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Showing posts from May, 2011

Grim's Cantorian Argument Against Omniscience

Philosopher Patrick Grim since the early 1980s has advanced an argument against the existence of God which turns on an incoherence he sees in the concept of omniscience, an essential property of God as understood by most orthodox incarnations of the Abrahamic religions. [ 1 ] It runs as follows: There does not exist a set T of all distinct truths. For suppose towards a contradiction that T exists. Let f be a mapping from T into the set P(T) of all subsets of T, and consider the subset S of T of every truth q which is not contained in the set f(q). By definition of S, no truth q is mapped by f to S, and we conclude that f is not surjective. Since f is an arbitrary mapping from T into P(T), it follows that no such map is surjective. Now define a map g from P(T) into T. For each subset A of T (where A is a member of the set P(T)), define g(A) by the truth expressed by the sentence "A is a subset of T." Since every member of P(T) is distinct, then g maps them to distinc...

Goodness Over God counter-apologetics podcast

I'm pleased to announce that philosophy graduate Michael Long and I have successfully launched the counter-apologetics podcast Goodness Over God , where we tackle religious and philosophical issues on a weekly (more or less) basis. We would like to have guests as often as possible, including but not limited to religious believers who wish to defend their views in a civil and friendly environment. So if you would like to participate, feel free to drop us a line at the following email address: GoodnessOverGod@gmail.com Here is a list of the episodes so far: Episode 05 (2011 Apr 30) - God as an Explanatory Hypothesis and Causality (with special guest Rachael Morris) Episode 04 (2011 Apr 23) - Easter, Miracles, and History Episode 03 (2011 Apr 09) - Hell and Justice Episode 02 (2011 Apr 05) - Secular Ethics, Theistic Ethics, and Faith Episode 01 (2011 Mar 31) - Plantinga's Modal Ontological Argument (Please note that we originally started under the name "Truly Free," ...