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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The properties of omnipotence, omniscience, simplicity, unity, and goodness may follow from the concept of a necessary being.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Necessary existence, as a modal property, entails only that a being cannot fail to exist, not any particular intrinsic nature or attributes.
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    • 2.Hume argued in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that we cannot infer qualitative perfections from bare existential necessity without illicitly importing prior theistic assumptions.
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    • 3.The inference from necessary existence to omnipotence commits a category error: modal status concerns existence conditions, not causal power or epistemic scope.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.A necessarily existing abstract object, such as the number 7 or a mathematical truth, satisfies necessary existence without possessing goodness, power, or knowledge.
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    • 2.Kant's critique in the Critique of Pure Reason establishes that existence is not a predicate, making the derivation of further predicates from necessary existence logically suspect.
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    • 3.If multiple candidates satisfy necessary existence, the stage-two derivation of unity fails, since nothing in the concept of necessity precludes a plurality of necessary beings.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.A necessary being has implications that bring it into the neighborhood of God as traditionally conceived.
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    • 2.Philosophers such as Rasmussen, O'Connor, and Koons have developed stage-two arguments deriving divine properties from the concept of necessary existence.
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    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.