What Caused God?
In comments to my post on
Dawkins and the Philosophers, atheist blogger
Jonathan West has been pushing back against Michael Ruse's
claim that Dawkins' prominent use of the "what caused God?" question is, as Jonathan puts it, 'fatuous.' Jonathan has also pushed this point in a recent
blog post which considers this question in light of Swinburne's 'necessary being' arguments in
The Existence of God. I will first make a few remarks about Swinburne's work in this area, and then proceed to show why the "what caused God?" question is indeed confused. To be fair, I admit...
Continue reading "What Caused God?"
Topic(s):
Abstract Objects
,
Alvin Plantinga
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Cosmological Argument
,
David Lewis
,
Existence of God
,
Historical Thinkers
,
James F. Ross
,
Modality
,
Ontological Argument
,
Ontology
,
Peter Unger
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Plato
,
Richard Dawkins
,
Richard Swinburne
,
Sydney Shoemaker
,
Theology
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A Note on Middle Knowledge and Berkeleian Philosophy of Science
A thought occurred to me just now as I was reading the end of Sydney Shoemaker's "Causality and Properties" and thinking, as usual, of a Berkeleian response. What, we ask, are the truth-conditions or truth-makers for statements about natural laws and causality? Shoemaker has a story about properties being defined in terms of dispositions to act a certain way in the presence of certain other properties, and he thinks we can flesh out these statements in this way. For Berkeley, of course, the properties of physical objects can have no causal efficacy. Instead, Berkeley takes these statements to be simple...
Continue reading "A Note on Middle Knowledge and Berkeleian Philosophy of Science"