Category: God
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Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?
The fact and extent of natural and moral evil make belief in a providential power difficult. But they also make belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also that of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such as Marxism. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety? And isn’t it…
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Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept
I had an excellent discussion with Mike Valle on a number of topics yesterday afternoon. The following post exfoliates one of the themes of our discussion. One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is…
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Hume: Occasionalism Without God?
I wonder if I can get any of my esteemed readers to swallow the following suggestion. Ten years or so ago it came into my head that Hume's analysis of causation in terms of (i) temporal precedence, (ii) spatiotemporal contiguity, and (iii) constant conjunction can be reasonably viewed as occasionalism without God.
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Four Kinds of Ontological Argument
The essence of ontological argumentation is the inferential move from the concept/essence of F to the existence/nonexistence of F. We are all familiar with ontological arguments for the existence of God. They have been a staple of philosophy of religion discussions from Anselm to Plantinga. But there is nothing in the nature of ontological argumentation…
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Classical Theism and Global Supervenience Physicalism
This is a paper I read at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, Massachusetts, August 10-15, 1998. It explains the notions of strong and global supervenience, notions which will serve as foils in getting a handle on the concept of emergence. ABSTRACT: Could a classical theist be a physicalist? Although a negative answer to this…
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Positive and Privative Constructions and the Case of Causa Sui
God is traditionally described as causa sui, as self-caused. Construed positively, however, the notion appears incoherent. Nothing can function as a cause unless it exists. So if God causes his own existence, then his existence as cause is logically prior to his existence as effect. God must 'already' (logically speaking) exist if he is to…
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Is God in Bad Taste? Some Anti-Searlean Remarks
In Mind, Language and Society, John R. Searle writes: In earlier generations, books like this one would have had to contain either an atheistic attack on or a theistic defense of traditional religion. [. . .] Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence.…
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Is Religion the Problem? Why Isn’t Belief As Such the Problem? The Special Pleading of Some Atheists
One of the arguments against religion in the contemporary atheist arsenal is the argument that religious beliefs fuel war and terrorism. Rather than pull quotations from such well-known authors as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I will quote a couple of passages from one of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. His piece…
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Multiverses, Possible Worlds, and God
A lawyer from Pennsylvania e-mails: . . . I have a philosophy question. Is it possible that cosmology generally, with its theory of multiverses — all possible universes exist — provides an argument, somewhat like the oldontological argument, for a non impersonal God? To wit: 1) Multiverses — the set of all possible universes — exist.…
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A. C. Grayling and a Stock Move of Militant Atheists
Since A. C. Grayling has surfaced in the ComBox here, it it will be useful for people to see just what sort of fellow he is. So over the next few days I will reproduce three or four of my Grayling posts from the old site. Militant atheist philosopher A. C. Grayling writes, Religious belief of…
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Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?
It seems to me that there is a sort of 'disconnect' in theist-atheist debates. It is as if the parties to the dispute are not talking about the same thing. Jim Ryan writes, The reason I'm an atheist is straightforward. The proposition that there is a god is as unlikely as ghosts, Martians amongst us,…
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Validity as a Modal Concept and a Modal Argument for the Nonexistence of God
'Modally Challenged' comments: I've run into this argument on several occasions and while the author(s) insist theists will accept the premises, it's more the validity I'd appreciate your take on. 1) If God is possible, then God is a necessary being. 2) If God is a necessary being, then unjustified evil is impossible.3) Unjustified evil…
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Is the Existence of God Entailed by Alternative Ways Natural Things Might Have Been?
This post is a sequel to Ayn Rand on Necessity, Contingency, and Dispositions. There we were examining this quotation: What do you mean by "necessity"? By "necessity," we mean that things are a certain way and had to be. I would maintain that the statement "Things are," when referring to non-man-made occurrences, is the synonym…
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Why God Cannot be the Creator of the Universe
Leonard Peikoff writes, "Is God the creator of the universe? There can be no creation of something out of nothing. There is no nothing." Peikoff is arguing that God cannot be the creator of the universe because creation is creation of something out of nothing, and there is no nothing. Is this a good argument…