Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Necessary being survey

Josh Rasmussen has a very interesting survey on propositions related to the existence of a concrete necessary being.

5 comments:

Sam Harper said...

It seems to me there's a difference between ontological possibility and epistemological possibility. I don't think anything ontological follows from epistemological possibilities. For example, one of the questions was whether I thought it was possible for there to be a contingent being that is not caused. Well, ontologically speaking, it may not be possible, but since I don't know, it's possible as far as I know. It seems like this distinction could skew the results. It was fun to do, though. I posted a link on my facebook page.

Sam Harper said...

Nevermind. I can see that "possible" was defined on the page defining a necessary being.

Joona said...

Hi Alex!

I was wondering what different kind of approaches there are to argue from necessary being (that created the universe) to personhood of that being?

My atheist friend accepted the existence of such a being after he did this survey by Rasmussen and I think the next step would be to make him accept that the nec being is personal.

Oh, and he is familiar with Rasmussen's own paper “From a Necessary Being to God,” International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 66.1: 1-13 (2009). He didn't accept it.


Thanks alot!

Alexander R Pruss said...

There is some material here.

Unknown said...

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