Browse Papers

I argue that abstract objects cannot depend on God for their existence and nature.

In ‘Anthropocentrism and the Problem of Evil’ Timothy Chappell argues that one cannot advance the following two criticisms of Christianity at the same time: (1) Christianity is an implausibly anthropocentric religion, and (2) Christianity has no convincing answer to the problem of natural evil. I demonstrate that Chappell’s argument is unsuccessful by providing three possible, and consistent, interpretations of (1) and (2).

According to one antitheist argument, the necessarily omniscient, necessarily omnipotent, and necessarily omnibenevolent Anselmian God does not exist, because if God is necessarily omnipotent it is impossible for Him to comprehend fully certain concepts, such as fear, frustration and despair, that an omniscient being needs to possess. Torin Alter examines this argument and provides three elaborate objections to it. I argue that theists would not accept any of them because they conflict with traditional Judaeo-Christian doctrines concerning divine attributes.

Patrick Grim argues that God cannot be omniscient because no one other than me can acquire knowledge de se of myself. In particular, according to Grim, God cannot know what I know in knowing that I am making a mess. I argue, however, that given two plausible principles regarding divine attributes there is no reason to accept Grim’s conclusion that God cannot be omniscient. In this paper I focus on the relationship between divine omniscience and necessary impossibilities, in contrast to the general trend of research since Aquinas, which has concentrated on the relationship between divine omnipotence and necessary impossibilities.

Paul Sheehy has argued that the modal realist cannot satisfactorily allow for the necessity of God’s existence. In this short paper I show that she can, and that Sheehy only sees a problem because he has failed to appreciate all the resources available to the modal realist. God may be an abstract existent outside spacetime or He may not be: but either way, there is no problem for the modal realist to admit that He exists at every concrete possible world.