Ben Wallis’s counter-apologetics blog

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...

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).

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)

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...

[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...