 1947), the first entry reads as follows: A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God…
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Mature Religion is Open-Ended Too: More Quest Than Conclusions
The following is from an interview with A. C. Grayling who is speaking of the open mind and open inquiry: It’s a mindset, he reveals, that “loves the open-endedness and the continuing character of the conversation that humankind has with itself about all these things that really matter.” It’s also a way of thinking that…
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Divine Creation, Possibility, and Actuality
This from a reader: Your latest blog posts on the problem of existence prompted me to question you about one philosophical problem which keeps "nagging" me: – When we make plans for the future (e.g. when choosing out next move in chess), we analyze different possibilities. Until the moment we decide our move, each possibility…