Steven Duncan

In this essay, it is my concern to explicate Austin Farrer's account of our knowledge of God's existence. In the first chapter, I introduce the reader to Austin Farrer and sketch the general outlines of his account of our apprehension of God, which for Farrer is the foundation for natural knowledge of God and hence for what he calls rational theology. Since Farrer regards rational theology as a department of metaphysics, I devote the next two chapters to a characterization of Farrer's metaphysical views. In the second chapter, my subject is Farrer's account of metaphysical inquiry and the role that mystery and analogy play in metaphysics. The third chapter is concerned with the content of Farrer's metaphysics; both the fundamental notions of metaphysics and Farrer's account of substantial relations are considered. The fruit of these labors is what Farrer calls the dialectic of theism, which is intended to produce an explicit apprehension of God; I consider the dialectic of theism in chapter four. In the fifth and final chapter, I compare Farrer's view to that of two contemporary philosophers of religion and conclude that he can meet obvious skeptical objections.

Imitative Exemplarism is the view that God's knowledge of creatures as objects of potential creation is acquired through reflection on his own essence-as-nature, by means of which He is able to see that nature as infinitely participable by creatures, each of which, and each kind of which, is known by Him by means of a Divine Idea or archetype that imitates that nature without materially resembling it. Having recently discerned that this is a view to which I am committed, I examine this view and defend it in this essay.

The two most common accounts of the category of relation are the "toothpick" account of relations and the inherent attribute view of relations. In this essay, I present and defend another traditional account of relations, according to which they are neither real things in their own right nor inherent attributes of things. Instead, they are creatures of reason grounded in objective, non-relational attributes of things. I illustrate this view by reference to the major classes of relations that have some claim to be real or objective - grounded in being. In an appendix, I use this account to discuss what it means to say that the persons of the Trinity are "substantial relations."

In a sequel to the author's argument for dualism from the lived experience of time, this paper continues the line of thought initiated by in that study a bit further by considering the implications of our experience of being in space for dualism. I conclude that four-dimensionalism cannot accommodate the facts of our experience of ourselves as being in time - localized in space but not located there after the manner of a material thing. Substance dualism, however, makes perfect sense of all these facts, which helps confirm the natural presumption in favor of that view. REVISED: March 24, 2022 with substantive changes.