Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: God

  • God, Truth, Reality Denial: A Response to Some Questions

    It is always a pleasure to get a challenge from a professional philosopher who appreciates the intricacies of the issues and knows the moves.  The comments below address things I say here. My responses are in blue. A few questions about this idea: "As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no…

  • Are Any Substantive Philosophical Propositions Epistemically Certain?

    I asked our Czech colleague Lukáš Novák for examples of philosophical propositions that he considers to be not only true, but knowable with certainty. He provided this list: a) God exists.b) There are substances.c) There are some necessary truths, even some de re necessary truths.d) Human cognition is capable of truth and certainty.e) There are no…

  • Physicalist Christology? Notes on Merricks

     "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . . . (John 1:14) Physicalism is popular among philosophers these days. So it is no surprise that Christian philosophers are drawn to it as well, including those who subscribe to the central teaching that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity,…

  • “Some of Us Just Go One God Further”

    A revised version of an entry from 26 July 2010. ………………… I've seen the above-captioned quotation attributed to Richard Dawkins. From what I have read of him, it seems like something he would say. The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist…

  • Nature, Signs, and Religious Experience

    Reader P. J. offers us for delectation and analysis the following quotation from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God: [Brother Lawrence] was eighteen at the time, and still in the world. He told me that it had all happened one winter day, as he was looking at a barren tree. Although the…

  • Again on Divine Simplicity and God’s Knowledge of Contingent Truths

    This entry continues yesterday's discussion.  The question was: How can an ontologically simple God know contingent truths?  Here again is yesterday's aporetic tetrad: 1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God. 2. God knows some contingent truths. 3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there…

  • Divine Simplicity: Is God Identical to His Thoughts?

    Theophilus inquires, I've been researching the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) recently and I've had a hard time figuring something out. On DDS, is it the case that God is identical with his thoughts? Surely on the view (as you say in your SEP article) God is identical with his omniscience. But does that also…

  • Which is More Certain, God or My Hands?

    A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?" The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question.  (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers…

  • How Could a Simple God be a Person?

    The Worthy Opponent writes, And how is the view of divine simplicity and consequent unintelligibility consistent with the view of God as a person? A person has a mind whose thoughts and feelings are distinct and successive. As Hume (1711–76) argued, a being who is simple has ‘no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment,…

  • The Holocaust Argument for God’s Existence

    Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing, Nelson, 2016, p. 231: There are people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual…

  • Is the Modal Ontological Argument Compelling?

    In a comment, Patrick Toner writes, . . . there is no substantive philosophical position for which there is *better* philosophical support than theism. I'm open to the possibility that at least one other philosophical position–namely, dualism–is at least as well supported by philosophical argument as theism. But nothing's got better support. [. . .]…

  • Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo?

    Classical theists hold that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This phrase carries a privative, not a positive, sense: it means not out of something as opposed to out of something called ‘nothing.’ This much is crystal clear. Less clear is how creation ex nihilo (CEN), comports, if it does comport, with…

  • God as Uniquely Unique

     I hit upon 'uniquely unique' the other day as an apt predicate of God.  But it is only the formulation that is original; the thought is ancient. To be unique is to be one of a kind.  It will be allowed that nothing counts as God unless it is unique.  So at a bare minimum,…

  • Comments on “Divine Fluidity”

    By Edward Buckner, here, at Dale Tuggy's place.  Ed's text is indented; my comments are not.  I thank Ed for the stimulating discussion. He begins: I have been telling the Maverick Philosopher here about Benjamin Sommer’s theory of divine fluidity, which is one solution to the problem of anthropomorphic language in the Hebrew Bible. The…

  • The Anthropomorphism of Perfect-Being (Anselmian)Theology

    One approach to God and his attributes is Anselmian: God is "that that which no greater can be conceived."  God is the greatest conceivable being, the most perfect of all beings, the being possessing all perfections.  But what is a perfection?  A perfection is not just any old (positive, non-Cambridge) property, but a great-making property.…