Powers, possibility, and the essential cosmological argument

One classical version of cosmological argument, defended famously by Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, deduces the existence of a First Cause from the existence of a particular sort of causal series: one that is ‘essentially ordered’. This argument has received renewed defence in recent work by Feser (2013), Cohoe (2013), and Kerr (2015). I agree with these philosophers that the argument is sound. I believe, however, that the standard defence given of the ECA in these philosophers can be complemented by a formulation that appeals to the powers theory of possibility. This approach to possibility has been defended in recent years by, for example, Pruss (2002), Jacobs (2010), and Vetter (2015). In this article, I show how this modal theory allows us to defend the ECA in a way that is dialectically advantageous as well as clarifying.

Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments

Graham Oppy has criticized several Thomistic versions of the cosmological argument in a series of publications over the years, most recently in a Religious Studies article responding to my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Here I reply to his criticisms, arguing that while Oppy raises important issues, a besetting weakness of his approach is a failure adequately to grapple with the metaphysical underpinnings of the arguments.

Locke, God, and Materialism

This chapter investigates Locke’s views about materialism, by looking at the discussion in Essay IV.x. There Locke—after giving a cosmological argument for the existence of God—argues that God could not be material, and that matter alone could never produce thought. In discussing the chapter, I pay particular attention to some comparisons between Locke’s position and those of two other seventeenth-century philosophers, René Descartes and Ralph Cudworth. Making use of those comparisons, I argue for two main claims. The first is that the important argument of Essay IV.x.10 is fundamentally an argument about the causation of perfections. Indeed, Locke gives multiple such arguments in the chapter. My second main claim is that my proposed reading of IV.x is not merely consistent with what Locke says elsewhere about superaddition, but also provides reasons to favor a particular understanding of what superaddition is.

Der kosmologische Gottesbeweis des Ralph von Battle. Rekonstruktion, Kritik und Einordnung

This paper reconstructs (in natural language) and discusses a proof of God’s existence by Anselm of Canterbury’s friend Ralph of Battle (1040–1124), developed in his recently edited De nesciente, a fictitious dialogue between a Christian and an atheist. Without precedent in antiquity and the Middle Ages, Ralph’s proof has never been examined in detail. It combines a “cogito” argument with a two-part cosmological argument. The paper first presents the textual basis and an exegetical interpretation of Ralph’s reasoning, classifies the parts of the proof historically and systematically, and then compares these with the proofs of God’s existence as well as other arguments in Anselm’s Proslogion and Monologion. Finally, it points out some similarities between Ralph’s “cogito” argument and a passage in the Liber pro insipiente, which may suggest that this anonymous critique of Anselm’s Proslogion proof was authored not by Gaunilo, as traditionally thought, but by Ralph.

The Cosmological Argument

This chapter argues, controversially, that all three of Kant’s announced criticisms are working parts of his critique of the cosmological argument. To see this point we need to appreciate that for Kant the assumption from which the argument begins is the fact that something existent is contingent—not in the sense that it might not have existed at all, but only in the sense that it might have existed in some other way. Consequently, the argument (even if it were not otherwise flawed) could hope to establish at most the existence of a being that can exist in only one way. Realizing this, Kant’s cosmological arguer attempts to strengthen the argument’s conclusion through reasoning that relies on the ontological argument. Recognizing this reliance, Kant sees the cosmological argument as merely an attempt to clothe the ontological argument in fashionably empirical garb—and thus to pass it off as something new.