Category: God
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Notes on Avicenna: Essence, Existence, and Creation
Time was when the Islamic world could boast world-class philosophers. The Persian Ibn Sina (980-1037 anno domini) was one of them. He is known in the West as Avicenna. Translated into Latin, his works had a major influence on the philosophy of the 12th and 13th centuries and beyond. De Ente et Essentia of Thomas…
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Galen Strawson on God
Substack latest. Does the fact of evil render the nonexistence of God certain? ……………. Tony Flood comments: A good one, Bill. Bahnsen held that atheists, having no reason for affirming an absolute moral standard (which evil offends) can't even frame a problem of evil. He also held that the classic argument you summarized is missing a premise: God could…
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The God Question and the Christian Proposition
A conversation between Alain Fikielkraut and Pierre Manent. Very French and very flabby, but here is an excerpt that I approve of (emphasis added): P.M. What is the nature of Islam’s challenge for us? And who is this “we” being challenged? The challenge lies in the fact that what is happening is that Islam is exerting…
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Countering the Absurd with an Argument from Desire: Preliminaries
Vito Caiati comments: I have been thinking about your intriguing post in which you write: “For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to. To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no…
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God and Morality
A short piece by Richard Swinburne.
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If God is Simple, How can the World be Contingent?
This entry is an offshoot of the earlier discussion of classical theism and its difference from theistic personalism. These labels have the meaning here than they had in that earlier discussion. Classical theism is committed to all three of the following: 1) God is simple. 2) God freely created the world in the libertarian 'could…
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Theistic Personalism versus Classical Theism: Response to Roger Pouivet
Professor Roger Pouivet (Université de Lorraine, France) recently subscribed to my Substack series. I wrote to thank him and to request a copy of his Against Theistic Personalism: What Modern Epistemology Does to Classical Theism. He replied promptly and I dove into his article. It proved to be stimulating and I thank him for writing it. Herewith,…
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God as Human Projection?
What could be logically weaker than the theory that God is a projection of human needs? Supposedly God does not exist because his existence reflects human exigencies. This argument presupposes that God could exist only if man did not need Him. What could be more absurd? But then, why is this idea so widespread? Augusto…
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Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers
Substack latest. It is a mistake to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
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Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?
I return an affirmative answer. If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset. This realism asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things other than God. 'Radically transcendent' means…
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The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer
Substack latest.
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Three Theisms: Ontic, Alterity, and Onto-Theological and their Liabilities
There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. One way into the problem is via the following aporetic triad: 1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence. 2. For any x, y, if x depends for its existence on y, and…
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Omnia Sana Sanis
"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness. For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow.…
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Of Russell’s Teapot and Abbey’s Angry Lunicorn
Does the angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon manage his anger by sipping herbal tea from Russell's teapot? Substack latest.
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The Concept GOD as a Limit Concept
The concept GOD is the concept of a being that cannot be constituted in consciousness in Husserl's sense of 'constitution,' a being that cannot be a transcendence-in-immanence, but must be absolutely transcendent, transcendent in itself, not merely for us. It follows that there cannot be a phenomenology of God. At best, there can be a…