Wainwright on Berkeley and Edwards
The second essay in Idealism and Christian Theology is "Berkeley, Edwards, Idealism, and the Knowledge of God" by William J. Wainwright. The aim of this article is to explore and explain similarities between Berkeley and Edwards in terms of the religious and cultural context in which they wrote, particularly the threat of deism and freethinking to these (relatively) traditional religious thinkers. This is an extremely interesting project, and it is for the most part well-executed, though the brevity of a single paper necessitates glossing over certain details, leaving some points underdeveloped, and so forth. Wainwright's central contention, I take it,...
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Topic(s):
Contemporary Thinkers
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George Berkeley
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Historical Thinkers
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Idealism/Phenomenalism
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Jonathan Edwards
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Joshua Farris
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Mark Hamilton
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Metaphysics
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Ontology
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Philosophy
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Theology
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William Wainwright
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More on FWD and Brute Contingencies
Yesterday, I noted that Plantinga's Free Will Defense (FWD), as it appears in The Nature of Necessity (NN) involves some very odd brute contingencies. These brute contingencies are not determined by God, or by anything else at all. They are truly brute: there is no reason or explanation for them. Furthermore, they limit God's power. When Plantinga admits that according to his theory "the power of an omnipotent God [is] limited by the freedom he confers upon his creatures" (NN 190), he cites William Wainwright, "Freedom and Omnipotence", Nous 2 (1968): 293-301. As it turns out, Wainwright is responding to...
Continue reading "More on FWD and Brute Contingencies"