Ben Wallis’s counter-apologetics blog

In this podcast, I discuss my criticisms of Craig's defenses for the Kalam's first premise. https://archive.org/download/podcast2020-05-20-LIB/podcast2020-05-20-LIB.mp3

With fresh eyes, I revisited Plantinga's "victorious" modal ontological argument (hereafter, VMOA) yesterday.  Some summaries of the argument, including the one at IEP, has Plantinga defining the term 'maximally great being' (hereafter, MGB) to be such that if it's possible an MGB exists, then an MGB actually exists, and has the properties of omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection.  On the IEP's account, Plantinga's argument really only has one premise, and the conclusion follows immediately. It turns out that IEP's summary is incorrect.  Plantinga's argument has a number of different premises, and he doesn't ever explicitly define anything.  His approach, instead, is to let the reader supply their own intuitive understandings of a given concept.  Sometimes he'll help this process along by giving examples, or brief conceptual sketches. In one case (as we shall see momentarily) he actually gives an analysis---although that...

Bruce Reichenbach wrote the SEP article on cosmological arguments.  SEP articles are, I believe, peer-reviewed, and so we shouldn't expect them to contain invalid arguments.  This one does, however.  Here it is: (1) A contingent being (a being such that if it exists, it could have not-existed or could cease to exist) exists. (2) This contingent being has a cause of or explanation for its existence. (3) The cause of or explanation for its existence is something other than the contingent being itself. (4) What causes or explains the existence of this contingent being must either be solely other contingent beings or include a non-contingent (necessary) being. (5) Contingent beings alone cannot provide a completely adequate causal account or explanation for the existence of a contingent being. (6) Therefore, what causes or explains the existence of this contingent being must include a non-contingent (necessary) being. (7) Therefore, a necessary being (a b...

Ben Wallis podcast 3/30/2020 - A skeptic's response to the Kalam cosmological argument In this podcast, I discuss how I think skeptics should respond to the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Last week I started reading about free will. That's right---last week ! I've been studying philosophy in my spare time for the last fifteen years; why did it take me so long to finally broach what is considered one of its most fundamentally important topics? Well first of all, it's perhaps not as important as it might seem; for instance the late Buddhist philosopher Michael Dorfman once called the free will problem "much ado about nothing." Meanwhile, none of the discussion about free will whose snippets I encountered seemed very intriguing to myself, whose chief areas of interest lie in epistemology, mind, and the nonexistence of God. Finally, the very concept of free will just seemed unnecessarily obscurist, whereas I desire clarity. So, if I could just get by without ever having to discuss free will, that would be extremely gratifying. So, what changed? Well, to put it simply, I encountered Tim Stratton's "freethinking argument against natu...

I want to post this more or less for reference, because even though it's just a simple observation, it has serious implications for the argument of Robin Collins. Usually, when a professional philosopher publishes an argument in a peer-reviewed journal or book, certain things are taken for granted, like the validity of any deductive arguments given in it. So it's a pretty straightforward matter to make sure that one's central argument, if it's intended to be deductively valid, is *in fact* deductively valid. But Robin Collins' argument is not. Here's an excerpt from the book: "(1) Given the fine-tuning evidence, LPU is very, very epistemically unlikely under NSU: that is, P(LPU|NSU & k') << 1, where k' represents some appropriately chosen background information, and << represents much, much less than (thus making P(LPU|NSU & k') close to zero). (2) Given the fine-tuning evidence, LPU is not unlikely under T: that is...

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has developed and defended an increasingly popular forumlation of the moral argument for the existence of God: (1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. (2) Objective moral values and duties do exist. (3) Therefore, God exists. ( Reasonable Faith , p172.) His principal defense for premise (2) consists in pointing to our moral experience, where he thinks we apprehend the objectivity of morality. However I will argue that while there may be a semantic sense in which our moral experience does offer evidence for the objectivity of morality, nevertheless Craig has in mind a different, specialized sense of objectivity which involves the existence of a concrete exemplar, and which is unsupported by experience.

Recall that Joshua Rasmussen in his "New Argument for a Necessary Being" (2011), argues that (1) Normally, for any intrinsic property p that (i) can begin to be exemplified and (ii) can be exemplified by something that has a cause, there can be a cause of p's beginning to be exemplified. (p1) When I expressed concerns with his published defense of (1), he (first privately, and later publicly ) offered the following supplement (my paraphrase): Consider mundane intrinsic properties of the form being an apple , or being aluminum , etc., which can begin to be exemplified. Clearly such properties possibly have a cause for their exemplification, and so inductively we infer (1).

The complexity of philosopher Alvin Plantinga's well-known evolutionary argument against naturalism (hereafter EAAN) affords the skeptic a variety of avenues for criticism. Of these, I prefer to focus on the objections that, first, we cannot be rationally obligated to stop depending on our cognitive faculties since it is quite impossible for us to rationally do so, and second, the sort of skepticism which Plantinga describes, if indeed it poses any danger at all, applies as well to the theist as it does the naturalist unless we already have reason to suppose that theism is true.

Joshua Rasmussen in his "New Argument for a Necessary Being" (2011), argues that (1) Normally, for any intrinsic property p that (i) can begin to be exemplified and (ii) can be exemplified by something that has a cause, there can be a cause of p's beginning to be exemplified. (p1)

William Lane Craig uses Hilbert's hotel in an attempt to illustrate the impossibility of an existing actually infinite multitude, but I find several serious gaps in his arguments which, in my judgment, prevent them from having any force. His approach takes two forms: First, he claims that certain logical contradictions follow from the existence of actual infinites; second, his intuition tells him that an existing infinite multitude is absurd. In response, I want to resolve the alleged contradictions, and argue that intuition is an unreliable guide to the possibility or impossibility of an existing actual infinite.

WLC suggests we characterize objective morality in terms of God's nature. In particular, he suggests a form of DCT, that "God's own nature is the standard of goodness, and his commandments to us are expressions of his nature" ( On Guard , pp135-6). The obvious reply here is that we can conceive a God whose commandments are morally wrong; so for instance we can envision a God who expresses his nature by commanding, say, a father to sacrifice his son. Clearly this would be an immoral act, and since definitions are true essentially it shows that morality is not defined by God's nature. WLC anticipates this sort of objection, but complains that the envisioned scenario is "logically impossible," on par with suggesting that a square can also be a circle (p136). On his view, of course, that's true enough---but if the contradiction only manifests when we assume DCT in advance, then that just goes to show that DCT is wrongheaded. Since we know human sac...

Dr. James Anderson has recently completed, with Greg Welty, the forthcoming paper "The Lord of Non-Contradiction," in which he argues for the existence of God from the laws of logic. We may divide the argument into two portions, the first where he holds that there is a necessarily existent mind, and the second that such a mind must be the mind of God. His summary of the first part of the argument proceeds thusly: "The laws of logic are necessary truths about truths; they are necessarily true propositions. Propositions are real entities, but cannot be physical entities; they are essentially thoughts. So the laws of logic are necessarily true thoughts. Since they are true in every possible world, they must exist in every possible world. But if there are necessarily existent thoughts, there must be a necessarily existent mind" (p20). Of course this is a summary only, and in the full paper each step in this argument is carefully defended with sub-arguments. For my o...

In The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (2009), Robin Collins presents an argument for the existence of God from the fine-tuning of the constant parameters of our physics models. I see several great problems with the argument, but in this blog entry I want to focus on just one family of problems having to do with his invokation of the controversial principle of indifference (hereafter POI). Philosophers know quite well from a slew of paradoxes dealing with the principle that it is inconsistent in its most general form, and generally avoid appealing to it. However this has not prevented some from developing more rigorous forms of it which they believe are useful and intuitive. Robin Collins has followed in this tradition, and so he presents in Blackwell his own "restricted" version of the principle (hereafter RPOI):

[NOTE: This is a post on Pastor Seger's argument. For the discussion with Sye Ten Bruggencate, go here .] This past Thursday Michael Long and I sat down to have a taped conversation (over Skype) with Sye Ten Bruggencate and Pastor Dustin Segers about the existence of God . We all had a great time, and plan to perhaps do it again at some point in the future. In the mean time, I'd like to clarify some comments I made. Not surprisingly, they appealed to their "assumption" that God exists, and boldly asserted that God somehow "grounds" the so-called "laws of logic" (among other things). Michael and I expressed our concern, however, that they don't have a coherent idea of what it means for logic to have a "ground," and we asked them to explain how they took God to serve this purpose. (We're also rather skeptical that they have a clear notion of what they're talking about when they refer to "laws of logic," but unfor...

It is certainly natural to perceive a physical order to the universe. Matter behaves in particular, predictable ways, and we have used mathematics to generalize those predictions with incredible, perhaps "unreasonable" success, to borrow Eugene Wigner's famous characterization. [ 1 ] An associate of mine recently offered up an argument for the existence of God which alleged that this formal order strongly suggests the influence of a personal designer. He did not rely directly on any Platonic understanding of math, although I suspect he believes therein; however, one of his key premises assumed that the order itself possesses divine attributes. If not exactly on the same grounds as Platonism, I must vehemently disagree.

According to amazon.com , it was 2003 Feb 20 when the venerable Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne published his book, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (hereafter simply Resurrection ). Swinburne, 74 years old as of today (2009 Sep 06), holds an Emeritus professorship at Oxford University, and has spent his academic career arguing for the existence of the Christian God, among other philosophical pursuits. I borrowed Resurrection from my own university library over the summer (of 2009), and acquainted myself with Swinburne's formalized thesis therein.