Download or read book Maximal God written by Yujin Nagasawa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yujin Nagasawa presents a new, stronger version of perfect being theism, the conception of God as the greatest possible being. Although perfect being theism is the most common form of monotheism in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition its truth has been disputed by philosophers and theologians for centuries. Nagasawa proposes a new, game-changing defence of perfect being theism by developing what he calls the 'maximal concept of God'. Perfect being theists typically maintain that God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being; according to Nagasawa, God should be understood rather as a being that has the maximal consistent set of knowledge, power, and benevolence. Nagasawa argues that once we accept the maximal concept we can establish perfect being theism on two grounds. First, we can refute nearly all existing arguments against perfect being theism simultaneously. Second, we can construct a novel, strengthened version of the modal ontological argument for perfect being theism. Nagasawa concludes that the maximal concept grants us a unified defence of perfect being theism that is highly effective and economical.
Download or read book Maximal God written by Yujin Nagasawa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yujin Nagasawa presents a new, stronger version of perfect being theism, the conception of God as the greatest possible being. Although perfect being theism is the most common form of monotheism in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition its truth has been disputed by philosophers and theologians for centuries. Nagasawa proposes a new, game-changing defence of perfect being theism by developing what he calls the 'maximal concept of God'. Perfect being theists typically maintain that God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being; according to Nagasawa, God should be understood rather as a being that has the maximal consistent set of knowledge, power, and benevolence. Nagasawa argues that once we accept the maximal concept we can establish perfect being theism on two grounds. First, we can refute nearly all existing arguments against perfect being theism simultaneously. Second, we can construct a novel, strengthened version of the modal ontological argument for perfect being theism. Nagasawa concludes that the maximal concept grants us a unified defence of perfect being theism that is highly effective and economical.
Download or read book Maximal God written by Yujin Nagasawa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yujin Nagasawa presents a new, stronger version of perfect being theism, the conception of God as the greatest possible being. Although perfect being theism is the most common form of monotheism in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition its truth has been disputed by philosophers and theologians for centuries. Nagasawa proposes a new, game-changing defence of perfect being theism by developing what he calls the 'maximal concept of God'. Perfect being theists typically maintain that God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being; according to Nagasawa, God should be understood rather as a being that has the maximal consistent set of knowledge, power, and benevolence. Nagasawa argues that once we accept the maximal concept we can establish perfect being theism on two grounds. First, we can refute nearly all existing arguments against perfect being theism simultaneously. Second, we can construct a novel, strengthened version of the modal ontological argument for perfect being theism. Nagasawa concludes that the maximal concept grants us a unified defence of perfect being theism that is highly effective and economical.
Download or read book The Existence of God written by Yujin Nagasawa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does God exist? What are the various arguments that seek to prove the existence of God? Can atheists refute these arguments? The Existence of God: A Philosophical Introduction assesses classical and contemporary arguments concerning the existence of God: the ontological argument, introducing the nature of existence, possible worlds, parody objections, and the evolutionary origin of the concept of God the cosmological argument, discussing metaphysical paradoxes of infinity, scientific models of the universe, and philosophers’ discussions about ultimate reality and the meaning of life the design argument, addressing Aquinas’s Fifth Way, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the concept of irreducible complexity, and the current controversy over intelligent design and school education. Bringing the subject fully up to date, Yujin Nagasawa explains these arguments in relation to recent research in cognitive science, the mathematics of infinity, big bang cosmology, and debates about ethics and morality in light of contemporary political and social events. The book also includes fascinating insights into the passions, beliefs and struggles of the philosophers and scientists who have tackled the challenge of proving the existence of God, including Thomas Aquinas, and Kurt Gödel - who at the end of his career as a famous mathematician worked on a secret project to prove the existence of God. The Existence of God: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal gateway to the philosophy of religion and an excellent starting point for anyone interested in arguments about the existence of God.
Download or read book Maximum Impact written by Wayne A. Mack and published by P & R Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If so, this helpful book by Wayne Mack is especially for you. Maximum Impact will tell you exactly how to make an impact for Christ in a way that is simple, yet profound. Drawn from Dr. Mack's lifetime of loving, compassionate ministry, this book will help you increase your effectiveness in every aspect of life. With a special emphasis on 1 Corinthians 13, Maximum Impact will help you approach this "love chapter" with a newfound appreciation. Very practical and well illustrated, it includes application, study, and discussion questions so that you can put into practice what you have learned ... and learn you will! Your friends, family, and colleagues will notice the change in you as you become more filled with love and more effective in your ministry every day. So read and learn how to live and love for God's glory. Spiritual fruit has never been sweeter. Book jacket.
Download or read book Can God Be Free written by William L. Rowe and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2004-04-22 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the three major religions of the West, God is understood to be a being whose goodness, knowledge, and power is such that it is impossible for any being, including God himself, to have a greater degree of goodness, knowledge, and power. This book focuses on God's freedom and praiseworthiness in relation to his perfect goodness. Given his necessary perfections, if there is a best world for God to create he would have no choice other than to create it. For, as Leibniz tells us, 'to do less good than one could is to be lacking in wisdom or in goodness.' But if God could not do otherwise than create the best world, he created the world of necessity, not freely. And, if that is so, it may be argued that we have no reason to be thankful to God for creating us, since, as parts of the best possible world, God was simply unable to do anything other than create us - he created us of necessity, not freely. Moreover, we are confronted with the difficulty of having to believe that this world, with its Holocaust, and innumerable other evils, is the best that an infinitely powerful, infinitely good being could do in creating a world. Neither of these conclusions, taken by itself, seems at all plausible. Yet each conclusion appears to follow from the conception of God now dominant in the great religions of the West. William Rowe presents a detailed study of this important problem, both historically in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, Samuel Clarke, Thomas Aquinas, and Jonathan Edwards, as well as in the contemporary philosophical literature devoted to the issue. Rowe argues that this problem is more serious than is commonly thought and may require some significant revision in contemporary thinking about the nature of God.
Download or read book Perfect Being Theology written by Katherin A Rogers and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-07 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That being than which a greater cannot be conceived.' This was the way in which the living God of biblical tradition was described by the great Medieval philosophers such as Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas.Contemporary philosophers find much to question, criticise and reject in the traditional analysis of that description. Some hold that the attributes traditionally ascribed to God - simplicity, necessity, immutability, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, creativity and goodness - are inherently incoherent individually, or mutually inconsistent. Others argue that the divinity described by philosophers cannot be the same as the providential God of revelation.In Perfect Being Theology Katherin A. Rogers defends the traditional approach, considering contemporary criticisms but concluding that the most adequate account of the nature of God should build upon the foundation laid by the Medieval philosophers.Written in a lively and accessible style and offering an important historical perspective, this book covers key areas of contention and many of the major ideas and thinkers from all sides of the debate are included.
Download or read book God Modality and Morality written by William E. Mann and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one new and sixteen previously published essays, William E. Mann presents a modern interpretation of a traditional theory in philosophical theology, according to which God is a metaphysically simple, necessarily existing, personal being. Mann addresses such issues as God's independence and sovereignty, God's relationship to creation, and humans' relationship to God.
Download or read book God Mind and Logical Space written by I. Aranyosi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book offers a novel approach to the idea of divinity in guise of a philosophical doctrine called 'Logical Pantheism', according to which the only way to establish the existence of God undeniably is by equating God with Logical Space.
Download or read book Five Proofs of the Existence of God written by Edward Feser and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2017-08-25 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God’s existence: the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist. It also offers a thorough treatment of each of the key divine attributes—unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth—showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs. This work provides as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past— thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others— that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism that gives aid and comfort to atheism.
Download or read book Immortality and the Existence of God written by David Apolloni and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immortality and the Existence of God: Reformulating the Arguments of Plato, Anselm, and Gödel defends a modern version of Plato’s argument for the immortality of the soul. The self is essentially conscious and hence essentially living. It is therefore “deathless” and cannot receive death. But then, it also cannot become something else, nor can it be destroyed, since that would be receiving death also. So, the self or immortal, and immaterial. The book then considers materialist theories of the mind and rejects them. It formulates an argument from introspection which the author believes establishes substance dualism. The argument for immortality and the Ontological Argument for the existence of God are parallel in that attempt to establish the existence of necessary beings. Since immortality makes sense within a theistic context, the second half of the book defends a version of Gödel’s Ontological Argument for God’s existence, utilizing experience of the moral good and that mutual entailment of the attributes of God to argue that these attributes, including necessary existence, are logically coherent. In the final chapter, the author uses the central arguments in the book to support accounts of the afterlife from those who have had near-death experiences.
Download or read book Alternative Concepts of God written by Andrei A. Buckareff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of God according to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism minimally includes the following theses: (i) There is one God; (ii) God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent; (iii) God is the creator ex nihilo of the universe and the sustainer of all that exists; and (iv) God is an immaterial substance that is ontologically distinct from the universe. Proponents of alternative concepts of God, such as pantheism, panentheism, religious anti-realism, developmental theism, and religious naturalism, exclude at least one of these claims. A number of prominent philosophers and scientists have expressed sympathy with alternative concepts of the divine. However, voices raised in defense of these concepts tend not to be taken seriously in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. This volume aims to shed light on alternative concepts of God and to thoroughly consider their merits and demerits. The contributors are leading analytic philosophers of religion, including critics of these views as well as sympathizers. This is the first contemporary edited collection featuring the work of analytic philosophers of religion covering such a wide range of alternative concepts of God.
Download or read book Defeating the Evil God Challenge written by Jack Symes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evil-god challenge is one of the most popular topics in contemporary philosophy of religion. In this landmark text, Jack Symes offers the most detailed examination of the challenge to date. Exploring the nature of god through the leading schools of philosophical theology, Symes argues that it is significantly more reasonable to attribute goodness to god than evil. Drawing from a breadth of ground-breaking material – in metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and epistemology – Symes claims to defeat the evil-god challenge on behalf of traditional theism. Is it any more reasonable to believe in a good god than an evil god? Not according to proponents of the evil-god challenge. After all, the world contains a significant amount of good and evil for which either god could be held responsible. However, if belief in both gods is equally as reasonable, then religious believers are unjustified in favouring one hypothesis over the other. Therefore, in order to defend their faith, theists must respond to the evil-god challenge: the question of what justifies belief in good god over evil god.
Download or read book Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities written by Jeanine Diller and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The envisioned volume is a collection of recent essays about the philosophical exploration, critique and comparison of (a) the major philosophical models of God, gods and other ultimate realities implicit in the world’s philosophical schools and religions, and of (b) the ideas of such models and doing such modeling per se. The aim is to identify exactly what a model of ultimate reality is; create a comprehensive and accessible collection of extant models; and determine how best, philosophically, to model ultimate reality, if possible and desirable.
Download or read book The Improbability of God written by Michael Martin and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the authors bring together for the first time an extensive collection of papers by many distinguished scholars who present a variety of arguments that the existence of God is improbable.
Download or read book Calculating God written by Robert J. Sawyer and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-03-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Calculating God is the new near-future SF thriller from the popular and award-winning Robert J. Sawyer. An alien shuttle craft lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. A six-legged, two-armed alien emerges, who says, in perfect English, "Take me to a paleontologist." It seems that Earth, and the alien's home planet, and the home planet of another alien species traveling on the alien mother ship, all experienced the same five cataclysmic events at about the same time (one example of these "cataclysmic events" would be the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs). Both alien races believe this proves the existence of God: i.e. he's obviously been playing with the evolution of life on each of these planets. From this provocative launch point, Sawyer tells a fast-paced, and morally and intellectually challenging, SF story that just grows larger and larger in scope. The evidence of God's universal existence is not universally well received on Earth, nor even immediately believed. And it reveals nothing of God's nature. In fact. it poses more questions than it answers. When a supernova explodes out in the galaxy but close enough to wipe out life on all three home-worlds, the big question is, Will God intervene or is this the sixth cataclysm:? Calculating God is SF on the grand scale. Calculating God is a 2001 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Logic and Theism written by Jordan Howard Sobel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-10 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a wide-ranging 2004 book about arguments for and against beliefs in God. This book will be a valuable resource for philosophers of religion and theologians and will interest logicians and mathematicians as well.