RE: God is so quiet
February 12, 2018 at 12:40 am
(This post was last modified: February 12, 2018 at 1:24 am by Angrboda.)
(February 11, 2018 at 11:05 pm)SteveII Wrote:Quote:You simply cannot have a "world" where neither God nor the universe exists, because that by definition is nothing, not a world. Duh. A possible world by definition is everything that exists; if you have no thing, you don't have a world.
I agree. I was made to realize my mistake and I altered my example of a possible world that only consisted of an immaterial mind (something god-like) or some other medium of existence to illustrate that it is logically possible that our universe could have failed to exist.
Forgive me if I've misunderstood, but from my perusal of this thread I was under the impression that you were using the premise that the universe is contingent in service to your natural theology arguments. Since the aim of those arguments is to derive the conclusion that God exists, your use of the idea of something god-like, which is by your definition a necessary being, to derive the result that the universe is contingent, is improper. Doing so would be to invoke the existence of God, to derive the contingency of the universe, to then use that result to derive the conclusion that God exists. That would be a clear case of begging the question. I don't know what you mean by "some other medium of existence" here, but regardless, I'd appreciate it if you'd clarify what greater argument you are using the result of the universe's contingency in service toward. (I'm not sure what you're working toward by invoking additional contingent entities such as an 'other' medium of existence and would appreciate you clarifying exactly what the relationship to the current question is. In regard to your comments about infinite regresses and occam's razor, I will simply caution you that if such objections are in the service of supporting natural theology arguments of the usual sort, I consider such objections problematic for reasons we will get into if the conversation turns in that direction.)
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