Children acquire natural languages. How they are capable of doing so is mysterious. A child appears to go from learning a few words and sentences to knowing how to construct infinite sentences in her learned language. Such a mystery provoked a long-lasting debate between empiricists and nativists. Empiricists about language acquisition hold that there is no innate knowledge ‘in the mind’ of a language learner without which the learner could not acquire a natural language. Nativists, by contrast, hold that there must be some innate feature of human minds (beyond the mere dispositional power to learn) that makes language acquisition possible for human beings In order to explain the phenomena…
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Should Christians Partake in Formal Debates About God?
Martin Lloyd-Jones was against formal debates with unbelievers. Why? His first reason is that no one comes to faith through a debate. Thus, debates are not useful. However, though the debate opponent rarely comes to faith, Dr. William Lane Craig (who debates non-believers regularly) claims people in his audiences do so. Debates are not merely showdowns between two people with opposing views, but showcases of opposing views allowing audiences to to hear both sides. Loyd-Jones then says that the topic of God is too serious a matter for public debate. I’m not clear what he means at this point. Isn’t a ‘formal’ debate as serious as one can get? What…
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Feser Interview
Here’s an interview with Ed Feser, author of Five Proofs of the Existence of God: Feser’s presentation of the ‘Aristotelian’ proof is well done.
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Notes: “Divine Necessity” by Robert Adams
Adams writes “to refute two…objections to the doctrine of divine necessity” (742). In doing so, he provides a refutation for evolutionary naturalism and an argument for the existence of God. Obj #1: The proposition, ‘God exists’, cannot be a necessary truth because only analytic truths can be necessary truths but existential propositions cannot be analytic truths. ‘God exists’ is an existential proposition. Therefore, ‘God exists’ cannot be a necessary truth. Why think analytic propositions cannot be existential propositions? An analytic proposition is a conditional the consequent of which is a correct analysis of the antecedent. For example, the proposition ‘if he is a bachelor, then he is unmarried’ (or ‘all…
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From Sentences to God
From a very young age, we can recognize the quality of sentences. We evaluate sentences according to some standard, some criteria of good, bad, better, or worse. If God created the world then it is likely that he would endow human beings with some way to recognize good and bad sentences according to some standard. One might think that this would entail that human beings know what makes sentences good or bad. But recognition of the value of an entity does not entail knowing what makes it valuable. This is true of good and bad actions as much as it is true of good or bad sentences. One might not…
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Alexander Campbell’s Argument for the Existence of God
Alexander Campbell was an influential pastor in 19th century. He came up with an interesting argument for the existence of God. I saw it nicely analyzed by Caleb Clanton. Campbell argues that human beings must have obtained the concept of God at some time in the past. But what best explains the cause of our having such a concept? There are five plausible options. First, the idea of God is innate to human minds. We never really obtained the concept; it was always within us. Second, the concept of God was acquired through direct experience of God. Third, the concept of God was arrived at by experience and reflection. Fourth,…
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Theism: Plain or Necessary?
Plain Theism is the view that ‘God exists’ is a logically contingent proposition. ‘God exists’ is neither necessarily true nor necessarily false. In contrast, necessitarian theism holds that the proposition, ‘God exists’ is necessarily true. In other words ‘it is false that God exists’ is a contradiction. I often wondered what would motivate my old prof, Keith Yandell to hold to plain theism. What does it mean to say that God does not have necessary existence or that ‘necessarily, God exists’ is necessarily false? Most theists contend that if ‘God exists’ is true, it is true necessarily. The answer, I think, lies in some of Dr. Yandell’s theistic argumentation. In…
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God-of-the-Gaps: No Such Thing
Mathematician, Pierre-Simon LaPlace was once asked by the emperor of France where God was to feature in LaPlace’s mathematical system. LaPlace replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” The idea behind the quip is that if you can find a good explanations for something without God, then you don’t need him. And if you don’t need him, then this is good reason to suppose that he’s not there. The kind of God supposed in such thought is the “God-of-the-gaps” kind of God, a God who is necessary only in so far that he explains some feature of the world – existence, the movement of the planets, the habits of…
