Maximal God and Arguments Against Perfect Being Theism I

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yujin Nagasawa
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Concept Of God

This chapter considers existing arguments against perfect being theism, classifying them into three types: (i) arguments that purport to show the internal incoherence of God’s individual properties, (ii) arguments that purport to show the mutual inconsistency between God’s properties, and (iii) arguments that purport to show the mutual inconsistency between the set of God’s properties and a certain fact about the actual world. The chapter then develops a radically new and economical defence of perfect being theism, a defence that appeals to the maximal concept of God. This defence, it is argued, undercuts nearly all the arguments of the three types at once.

A Religion of Reason

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick C. Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Religion Of Reason ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter is an examination of Cohen’s main work on the philosophy of religion, his Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Cohen’s religion of reason was an attempt to respond to two opposing conceptions of religion: that of the romantics (Schleiermacher, Fries) and that of the Tübingen school (Baur, Strauβ‎). The romantics saw the essence of religion in feeling, the Tübingen school saw it in myth. Cohen tried to rescue the rational content of religion by interpreting it mainly in ethical terms, which he believed to consist in rational imperatives. Cohen’s concept of God is interpreted in terms of the validity of these ethical imperatives and not in terms of the existence of any entity. One section considers Cohen’s re-examination of the relationship between religion and ethics, which now stresses the distinctive characteristics of religion within ethics. The final section criticizes Rosenzweig’s interpretation of Cohen as a proto-existentialist.

The Greatest Possible Being

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Speaks
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Attributes Of God

Philosophical theology is the attempt to use reason to determine the attributes of God. An ancient tradition, which is perhaps more influential now than ever, tries to derive the attributes of God from the principle that God is the greatest possible being. This book argues that that constructive project is a failure. It also argues that the principle that God is the greatest possible being is unsuited to play two other theoretical roles. The first of these is the role of setting the limits of the concept of God, particularly in the context of debates over the existence of God. The second is the role of explaining the meaning of ‘God.’ This leaves us with three unanswered questions. If the principle that God is the greatest possible being can’t deliver results about the divine attributes, define the concept of God, or give the meaning of the name ‘God,’ what can? The last chapter makes some initial steps toward answering these questions.

Presence, Environment, and Sound and the Role of Imagination

2019 ◽  
pp. 667-681
Author(s):  
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keyword(s):  
Computer Games ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Sensory Input ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Dimension ◽  
The Creation ◽  
First Person Shooter ◽  
Selection Of

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard addresses the role of sound in the creation of presence in virtual and actual worlds. He argues that imagination is a central part of the generation and selection of perceptual hypotheses—models of the world in which we can act—that emerge from what Grimshaw-Aagaard calls the “exo-environment” (the sensory input) and the “endo-environment” (the cognitive input). Grimshaw-Aagaard further divides the exo-environment into a primarily auditory and a primarily visual dimension and he deals with the actual world of his own apartment and the virtual world of first-person-shooter computer games in order to exemplify how we perceptually construct an environment that allows for the creation of presence.

scholarly journals A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Nils Franzén
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Recent Discussion ◽  
Personal Taste ◽  
Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽  
Imaginative Resistance ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Evaluative Terms ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

scholarly journals God and the Playpen: On the Feasibility of Morally Better Worlds

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 266
Author(s):  
Cheryl K. Chen
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Actual World ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Moral Goodness ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Horrendous Evil ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Free Will Defense ◽  
Better Than

According to the free will defense, God cannot create a world with free creatures, and hence a world with moral goodness, without allowing for the possibility of evil. David Lewis points out that any free will defense must address the “playpen problem”: why didn’t God allow creatures the freedom required for moral goodness, while intervening to ensure that all evil-doing is victimless? More recently, James Sterba has revived the playpen problem by arguing that an omnipotent and benevolent God would have intervened to prevent significant and especially horrendous evil. I argue that it is possible, at least, that such divine intervention would have backfired, and that any attempt to create a world that is morally better than this one would have resulted in a world that is morally worse. I conclude that the atheologian should instead attack the free will defense at its roots: either by denying that the predetermination of our actions is incompatible with our freely per-forming them, or by denying that the actual world—a world with both moral good and evil—is more valuable than a world without any freedom at all.

Does the actual world actually exist?

1993 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul McNamara
Keyword(s):  
Actual World

Process Theology's Concept of God

1973 ◽  
Vol 84 (10) ◽  
pp. 292-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Gunton
Keyword(s):  
Concept Of God

RESEARCH: "Individual Differences in the Theological Concept of God"

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samir Trimeche ◽  
Genevieve Vinsonneau ◽  
Etienne Mullet
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Theological Concept
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