Author: Roland

  • Fitch, Humberstone, and an omniscient being

    I just read the paper “Omnificence” by John Bigelow[1]. In the preamble he recounts the following argument for an omniscient being Any fact (true proposition) is knowable by someone. (Premise) Therefore, every fact is known. Therefore, someone knows every fact. Fitch[2] was responsible for showing that (2) follows from (1). One way to see this is… →

  • Argument from love for objective moral value

    Consider the following argument: Love involves appreciation. Appreciation of something is irrational if it has no value. It is rational to love other persons. Now, I suppose value comes in different forms, and what we really need is objective intrinsic value. Well, people usually don’t love other people because of what they can do for… →

  • Atheism is self-defeating

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    I was thinking about the short argument I gave here and was wondering if it could be turned into a positive argument for theism. I came up with this: If God doesn’t exist, then our cognitive faculties arose from non-purposive processes. No purposive system can arise from non-purposive processes. Therefore, if God doesn’t exist, then our… →

  • Modality and the ontological argument

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    Previously, I outlined what I find to be a compelling ontological argument from Alexander Pruss. In the post, we dispelled the idea that there is a single ontological argument and distinguished between a number of families on such arguments. The one we focussed on is a so-called Gödelian ontological argument, named after the famous mathematician… →

  • A Gödelian ontological argument

    I’ve never really had a nice relationship with the ontological argument from Anselm. When I first heard of it, it seemed strange that existence would be greater than non-existence, so I pushed it aside. About 2 years later, I realised that existence could maybe be bootstrapped from other properties, like power. But by then I… →

  • World-types have explanations but not grounds?

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    On the one hand I personally like the idea of middle-knowledge for understanding the relationship between God’s providence and our libertarian-free choices[1]. On the other hand, I’m what William Lane Craig once called[2] a latter-day Leibnizian, who wants “everything to be brought into submission to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, including facts concerning human free… →

  • The possibility premise of the simple existential cosmological argument

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    In my previous post I showed that even without the plausible S5 or Brouwer axioms, we can move from the possible explanation of the maximal simple existential fact (we called it K there), to the existence of a necessary being. Now I see no reason for thinking such an explanation is impossible, and it seems… →

  • A cosmological argument from simple existential facts

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    There are loads of different cosmological arguments out there and hopefully someday I’ll be able to write blog posts about some of them. Right now, however, I want to share an interesting version I came up with, thanks to an argument from Alexander Pruss: define a “simple existential fact” to be a true proposition reporting… →

  • Epistemological issues in the moral argument

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    I am a proponent of a moral argument, taken from William Lane Craig, given in the following form: If God doesn’t exist, then objective moral values and duties don’t exist Objective moral values and duties do exist Therefore, God exists I’ve had a number of previous posts here dealing with specific details of this argument’s… →

  • Covenantal Modalism

    This probably isn’t a novel idea, but I thought it was worth sharing. I was talking to my friend, Marcus, about various theological topics and at some point the question of the nature of blessing in the Old and New Testaments came up. I was trying very hard to articulate generally how I saw the… →