In homage to Descartes and Spinoza: A cosmo‐ontological case for God

Philosophical Forum 52 (1):41-64 (2021)
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Abstract

Integrating cosmological and ontological lines of reasoning, I argue that there is a self-necessary being that (a) serves as the sufficient condition for everything, that (b) has the most perfect collection of whatever attributes of perfection there might be, and that (c) is an independent, eternal, unique, simple, indivisible, immutable, all-actual, all-free, all-present, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, personal creator of every expression of itself that everything is. My cosmo-ontological case for such a being, an everything-maker with the core features ascribed to the God of classical theism, addresses the standard worries plaguing these lines of reasoning: (1) the richness required of such a being dissolves it into many beings; (2) the metaphysical possibility of such a being is assumed on insufficient grounds; (3) the features we ascribe to such a being are mere human-all-too-human projections.

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M. A. Istvan Jr.
Austin Community College

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References found in this work

Summa Contra Gentiles.Thomas Aquinas - 1975 - University of Notre Dame Press.
Ontological Arguments.Graham Oppy - 2019 - The Philosophers' Magazine 86:66-73.
Against mereological nihilism.Jonathan Tallant - 2014 - Synthese 191 (7):1511-1527.

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