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Faith and Philosophy

Volume 2, Issue 4, october 1985
Symposium on the Logic of Religious Concepts

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Displaying: 1-13 of 13 documents


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1. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
George I. Mavrodes Miracles and the Laws of Nature
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Construing miracles as “violations,” I argue that a law of nature must specify some kind of possibility. But we must have here a sense of possibility for which the ancient rule of logic---ab esse ad posse valet consequentia---does not hold. We already have one example associated with the concept of statute law, a law which specifies what is legally possible but which is not destroyed by a violation. If laws of nature are construed as specifying some analogous sense of what is naturally possible, then they need not be invalidated by a (rare) violation, and Humean miracles remain a genuine possibility.
2. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
Joshua Hoffman Comments on “Miracles and the Laws of Nature”
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3. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzmann Absolute Simplicity
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The doctrine of God’s absolute simplicity denies the possibility of real distinctions in God. It is, e.g., impossible that God have any kind of parts or any intrinsic accidental properties, or that there be real distinctions among God’s essential properties or between any of them and God himself. After showing that some of the counter-intuitive implications of the doctrine can readily be made sense of, the authors identify the apparent incompatibility of God’s simplicity and God’s free choice as a special difficulty and associate it with two others: the apparent incompatibilities between essential omnipotence and essential goodness, and between perfect goodness and moral goodness. Since all three of these difficulties are associated with a certain understanding of the nature of God’s will, the authors base their resolution of them on an account of will in general and of God’s will in particular, drawing on Aquinas’s theory of will.Taking creation as their paradigm of divine free choice, the authors develop a solution of the principal incompatibility based on three claims: (i) God’s acts of choice are both free and conditionally necessitated; (ii) the difference between absolutely and conditionallynecessitated acts of will is not a real distinction in God; and (iii) the conditional necessity of God’s acts of will is compatible with contingency in the objects of those acts. The heart of their solution consists in their attempt to make sense of and support those claims.The authors extend their solution to cover the two associated apparent incompatibilities as well.The article concludes with observations on the importance of the doctrine of God’s absolute simplicity for resolving problems in religious morality and in the cosmological argument.
4. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
James Ross Comments on “Absolute Simplicity”
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5. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
Eleonore Stump The Problem of Evil
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This paper considers briefly the approach to the problem of evil by Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, and John Hick and argues that none of these approaches is entirely satisfactory. The paper then develops a different strategy for dealing with the problem of evil by expounding and taking seriously three Christian claims relevant to the problem: Adam fell; natural evil entered the world as a result of Adam's fall; and after death human beings go either to heaven or hell. Properly interpreted, these claims form the basis for a consistent and coherent Christian solution to the problem of evil.
6. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
Michael P. Smith What’s So Good About Feeling Bad?
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7. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
Eleonore Stump Suffering For Redemption: A Reply to Smith
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8. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
William E. Mann Epistemology Supernaturalized
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If God is omniscient then he knows contingent facts. If he exists a se, then his knowledge of facts must not depend on them. How then does he know them? I take seriously Aquinas’ view that God’s knowledge is the cause of things. I argue that “things” includes both entities and situations, that God’s knowledge of them is his knowledge of his unimpedable will, and that the view does not threaten human freedom. God’s knowledge is thus like my knowledge of my linguistic stipulations, except that whereas my knowledge is dedicta, his is de reo
9. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
Gary Rosenkrantz Necessity, Contingency, and Mann
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10. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
William E. Mann Keeping Epistemology Supernaturalized: A Reply to Rosenkrantz
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11. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
Philip L. Quinn In Search of the Foundations of Theism
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This paper is a critical and exploratory discussion of Plantinga’s claim that certain propositions which self-evidently entail the existence of God could be properly basic. In the critical section, I argue that Plantinga fails to show that the modem foundationalist’s criterion for proper basicality, according to which such propositions could not be properly basic, is self-referentially incoherent or otherwise defective. In the exploratory section, I try to build a case for the view that, even if such propositions could be properly basic, they would seldom, if ever, be properly basic for intellectually sophisticated adult theists in our culture.
12. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
Jonathan Malino Comments on Quinn
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13. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 4
Index: Volume 2, 1985
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