Recently in Existence of God Category

Here's an old chestnut I haven't thought about in awhile but had reason to re-visit tonight.
It's an argument for the incompatibility of omnipotence and omniscience by Richard LaCroix (Analysis 33:5, April 1973).
Consider a being B which has the following properties:

(1) B is finite
(2) B does act A.
(3) B is the only being in existence who knows that (2) is true.

He says that if "x is omnipotent" entails the following

(4) x can create any finite being y, provided that (i) y has properties such that the statement that y has those properties is neither self-contradictory nor entails a contradiction and (ii) there is no being z such that the statement that z and y exist is either self-contradictory or entails a contradiction.

then an omnipotent being can create a being with (1)-(3).

Since "x is omniscient" entails

(5) For any finite being B and act A, if B does A then x knows that B does A.

it follows that omnipotence so conceived is inconsistent with omniscience.

I'll put my response below the fold to see if we come to the same conclusion.

There is a dislike of God-of-the-gaps arguments in the theological and philosophical community. A God-of-the-gaps argument is an argument for a theistic explanation of a feature that does not have a scientific explanation but where, as far as we can tell, a scientific explanation would in principle be possible.

But suppose that there is currently no good scientific explanation of a puzzling natural feature F of the universe, although we can give a good theistic explanation of F. This is likely to be evidence for theism. After all, if F is puzzling, then our best theories presumably do not predict it. Thus, given what we know, F is very unlikely on the naturalistic hypothesis. But if we can give a good theistic explanation, F is not going to be very unlikely on the theistic hypothesis. A good theistic explanation of F in this context will have to give reasons that God would have for actualizing F, and will have to give an argument for why God is not unlikely to act on these reasons, given the relevant background assumptions. This is not an impossible task--e.g., God would have strong reasons for creating persons, because the existence of persons has great worth, and a perfectly good being would be not very unlikely to act on such strong reasons.
Now, if F is evidence for theism, then surely a rational person cannot fail to consider F just because the evidence falls is of the "God-of-the-gaps" type. What matters evidentially is not whether the evidence is of the "God-of-the-gaps" type, but how much confirmation that evidence gives to the existence of God.

It may, of course, be that some evidence needs to be excluded for certain purposes on non-evidential grounds. Thus, a priest needs to ensure that his public interaction with a penitent is not affected by what he learned about the penitent in the confessional, lest inferences about what the penitent confessed be made from the priest's behavior, and it may be that the best means to that end is for the priest to exclude information about particular persons gained in the confessional from his general stock of information for making inferences. But it seems unlikely that the class of "God-of-the-gaps" evidence is at all analogous to cases like these.

Bradley Monton has completed a book MS on Intelligent Design. I'll paste some of his introductory remarks here with a link to the originating page and to his blog, which I highly recommend Prosblogion readers take a look at.

I've known Brad for years now and have discussed confirmation theory and philosophy of religion with him a lot, including at various conferences. Along with Erik Wielenberg, Bradley is one of the great young guns of contemporary analytic philosophy of religion on the non-theist side. These guys are great philosophers who take the arguments seriously and advance the state of the art. Dawkins and Dennett just distract (and detract) from the real work, but these guys are the real thing. Please check out Bradley's blog here: http://bradleymonton.wordpress.com/

Here's his description of the book. For an annotated bibliography go to his page here: http://spot.colorado.edu/~monton/BradleyMonton/ID.html

"The doctrine of intelligent design has been maligned by atheists, but even though I'm an atheist, I'm of the opinion that the arguments for intelligent design are stronger than most people realize. The goal of this book is to try to get people to take intelligent design seriously. I maintain that it is legitimate to view intelligent design as science, that there are somewhat plausible arguments for the existence of a cosmic designer, and that intelligent design should be taught in public school science classes."

This is the last installment of the Prosblogion Reading Group. I've found reading these posts and comments edifying, and I hope the rest of the readers have as well. I'd like to thank Matthew for setting this up, and for the other participants--both posters and commenters--for their great thoughts.

Below I discuss Tooley's response to Plantinga's response to Tooley. Or, put another way, Tooley's "Yes way!" to Plantinga's "No way!" To keep my comments at a manageable length I've referred back to Trent and Andrew's posts, rather than presenting the whole dialectic here. But I've tried to summarize the dialectic briefly in most places. For more detail on the original argument or Plantinga's response, be sure to see the discussions of the last two weeks.

Sorry for the delay in posting this, but I wanted to go over my post with my summer Philosophy of Religion class here at Rochester.

First a preview for those who have carefully read the chapter, then I'll lay out the core argument for those who have or have not, finally I'll detail the objections in the preview.

PREVIEW

1. Premises (12) and (15) are more controversial than he lets on. It is hard to evaluate apart from the probability for one of God's existence.

2. re: Premise (16). There are oddities and worries about it--including the fact that the probability judgements seem utterly inscrutable. But the assumptions about properties are not unreasonable. I do think, however, that the a posteriori probability after taking into account the frequency of the tokens is different and relevant (he considers this objection but doesn't address it (at least not in my section).

3. (Most seriously) I don't think the extension from one evil to many (many) evils does much. For either they don't compound because they are not independent--due to being consequences of a common cause--or they do but not much comes from it due to the fact that if there is a defense/theodicy for one there is one for all.

William Lane Craig wrote the cover story for this month's edition of Christianity Today. It can be found here. He speaks of a renaissance of Christian/theistic philosophy in secular academia, he reviews some of the main arguments for God's existence, and he talks about the relevance of arguments in today's "postmodern culture".

I've read about the need for good PR for philosophy over at Leiter's blog. One thing I'm happy about is that, in Christian circles, there's been an increasing amount of positive PR for philosophy, primarily by way of Christian apologetics. Lee Strobel's books The Case for Faith and The Case for a Creator feature interviews (and philosophical discussions) with professional philosophers such as William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, and Robin Collins. I rarely meet Christians nowadays who have never heard of Strobel's books, and a surprising number of them have actually read and enjoyed the books. Other Christian apologists who are not active, professional philosophers (e.g., Norman Geisler, Ravi Zacharias, Gregory Koukl, etc.) all speak with high regard for the value of philosophy. More recently, Pastor Timothy Keller's very popular book The Reason for God makes use of arguments that draw right out of the professional literature (mostly from Plantinga and Alston). I've found that many Christians walk away from reading/hearing these apologists with a higher appreciation for philosophy. Some enjoyed the arguments so much that they went into a full time study of philosophy. (I believe that many Talbott graduates fit this description.)

So I'm happy that there is this PR for philosophy in Christian circles. We can hope that this will contribute to good PR for philosophy in society generally!

Plantinga gives three main arguments against naturalism in the opening chapter of Knowledge of God. These are:

1. naturalism cannot accommodate the idea of proper function (and since warrant essentially involves proper function, if naturalism were true then no one would have knowledge),


2. naturalism leads directly to Humean skepticism, the condition in which you have a defeater for whatever you believe and cannot sensibly trust your cognitive faculties, and


3. naturalism cannot accommodate belief; if naturalism were true, no one would believe anything (19).
   

The first of these was the focus of Andrew's earlier post in this series. Below the fold, I want to summarize and raise some points about (ii) and (iii).

Suppose Hitler won the war. Furthermore, there were certain nonAryans who had a mutation such that everything they saw was tinted green and caused a harsh pain. Let 'G' denote this new property of their eyes. Hitler enjoyed this suffering, so he allowed these nonAryans to survive. After a few generations, nonAryans with eyes like ours died out, and the nonAryans with these mutated eyes continued to survive. This mutation spread throughout the population.

Consider one such creature, m. Plantinga asks, "But wouldn't it be wrong (not to mention crazy) to say that m's visual system is functioning properly? Or that its function is to produce both pain and a visual field that is uniformly green? Or that the resistance medical technicians who desperately try to repair the damage are interfering with the proper function of the visual system?" (p. 26) This example seems to work against any evolutionary theory of proper function.

Here's one worry for this example.

This is another post about the first thirty pages of Chapter 1 for our Knowledge of God reading group. I hope Wednesday isn't too early to start chiming in with posts. I'm going to focus on that item (iii) that Andrew Moon mentioned in his first post.

In chapter one of Knowledge of God, Alvin Plantinga argues that naturalism cannot account for proper function. According to Plantinga, proper function requires intelligent design.

The Proper Function Argument Against Naturalism

1. If naturalism is true, then there is no proper function (with respect to human beings).
2. There is proper function (with respect to human beings).
3. Therefore, naturalism is not true.
   (Note: I'm oversimplifying this. I'm translating all of Plantinga's talk about naturalism can't accomodate proper function" to "there is no proper function" - this oversimplification has no bearing on the puzzle I want to raise.)
   

I'm interested in the assumption that motivates (1). The thesis is roughly:

Proper Function Requires Design Thesis
(P) If S functions properly, then S has an intelligent designer.

(P) is incompatible with what seems to be perfectly acceptable talk about God. It seems to make sense to talk about God functioning properly - especially if we're working with the concept proper function that we all have and use in ordinary life (p. 23).

If God exists, then God functions properly. If God functions properly, then (P) is false - because presumably God does not have a designer. 

I think the main problem for the argument I have given will be whether or not we can sensibly talk about God functioning properly.&title=<$MTEntryTitle$>','resizable,location,menubar,toolbar,scrollbars,status'));">

Welcome to the Knowledge of God Prosblogion reading group! Each week, we will read a section of the book, and the section breakdown and ordering is as follows:
C. 1 (1-30), C. 1 (30-69), C. 4, C. 5, C. 2 (70-108), C. 2 (108-150), C. 3, C. 6.

Each Monday, a different Prosblogion contributor will write an opening post. Other contributors can post on that section two or three days later in the week. Everybody is welcome to read along in the book and comment.

It's a pleasure to kick-off all the fun. Let me summarize the main claims that I take Plantinga to argue for in my section.

I) If God exists, then it is likely that many people know that God exists.
II) If Christian belief is true, then it is likely that many people know that it is true.
III) If naturalism is true, then no biological organs function properly or improperly.

Plantinga's defends (I) and (II) as follows:

Here's a link to a recent debate between William Lane Craig and Louise Antony on whether or not God is necessary for morality. It was interesting for me since reading Craig's debates and apologetics works helped get me into philosophy, and Antony was one of my professors when I was an undergraduate at The Ohio State University. Both are moral realists and affirm that there are objective moral truths. I didn't find Craig's arguments that God is necessary for morality to be convincing.

However, here's one of his arguments which has some intuitive appeal and that I'd like to explore. He points out that if God does not exist, then there is no ultimate moral accountability. People will not ultimately get what they deserve, whether this be reward for a life well lived or punishment for horrendous evils. This seems to me to be correct. If naturalism is true, then even if there are objective moral truths, people will not ultimately get what they deserve.

But is there any reason to think the following?

1) If there are objective moral truths, then there will be some ultimate moral accountability.

There is no doubt something less satisfying (at least emotionally) with the naturalistic worldview, but I don't know if I can think of any good reasons to believe that (1) is true. And if (1) is false, there is no problem for the naturalist.

Could we defend (1) just by appealing to intuition? Do most humans have a deep intuition that wrongs must be righted and vice versa? But this intuition is weak at best. I would hope for some more argument. Any suggestions?

So there's the theistic explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe and the many-universes atheistic explanation. One of the criticisms that theists have made of the many-universes atheistic explanation is that there is no independent evidence that such universes exist. I was wondering if anybody's put forth the idea that all of David Lewis' reasons for believing in concrete possible worlds are reasons to believe in many universes. With Lewis' possibilism in place, we have a response to this criticism. (I'm sure that's not the only response; anyway, this is the response I'm interested in.) Does anybody know if anyone has written on the connection between Lewis' possible worlds and the many-universes hypothesis?