Category: God
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Thinking and Speaking about the Absolute: Three Views
Univocity. There is an absolute reality. We can speak of it literally and sometimes truly using predicates of ordinary language that retain in their metaphysical use the very same sense they have in their mundane use. For example, we can say of Socrates that he exists, and using 'exists' in the very same sense we…
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Can Kant Refer to God?
Ed Buckner raises this question, and he wants my help with it. How can I refuse? I'll say a little now, and perhaps more later. Kant was brought up a rationalist within the Wolffian school, but then along came David Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumber. This awakening begins his Critical period in…
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Whether ‘Image and Likeness’ Supports God’s Having a Body
If man is made in God's image and likeness, does it follow that God is essentially embodied? Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . . Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God…
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Could God Prove His Own Existence?
In response to two recent posts, here and here, Jacques comments: I'm mostly persuaded by your recent posts about theism and knowledge, but I disagree about your claim that "Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to." Think of your condition 5 ["It is such that all…
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God and Proof
This is an addendum to clarify what I said two days ago. My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism. Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration. A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:…
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Neither the Existence Nor the Nonexistence of God is Provable
A post of mine ends like this: To theists, I say: go on being theists. You are better off being a theist than not being one. Your position is rationally defensible and the alternatives are rationally rejectable. But don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite. In the end you…
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God and the Transcendental Ego
God does what Husserl's transcendental ego wanted to do but couldn't pull off, namely, constitute beings not as mere unities of sense, but as beings, as "independent reals" to borrow a phrase from Josiah Royce. Husserl's transcendental idealism never gets the length of Sein; it reaches only as far as Seinsinn. This leads us to…
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An Insufficient Argument Against Sufficient Reason
Explanatory rationalism is the view that there is a satisfactory answer to every explanation-seeking why question. Equivalently, it is the view that there are no propositions that are just true, i.e., true, contingently true, but without explanation of their being true. Are there some contingent truths that lack explanation? Consider the conjunction of all contingent truths.…
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Forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy: Review of W. E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality
Review William F. Vallicella William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), ix + 369 pp. This is a book philosophers of religion will want on their shelves. It collects sixteen of William E. Mann's previously published papers and includes “Omnipresence, Hiddenness, and Mysticism” written for this volume. These influential papers combine…
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Two Senses of ‘Contingency’ and a Bad Cosmological Argument
Fr. Aidan Kimel asked me to comment on a couple of divine simplicity entries of his. When I began reading the first, however, I soon got bogged down in a preliminary matter concerning wonder at the existence of the world, its contingency, and whether its contingency leads us straightaway to a causa prima. So I…
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God as Biblical Character and as Divine Reality
When Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza write about the God of the Old Testament, they write about numerically the same Biblical character using the same Latin word, Deus. They write about this character, refer to it, and indeed succeed in referring to it. But Aquinas and Spinoza do not believe in the same divine reality.…
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Divine Creation and Haecceity Properties
Having somewhat churlishly accused Daniel M. of failing to understand my post Does Classical Theism Logically Require Haecceitism, he wrote back in detail demonstrating that he did understand me quite well. I will now post his e-mail with some responses in blue. I'm sorry. I've re-read your post, and it strikes me as quite clear,…
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Does Classical Theism Logically Require Haecceitism?
Haecceitism is the doctrine that there are haecceities. But what is an haecceity? Suppose we take on board for the space of this post the assumptions that (i) properties are abstract objects, that (ii) they can exist unexemplified, and that (iii) they are necessary beings. We may then define the subclass of haecceity properties as…
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William Lane Craig on the ‘Same God?’ Question
A tip of the hat to Karl White for pointing us to this article which includes a critique of Francis Beckwith's contribution to the debate. Craig concludes: So whether Muslims and Christians can be said to worship the same God is not the truly germane question. The question is which conception of God is true.…
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Do Muslims Worship the True God?
It depends. Suppose the true God is the triune God. Then two possibilities. One is that Muslims worship the true God, but not as triune, indeed as non-triune; they worship the true God all right, the same one the Christians worship; it is just that the Muslims have one or more false beliefs about the…