Category: Philosophy

  • God’s control and our free will

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    This is the second post in a series of posts on God’s providence. Last time we looked at a bunch of passages from Scripture which weigh in on the question. This time, as the title suggests, we’re going to talk about the relationship between God’s control and our free will. In our first post, we →

  • What’s a negative property?

    In discussing the Gödelian ontological argument recently articulated by Alexander Pruss[1] (here and here) there was a need to define what we mean by “positive property”. In the first post, we defined a positive property (in a very Anselmian way) as a property that is better or greater to have than not. In his second paper, →

  • The gap problem

    In the previous two posts (here and here) we looked at a Gödelian ontological argument from Alexander Pruss, which we’ll use a bit in this post. The gap problem Right, so what is the gap problem? Simply put, solving the gap problem involves bridging the gap between (i) the first cause or necessary being that →

  • Regent nomadic educated oligarchy

    My brother studies politics and economic history, so sometimes we get into discussions about how governments should be structured. Yesterday we had an interesting discussion, so I thought I’d write something about it. Anarchism and the problem of greed We started by discussing anarchism. Now if you didn’t already know, anarchists aren’t proponents of chaos, they’re →

  • 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 →