Why the arguments for atheism are moral arguments, and why that matters

At ST Ia Q2 A3, where Aquinas offers his well-known “five ways” of proving God’s existence, he notes and replies to two objections. To paraphrase, the first is that “infinite goodness” is incompatible with the existence of “evil”; the second, that citing God is “superfluous” as an explanation for the world’s existence. It’s pretty evident [...]

For the feastday

I thought I’d observe the feast of St. Anselm today by pointing readers to a truly remarkable little essay by Brandon Watson on Anselm’s argument for God’s existence in Chapter 2 of the Proslogion. Though written three years ago, and garnering zero comment, it’s well worth discussing. I’d like to initiate discussion of it here.
To [...]

Are universes clickable?

Over at the conservative blog What’s Wrong with the World (‘W4′ for short), Lydia McGrew critiques what she calls The Fallacy of the Clickable Universe. Here’s how she starts:
When philosophers talk about the Problem of Evil (aka “the POE”), they sometimes cast the question like this: “Why did God create a universe in which Adam [...]

Essence and Energy

In a post at Pillar and Ground of the Truth, Fr. Gregory Hogg has compared the statement of St. Augustine in De Trinitate 1.1.3, that it is “difficult” to contemplate and have full knowledge of God’s substance, with the statement of Gregory the Theologian in Theological Orations 28.4 that is is “impossible” to express God [...]

God and Infinite Choices

William Rowe, in Can God be Free? (2004), gives us three propositions
A) There necessarily exists an essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially perfectly good being who has created a world.
B) If an omniscient being creates a world when there is a better world that it could have created, then it is possible that there exists a [...]