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In this book, I discuss the question whether God exists, not as a
Tillichian religious symbol, but as an actual person, albeit a
person who is very different from you and me. My procedure is to
examine arguments bdth for and against God's existence qua person
and to assess their relative merits. I shall try to show that there
is more evidence that God exists than that he does not. This
position is, of course, rejected nowadays, even by most religious
thinkers, who hold, for one reason or another, that evidence has
nothing to do with religious belief, properly understood. My reply
to these thinkers is simply to ask them to examine what follows. A
useful companion to Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and the Appendix of this
book would be Alvin Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity.l Though I
avoid technical terminology wherever possible, those chapters
presuppose an elementary understanding of 'possible worlds'
discourse; and a clear and concise explanation of that terminology
can be found in Chapter IV of Plantinga's book. Also, I use
'logical' throughout to mean what Plantinga means by 'broadly
logical' on page 2 of The Nature of Necessity.
The main aims of this text are to establish that it is rational to
believe that God exists; to show how God relates to morality; and
to show how God is casually connected to his creation. The author
defends a version of the ontological argument and refutes the
atheistic argument from suffering. He argues that only God can
account for the overridingness of morality. He also treats ethical
supernaturalism as a type of ethical attitude theory, showing how
it is related to secular theories which base valid judgements of
moral goodness and evil on pro and con attitudes. He illustrates
how, given scientific explanation, theistic explanation of the
empirical universe can get a foothold. His method is to adopt and
defend a version of theistic (Berkeley-like) phenomenalism and, in
that connection, a pragmatic-instrumentalist interpretation of
scientific theories.
In this book, I discuss the question whether God exists, not as a
Tillichian religious symbol, but as an actual person, albeit a
person who is very different from you and me. My procedure is to
examine arguments bdth for and against God's existence qua person
and to assess their relative merits. I shall try to show that there
is more evidence that God exists than that he does not. This
position is, of course, rejected nowadays, even by most religious
thinkers, who hold, for one reason or another, that evidence has
nothing to do with religious belief, properly understood. My reply
to these thinkers is simply to ask them to examine what follows. A
useful companion to Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and the Appendix of this
book would be Alvin Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity.l Though I
avoid technical terminology wherever possible, those chapters
presuppose an elementary understanding of 'possible worlds'
discourse; and a clear and concise explanation of that terminology
can be found in Chapter IV of Plantinga's book. Also, I use
'logical' throughout to mean what Plantinga means by 'broadly
logical' on page 2 of The Nature of Necessity.
The main aims of this book are to establish that it is rational to
believe that God exists; to show how God relates to morality; and
to show how God is causally connected to his creation. Dore defends
a version of the ontological argument and refutes the atheistic
argument from suffering. He argues that only God can account for
the overridingness of morality. He also treats ethical
supernaturalism as a type of ethical attitude theory, showing how
it is related to secular theories which base valid judgments of
moral goodness and evil on pro and con attitudes. He illlustrates
precisely how, given scientific explanation, theistic explanation
of the empirical universe can get a foothold. His method is to
adopt and defend a version of theistic (Berkeley-like)
phenomenalism and, in that connection, a pragmatic-instrumentalist
interpretation of scientific theories.
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