Other Notes

• First Day Stuff
• Syllabus

• see syllabus
• Question to consider for next time: What traits would a being have to have to qualify as God?

• More Syllabus
• The Nature of God
• The Need for a Definition of 'God'
• A "Proof" of the Existence of God
• Some Possible Divine Attributes
• A Guiding Principle: God as the Supreme Being

• Rowe, "The Idea of God"

• God as the Supreme Being
• the notion of a perfection
• The Big Three: essential omnipotence, essential omniscience, essential perfect goodness
• Essentiality vs. Accidentality
• Why include essentiality?
• Other Possible Perfections: necessary existence, eternality, omnipresence, ... .

• Aquinas, "Is God's Power Limited?," pp. 265-267. Read it three times.

• Had Pop Quiz #1, administered by our TA, Chad Vance. No lecture today due to Heathwood's being ill.

• Absolute Account of Omnipotence
• An Argument Against the Absolute Account of Omnipotence
• The Law of Non-Contradiction
• Possibility Accounts of Omnipotence
• Relative Possibility vs. Absolute/Metaphysical Possibility
• How Essential Attributes Can Make Certain Things Metaphysically Impossible
• Aquinas's Privation Theory of Sin

• Mavrodes, "Some Puzzles Concerning Omnipotence," pp. 267-269
• Frankfurt, "The Logic of Omnipotence," pp. 269-271

• Heathwood still ill. Guest lecture by Chad Vance.
• Pop Quiz #1 returned.

• The Thomistic Account of Omnipotence (TAO)
• TAO Applied to Creating a Four-Sided Triangle
• TAO Applied to Divine Suicide
• TAO and the Paradox of the Stone

• Plato, excerpt from Euthyphro, pp. 556-557.

• Can God Do Evil?, or the Problem of Divine Sin
• The Problem This Presents for Aquinas' Account of Omnipotence
• One possible solution: deny God's essential perfect goodness
• A second possible solution: the Divine Command Theory.
• What Aquinas Says About It
• Clarke's Account of Omnipotence

• We did a group exercise in which groups looked at a passage from Samuel Clarke and tried to figure out Clarke's account of omnipotence.
• Here is the account: x is omnipotent =df. x can bring about any state of affairs that (i) is metaphysically possible, and (ii) is such that x’s bringing it about is compatible with all of x’s essential attributes.
• HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: answer the following two questions: (1) How does Clarke's account solve the problem of divine evil; (2) Are there new problems for Clarke's account (HINT: recall the sort of problem that plagued the Relative Possibility Account of Omnipotence).

• READ Passages from God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist, by WIlliam Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, on Readings page of website.
  (As you read, try to identify Craig's reasons for holding the first premise of his argument. Think about whether you think they are any good.)

• Had POP QUIZ #2. Announced that all pop quizzes are worth 10 points, and will always have four questions worth 2 points each. You will get 2 free points just for showing up on time. If you are late for the quiz, you get only 1 free point (plus you will probably miss some questions).
• If you miss a quiz (and don't have an excused absence), you get no free points and get a 0 out or 10 on the quiz.

• DCT stated
• Motivations for DCT:
  (1) Thought to Be the Best Way to Secure Universalism and Objectivism in Ethics
  (2) Thought to Provide a Source for Morality
  (3) Thought to Have a Ready-Made Answer to "Why Be Moral?"
  (4) Thought to Make More Room for God's Omnipotence and Sovereignty
• Can An Atheist Be a Divine Command Theorist?

• Essay Exam 1 will take place next week, probably on Wednesday.
• New Laptop Use Policy: you can use a laptop to take notes, but only for this purpose. No surfing the web, no email, and no instant messaging during class.

• Two Inconclusive Arguments Against DCT: (i) an argument from the difficulty of knowing God's commands, and (ii) an argument from the alleged immorality of God's alleged commands.
• The Euthyphro Problem
• Socrates' Question
• Horn 1 vs. Horn 2
• Three Implausible Consequences of Horn 1:
  (a) God's commands arbitrary
  (b) All of morality contingent
  (c) God's goodness cheap

• Horn 2's Incompatibility with DCT
• The Euthyphro Problem in the form of a valid line-by-line argument
• Does Horn 2 Make God Less Powerful or in Any Other Way Less Great?; Is Horn 2 Any Kind of Threat to Theism?
• Horn 2 and Accounts of Omnipotence (in particular, Aquinas')
• DCT and the Story of the Contest for Omnipotence
• DCT and the Problem of Evil
• Other Examples of God's "Subjugation"

• Had POP QUIZ #3
• Essay Exam 1 will take place on Wednesday, Feb. 13. Bring bluebook. Bring blue or black ink pen.
• Monday is a Review Session. Come ready with questions.

• Review for Essay Exam 1

• Essay Exam 1

• Returned Essay Exam 1
• Went over exam
• Started looking at Augustine on the Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge

• READ, Augustine, excerpt from On the Free Choice of the Will, pp. 247-249.

• HOMEWORK: Answer the following questions (I am going to collect this on Monday):
• How does Augustine formulate the Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (in the mouth of Evodius)? Write your answers in the form of an argument, starting from a premise about God's knowing what we will do to a conclusion to the effect that we are not free;
• (ii) What is Augustine's solution? Identify which part of your argument from above he would reject, and why.
• (Extra credit: explain why this is not a great way to formulate the DFF.)

• First Interpretation of Augustine’s Formulation of the DFF
• First Interpretation of Augustine’s Formulation of the DFF -- symbolically
• How does Augustine respond?
• Augustine's Compatibilist Theory of Freedom
• The "Ability to Do Otherwise" Theory of Freedom
• How do we decide between these two theories of freedom?

READ:

• van Inwagen, passage on possible worlds, from his Metaphysics, second edition (Westview Press, 2002), pp. 97-98.
• Plantinga, "On Ockham's Way Out," only section I for now, i.e., up to p. 243. (Print the Plantinga reading out; we will be spending a lot of time with it.)

• Tomorrow night is Philosophy and Film night. Come and see Marcello Mastroianni’s production of Albert Camus’ “The Stranger,” tomorrow, Tuesday, 2/19, at 6:30 pm, in HUMN 250. Devon Belcher will present a discussion.

• The Notion of a Possible World
• The Possible Worlds Analysis of Modality
• A Case that Suggests that the "Ability to Do Otherwise" Theory of Freedom is better than Augustine's Compatibilist Theory of Freedom
• Moral Responsibility as a Test of Freedom
• Why P2 of the First Interpretation of Augustine’s Formulation of the DFF is Clearly False
• Why P2* of the Second Interpretation of Augustine’s Formulation of the DFF is Clearly True

• NO CLASS FRIDAY!

C L A S S   C A N C E L E D

• The Invalidity of the Second Interpretation of Augustine’s Formulation of the DFF
• Counter-models
• A Correct Way to Formulate the DFF
• Knowledge Entails Truth (KET)
• Divine Foreknowledge of Action (DFA)
• The Fixity of the Past (FP)

• Plantinga, "On Ockham's Way Out," section II.

• Handed out Handout 1 - The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge

• The Transfer of Powerlessness (TP)
• Freedom Requires the Power to Do Otherwise (FRP)
• The Argument (that is the DFF)
• The Boethian Response: God is Eternal (= "outside of time")
• A Rejoinder to Boethius: a Variant of the Argument Based on the Fixity of the Eternal
• Why This Variant Argument is Weaker than the Original Argument

• Plantinga, "On Ockham's Way Out," section IV.

• The Ockhamist Response to the DFF
• A Slogan for the Ockhamist Response
• Which Premise Ockham Denies
• How to Make that Denial Plausible
• Hard Facts about the Past vs. Soft Facts about the Past; rough definitions of each
• One of Ockham's Key Insights: Soft Facts about the Past Can Be Within Our Power
• Quitting Smoking and False Promise examples
• How this Undermines the Principles of the Fixity of the Past
• A Rejoinder to Ockham:
  New Principle: The Fixity of the Hard Past
  New Premise: Facts about God's Past Foreknowledge are Hard Facts about the Past
• Ockham's Reply to the Rejoinder: Facts about God's Past Foreknowledge Can In Fact Be Soft Facts about the Past
• The Justified True Belief theory of Knowledge
• How This Shows that Facts about God's Past Foreknowledge Can Be Soft Facts about the Past

• Plantinga, "On Ockham's Way Out," section V.

• Had POP QUIZ #5

• How Pike Would Respond to Ockham's Claim that God's knowing in 1000 AD that I would clap my hands at noon tomorrow Is a Soft Fact about the Past: the Dilemma of Freedom and Forebelief
• What New Claims the Dilemma of Freedom and Forebelief Requires: (1) the Claim that God is Infallible; (2) the Principle that Infallible Belief Entails Truth; (3) the Principle that God Believes All Future Truths; and (4) the Claim that God's believing in 1000 AD that I would clap my hands at noon tomorrow Is a Hard Fact about the Past.
• Why the Dilemma of Freedom and Forebelief Is A Stronger Argument Than the Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge
• How Plantinga Responds to Pike's Dilemma of Freedom and Forebelief: God's believing in 1000 AD that I would clap my hands at noon tomorrow Is In Fact a Soft Fact about the Past (and So One We Have Power Over)
• One of Plantinga's Two Arguments for This Claim:
  P1. The fact that it was true in 1000 AD that I would clap my hands at noon tomorrow is a soft fact about the past.
  P2. The fact that it was true in 1000 AD that I would clap my hands at noon tomorrow is logically equivalent to the fact that God believed in 1000 AD that I would clap my hands at noon tomorrow.
  P3. Any fact logically equivalent to a soft fact is itself a soft fact.
  ----------------
  C. Therefore, the fact that God believed in 1000 AD that I would clap my hands at noon tomorrow is a soft fact about the past.
• A Possibly Startling Implication of Plantinga's Ockhamist Position: We All Have the Power to Change God's Past Beliefs

• Re-Read Sections I-IV of Plantinga's Paper

• An Audio Recording of Professor Wes Morriston's Recent THINK! Lecture, "Why No One Needs to Fear Going to Hell," Can Be Found Here.
• Professor Morriston's slides can be found here.
• Click here for more information about our THINK! lecture series.
  

• Talk by Chad Vance on his solution to the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge

• Pascal's Wager, pp. 364-366.

• There will be a talk tomorrow (Thursday, March 6) by Brad Monton (CU Philosophy) called "What is Intelligent Design, and Why Might an Atheist Believe in It?," at 9:00 a.m. in the Center for British and Irish Studies (5th floor of Norlin Library)
• This is part of the Faith, Reason, and Doubt Colloquium Sponsored by our Center for Humanities and the Arts

• Had Pop Quiz and then no lecture; Heathwood was sick.

• Hájek, "Pascal's Wager," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, just Sections 1 and 2 for Monday.

• Faith
• Two Main Conceptions of Faith: Faith as Belief that Goes Beyond the Evidence; Faith as Belief Despite a Lack of Absolute Certainty
• Evidentialism
• Epistemic Reasons to Believe Something vs. Prudential Reasons to Believe Something

• Hájek, "Pascal's Wager," through section 4.

• Handed out Handout 2 - Pascal's Wager

• Pascal's General Strategy
• Decision Theory
• Decision Matrices
• The Concept of Dominance
• The Principle of Dominance
• The Argument from Dominance
• An Objection from Doxastic Voluntarism
• Pascal's Reply
• A Proof that 2=1.

• Finish Hájek, "Pascal's Wager,".

• Midterm in one week.
• Draft of Study Guide now up.

• Another Objection to the Argument from Dominance: the Appeals of a Libertine Life
• The Concept of Expected Value
• The Principle of Expected Value
• The Argument from Expected Value
• Why Pascal Might Think P(G)=.5.
• An Objection to the Argument from Expected Value: Why It Might Be That P(G)<.5.
• The Concept of Dominating Expected Value
• The Principle of Dominating Expected Value
• The Argument from Dominating Expected Value
• Why P(G)>0.
• A Final Objection to Pascal: The Many-Gods Objection.

• Final Version of Study Guide Now Up

• Review Day

• Midterm

• Returned Midterm
• Went Over Midterm

On St. Anselm's Ontological Argument, READ

• the editors' introduction
• St. Anselm's presentation
• Gaunilo's criticism
• Anselm's Rejoinder

This is all on pp. 2-5.

Look at the "Reading Questions" on the Readings page -- they will help you as you read the reading, and they will also help you with a pop quiz, if there is one.

• We're starting a new thing. I'm going to provide you in advance with "reading questions" for most or all of our readings from now on. Keep them in mind as you are doing the reading, and write down in your reading notes the answers to them. This will help you immensely on the quizzes.
• The Reading Questions can be found on the Readings page, under the relevant reading.

• Ontological Arguments
• A priori arguments
• General difference between the ontological argument and other a priori arguments.
• Anselm's Definition of God
• A Very Simple Ontological Argument
• Parody Arguments
• Definitions, "existential import," and the problem with the Very Simple Ontological Argument
• Existence in Reality vs. Existence in the Understanding
• Examples of each

• No lecture -- Heathwood out sick -- again.
• Chad gave a pop quiz.

• Had Pop Quiz, then class was dismissed.

• The Problem of Negative Existentials
• Anselm's Solution to the Problem of Negative Existentials
• Anselm's Ontological Argument
• Reductio Ad Absurdum Arguments
• Anselm's Thesis About Greatness
• What This Thesis is Not
• Some Illustrations of It

• Kant's Critique of the Ontological Argument, pp. 6-9, (from his Critique of Pure Reason)

• Guanilo's Parody Argument: the Lost Isle Argument
• Plantinga's Reply: the great-making features of islands and properties with intrinsic maxima
• Kant's reply: existence is not a real property
• Property Equivalence
• What It Is for a Property to be Real
• How this Relates to Anselm's Argument

• Parfit, "Why Anything? Why This?" Sec. 1-3 (the rest is encouraged, but optional)
• Collins, "A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God," Sec. I-II, pp. 74-78.

• Review of Kant's Response to Anselm's Ontological Argument
• Traditional Theism vs. Minimal Theism
• Cosmological Arguments
• Aquinas' First Cause Argument
• Leibniz' Cosmological Argument
• Chad's Cosmological Argument

• Collins, "A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God," Sec. III-V, pp. 78-84. (Appendix optional.)

• The Watchmaker Argument
• The Principle of Confirmation Theory
• Paley's Human Eye Argument
• The Problem with the Human Eye Argument: Darwin's Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection

• The Fine-Tuning Argument
• Examples of Fine-Tuning
• The Fine-Tuning Argument and Minimal Theism
• Objections and Replies:
• Objection: the Chance Hypothesis
• Reply: Parfit's pi Example; Parfit's Lottery Example; Collins' Rocks on the Beach Example
• Objection: The Anthropic Principle
• Reply: the Firing Squad, the Plane Crash
• Objection: Other Forms of Life
• Reply: the Fly on the Wall

• Hick, "Immortality and Resurrection," first two sections, pp. 339-342. (So you can skip the section, "Does Parapsychology Help?")
• Olen, "Personal Identity and Life After Death," first main section, pp. 345-352.

• Final Objection to the Fine-Tuning Argument: the Multiple Universes Hypothesis
• Analogy with the Fine-Tuning of the Earth and the "Multiple Planets Hypothesis"
• Two Versions of the Multiple Universes Hypothesis
• Possible Problems for the Multiple Universes Hypothesis: the dice-rolling, coin-flipping, and bird-sh**ing analogies.

• Olen, "Personal Identity and Life After Death," first main section, pp. 353-355.

• Our Question: What would we have to be like for life after death to be possible, and are there any reasons to think that we are, or are not, that way?
• The Soul Theory, of Substance Dualism
• What the Soul Theory Implies About the Possibility of Life After Death
• Problems for the Soul Theory
• The Bodily Theory, or Animalism
• What the Bodily Theory Implies About the Possibility of Life After Death
• Problems for the Bodily Theory
• The Psychological Theory
• The Teletransporter

• Wielenberg, "God and the Meaning of Life," from his Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (Cambridge, 2005).

• The Psychological Theory
• Psychological Continuity
• What the Psychological Theory Implies About the Possibility of Life After Death
• Problem for the Psychological Theory: the Duplication Problem
• The Brain Theory
• The Brain Theory and Body Transplants
• What the Brain Theory Implies About the Possibility of Life After Death

• Death, God, and Meaning

• Review for Essay Exam 2

• Essay Exam 2 - OR -Term Paper Due

• Do FCQ's, return exams

• Review for Final