I tackled this topic several years ago, but I think it’s time to revisit it again. I’m going to argue that truthmaker maximalism (TM)—the view that every truth is grounded in some reality that makes it true—should not be regarded as a particularly controversial thesis. It’s virtually a corollary of the correspondence theory of truth (CTT).… Read More »
In a previous post I presented the infamous grounding objection to Molinism. The problem stems from the fact that for Molinism God’s middle knowledge (MK) is supposed to be non-natural, i.e., not part of, entailed by, or grounded in God’s nature contingent, i.e., neither necessary nor impossible in the abstract metaphysical sense that I describe… Read More »
In my previous post, I discussed the grounding objection to Molinism and also briefly touched on another problem having to with divine aseity. In this post I want to try to cut to heart of the matter and show as simply and directly as I can that Molinism is necessarily false because it is internally… Read More »
This post has three parts: To begin, I will (§1) explain what Molinism is. I will then (§2) explain the infamous “grounding” objection to Molinism. I will argue that Molinism cannot give a positive answer to the grounding objection. The Molinist simply has to bite the bullet and admit a boatload of ungrounded contingent truths and/or… Read More »
In a recent post, I argued that God’s existence is not “logically” necessary but should instead be thought of as “metaphysically” necessary. I also argued there that nothing exists out of logical necessity on the grounds that an ontologically empty world (a null world) is a logically coherent possibility. I subsequently got into a Facebook… Read More »
If there’s a “poster child” of classical theism, it would have to be Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 AD). By the end of only the third question in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas has concluded that God necessarily exists and is the absolutely simple and purely actual first, uncaused cause of the moment-by-moment being of everything else.… Read More »
All theists believe—or should believe—that God’s existence is necessary in a metaphysically robust sense of “necessary”. How, after all, could we unswervingly commit our lives and our futures to an ontologically fragile God, one who could—try as He might to avoid it—cease to exist? Or one who, because He simply got bored with eternity, commit deicide,… Read More »
In my previous post I contrasted four models of divine providence with respect to the retrospective and prospective problems of evil. Here’s another complementary way of looking at the problem of evil in terms of how each model tries to relieve some of the tension caused by evil by adjusting our understanding of the divine… Read More »
There are two sides to the problem of evil: God’s responsibility for evil God’s response to evil. (1) is retrospective; it has to do with God’s complicity in past occurrences of evil. (2) is prospective; it has to do with God’s ability to respond to evil moving forward—to eliminate evil, to bring good out of… Read More »
In my previous post, I develop what I take to be a refutation of the simple foreknowledge (SF) view. In this post I want to look at little more carefully at that refutation, consider how a proponent of SF might try to get around it, and show that this response does nothing to resolve the… Read More »