Theism

The package of attributes the word normally carries: maximal power, maximal knowledge, perfect goodness, and responsibility for everything else

8 min

Three positions distinguished by what each asserts rather than by how confident anyone feels

9 min

What it means for everything else to depend on God, both at the first moment and at every moment after it

9 min

Whether faith supplements argument, replaces it, or is answerable to it, and what each answer commits you to

10 min

Why almost nobody now offers a proof, and what it means to argue that a hypothesis is instead made more likely by the evidence

10 min

Three arguments from the existence of the universe: Kalam from a temporal beginning, Leibniz from contingency, Aquinas from an ordered causal series

18 min

From biological order to the narrow constants of physics, and the multiverse and observer-selection replies

16 min

Anselm's inference from a concept, Descartes' perfection version, Kant's objection that existence adds nothing, and Plantinga's modal reformulation

17 min

The claim that binding obligations need a commanding will, met by the Euthyphro dilemma and by secular accounts of moral facts

15 min

Whether the reports of people who take themselves to have encountered God are evidence, and what the diversity of those reports does to the argument

17 min

Pascal's wager, James's will to believe, and the question whether the consequences of holding a belief can be reasons for holding it

16 min

The logical and evidential versions of the argument from suffering, and what each of them requires a response to accomplish

18 min

The free will defence, the soul-making theodicy, the privation view, and skeptical theism, assessed against what each version of the problem requires

19 min

Whether the properties classical theism ascribes to God can all be held at once, and what the standard puzzles about omnipotence, immutability, and divine freedom actually establish

16 min

Whether testimony could ever make it reasonable to believe a law of nature was broken, and what such an event would show even if it were established

15 min

Two incompatible pictures of survival, the identity problem that both face, and whether eternal punishment can be reconciled with perfect goodness

18 min

Projection theories, the cognitive science of religion, and what actually follows for the truth of a belief from an account of why people hold it

18 min

Recasting the arguments as claims about how much likelier the evidence is on theism, which moves the whole dispute onto the prior and onto what fixes it

26 min

A supertask that yields a contradiction from apparently consistent parts, offered as a reason to deny that anything can have infinitely many causal antecedents

26 min

The argument turns entirely on the possibility premise, and parallel arguments for a maximally great island or a necessary nonexistence exploit that

22 min

The classical doctrine that God has no parts, no temporal location, and no states caused from outside, and the collapse and personhood objections it faces

22 min

Whether God is a being among beings with a very good set of properties, or is not that kind of thing at all, and why classical theists treat the first as a category mistake rather than a rival view

26 min

If God depends on nothing, numbers and properties cannot exist independently, and every way of making them depend on God threatens to presuppose them

26 min

If a thing once made would simply keep going on its own, conservation has nothing left to do, and the argument from an ordered causal series loses its terminus

24 min

If a past belief about your next act is already fixed, the act looks unavoidable, and Molinism, Ockhamism, and open theism each break the chain at a different link

24 min

Whether talk about God says anything at all: denial of positive description, analogical predication, and the verificationist charge of meaninglessness

22 min

Plantinga's case that belief in God can be rational without argument if it comes from a faculty working as designed, and the objection that any belief could claim this

21 min

Treating theism and naturalism as rival explanations of the same data, and the disputes over simplicity, scope, and gap-filling that follow

23 min

Not that suffering is pointless, but that its distribution tracks biological usefulness far more closely than theism would lead anyone to expect

24 min

Plantinga's claim that unguided evolution gives you no reason to trust your own faculties, which makes naturalism self-defeating rather than merely false

26 min

Rowe's inference from apparently pointless suffering, the CORNEA restriction on such inferences, and how theodicies enter as competing likelihoods

24 min

Granting that we cannot judge which goods God might be securing appears to also undercut ordinary moral reasoning and the evidence of our senses about the world

26 min

Evils that appear to ruin the life they fall on cannot be handled by a balance of goods, and there is a case that trying to justify them at all is the deeper mistake

24 min

Schellenberg's argument that a perfectly loving God would leave no one open to relationship yet unable to believe

20 min

If for every world God could create there is a better one, then whatever God creates, a better being could have done more

24 min

Set aside whether God exists and ask whether it would be better if God did, which some atheists answer yes and some theists answer no

22 min

Whether one tradition can be uniquely right, whether all are responses to a single reality, and what disagreement among informed believers does to either claim

22 min

Pantheism, panentheism, polytheism, deism, and traditions with no creator at all, and how the standard arguments fare when the target changes

20 min