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William Hasker on Divine Simplicity
In "Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake", William Hasker argues that "the strong doctrine of divine simplicity **is** a mistake, one from which theology needs to be liberated." With this sweeping charter, Hasker proceeds to critique the "traditional strong doctrine of divine simplicity, attributed to Aquinas and before him to Augustine."
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Is the Trinity Contradictory? The Case of Dale Tuggy
If one had to choose a teaching of Christianity that caused more confusion than any other, the leading candidate would likely be the doctrine of the Trinity. Who has not been told at some point that God is both one and three, and that, though contradictory, such Christians must acquiesce for the sake of faith? Critics—both popularizers and sometimes academics—often hold up the Trinity as an exemplar of Christian irrationalism, proof that Christians cannot be both reasonable and faithful.
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God's Necessity, Being's Priority
It seems inevitable in the course of analytic treatments of philosophy of religion that we must endure talk of “possible worlds.” The deployment of “possible worlds” strike me as problematic for a number of reasons. It tends to conflate metaphysical and logical possibility, it attempts to solve real world questions with the fancies of the imagination, it often assumes that the actual is grounded in the possible (and vice versa) and it grants far too much weight to the powers of abstraction in penetrating the nature of the world.
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Roadmap for an Argument for the Existence of God
This post sets out the initial roadmap for the argument for the existence of God that will be set out in later posts. The particular argument I will be using is derived from Robert Spitzer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God and, to a lesser extent, W. Norris Clarke’s The One and the Many. Both are simplified versions of Aquinas’ Second Way, and they do not rely on any particular metaphysical view of the world. Thus, one does not need to accept Aquinas’ metaphysics to find the argument compelling.
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Step 1: The Necessity of an Unconditioned Reality
This is the third post in the ongoing series presenting an argument for the existence of God. In this post we move into the argument itself, taking the first step toward an argument for the existence of God.
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Introductory Remarks to An Argument for the Existence of God
It is commonly assumed that there is no compelling argument for the existence of God. However, the argument for the existence of God is more compelling than almost any other argument about the fundamental nature of reality. The existence of God is more easily and convincingly demonstrated than the existence of other minds; the independent or objective existence of objects; or the real existence of subatomic particles.
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