Alexander R. Pruss

We introduce three arguments for the thesis that time cannot exist prior to an original creation event. In the first argument, we seek to show that if time doesn’t depend upon creation, then time is infinite in the backwards direction, which is incompatible with arguments for a finite past. In the second and third arguments, we allow for the possibility of backwards-infinite time but argue that God could not have a sufficiently good reason to refrain from creating for infinitely many moments—either in a world void of created things or in the actual world prior to creation. Our end goal is to help clarify connections between time and divine action.

Some, notably Peter van Inwagen, in order to avoid problems with free will and omniscience, replace the condition that an omniscient being knows all true propositions with a version of the apparently weaker condition that an omniscient being knows all knowable true propositions. I shall show that the apparently weaker condition, when conjoined with uncontroversial claims and the logical closure of an omniscient being's knowledge, still yields the claim that an omniscient being knows all true propositions.

The free-will defence (FWD) holds that the value of significant free will is so great that God is justified in creating significantly free creatures even if there is a risk or certainty that these creatures will sin. A difficulty for the FWD, developed carefully by Quentin Smith, is that God is unable to do evil, and yet surely lacks no genuinely valuable kind of freedom. Smith argues that the kind of freedom that God has can be had by creatures, without a risk of creatures doing evil. I shall show that Smith's argument fails – the case of God is disanalogous to the case of creatures precisely because creatures are creatures

          Despite the fact that the strength of argument is clearly on the pro-life side—nobody except a handful of academics would question the grave wrongness of abortion were pregnancy never inconvenient—somehow ordinary intelligent people, like our students, often remain unconvinced. There are many reasons for this, of course. For instance, a number of students have had their children aborted while many know others who have had abortions, and one does not want to condemn oneself or oneÂ’s friends. I am a philosopher, however, and so I will be interested in intellectual reasons, even though these subjective psychological ones are almost surely more important. Specifically, I will be interested in the fact that the ordinary person subscribes to a number of erroneous big-picture ethical beliefs, each of which, to a different degree, does something to block access to the pro-life arguments. I will not talk about all such erroneous beliefs and I would be grateful in the discussion for more examples.           I will talk about eight errors I have identified, largely through teaching. For each one, I will identify the error, show how it impacts the pro-life message and explain why it is tempting to most of us —there is, after all, something right about five of the errors. For each of these errors is one that we might ourselves be tempted by on occasion. I will then suggest some ways of refuting the error. In some cases, the mere identification of the error should do the trick, as these erroneous beliefs are often not explicitly identified by our interlocutors. My suggested refutations will not always be phrased in the way in which I would phrase them for didactic effectiveness: in this talk, I am mainly trying to convey ideas.

SpinozaÂ’s God is a being with infinite attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence. Does this mean that God has infinitely many attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence, or does God simply have attributes, each of which is infinite and expresses infinite essence? SpinozaÂ’s argumentation in Letter 9 and the Scholium to Prop. I.10 clearly indicates that it is not just each individual attribute that is infinite, but there are in some sense infinitely many of them. This would seem to settle the issue, except that Spinoza never talks of more than two attributes, Extension..

Consider the regularity thesis that each possible event has non-zero probability. Hájek challenges this in two ways: there can be nonmeasurable events that have no probability at all and on a large enough sample space, some probabilities will have to be zero. But arguments for the existence of nonmeasurable events depend on the axiom of choice. We shall show that the existence of anything like regular probabilities is by itself enough to imply a weak version of AC sufficient to prove the Banach–Tarski Paradox on the decomposition of a ball into two equally sized balls, and hence to show the existence of nonmeasurable events. This provides a powerful argument against unrestricted orthodox Bayesianism that works even without AC. A corollary of our formal result is that if every partial order extends to a total preorder while maintaining strict comparisons, then the Banach–Tarski Paradox holds. This yields an argument that incommensurability cannot be avoided in ambitious versions of decision theory

Consider the reasonable axioms of subjunctive conditionals if p → q1 and p → q2 at some world, then p → at that world, and if p1 → q and p2 → q at some world, then → q at that world, where p → q is the subjunctive conditional. I show that a Lewis-style semantics for subjunctive conditionals satisfies these axioms if and only if one makes a certain technical assumption about the closeness relation, an assumption that is probably false. I will then show how Lewisian semantics can be modified so as to assure and even when the technical assumption fails, and in fact in one sense the semantics actually becomes simpler then

Consider the following three-step dialectics. (1) Even if God (consistently) commanded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong. Therefore Divine Command Metaethics (DCM) is false. (2) No: for it is impossible for God to command torture of the innocent. (3) Even if it is impossible, there is a non-trivially true per impossibile counterfactual that even if God (consistently) com­manded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong, and this counterfac­tual is incompatible with DCM. I shall argue that the last step of this dialectics is flawed because it would rule out every substantive metaethical theory.