Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 58-77.

As Plato suggested, the cosmos may exist because this is ethically necessary. It then might well consist of infinitely many minds, each itself infinite through eternally knowing all that was worth knowing. Our universe would exist inside one of them, as a pattern in its thought. But intrinsic value could be a fiction, making Plato’s suggestion a non-starter. Again, indeterministic free will might have immense value. Those infinite minds could then differ from one another in constantly changing ways through the (...) free decisions of beings who lived, moved and had their being inside them. (shrink)

God seemingly had a duty to create minds each of infinite worth through possessing God-like knowledge. People might object that God’s own infinite worth was all that was needed, or that no mind that God created could have truly infinite worth; however, such objections fail. Yet this does not generate an unsolvable Problem of Evil. We could exist inside an infinite mind that was one among endlessly many, perhaps all created by Platonic Necessity. “God” might be our name for this (...) Necessity, or for the infinite mind inside which we existed, or for an infinite ocean of infinite minds. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to Nikolay Lossky who was one of the leading Russian philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century. We demonstrate the interrelationship between three aspects of Lossky’s philosophy: realism in the theory of knowledge, hierarchical personalism, and supra-naturalistic concept of evolution. We pay attention to the contemporary relevance of Lossky, and we discuss and critique his ideas in light of those of other philosophers. Lossky acknowledges that the subject interacts with being itself and that knowledge (...) is not a shadow or copy of being. His ontology is based on intuitivism and epistemological optimism. Its main categories are God, as the super-systematic principle, and monads. In Lossky’s metaphysics, the idea of abstract ideal principles of being is quite harmoniously combined with personalism. Lossky’s ontology has strong ethical underpinnings. He considers that values are rooted in being and that the evolution of the world is directed by God towards the good. Lossky elaborates a supra-naturalistic concept of evolution. He extrapolates principles of teleological determination, which are fundamental to human existence, on the underlying levels of the world as a whole. Many trends of modern thought are in tune with Lossky’s philosophy, including a return to metaphysics, panpsychism, Platonism, and the desire to unite the religious worldview with new scientific discoveries. (shrink)

I argue that the Carroll-Chen cosmogonic model does not provide a plausible scientific explanation of our universe's initial low-entropy state.