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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 Traditional defenders of the cosmological argument cannot invoke the requirement of an absolute explanation.

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

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.If traditional defenders invoked absolute explanation, given their metaphysic of actualist realism, they would face the impossibility of libertarian free will, of indeterministic quantum effects, of modal imagination about lawless worlds where things pop into existence, and the collapse of modal distinctions.
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    • 2.Since all is determined on an absolute explanation, these problems arise from the conjunction of an absolutist PSR with actualist realism (only the actual is real).
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason, when applied within actualist realism, entails that every contingent fact must have a fully determining cause, leaving no explanatory room for genuinely contingent outcomes.
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    • 2.Libertarian free will requires that agents could have done otherwise under identical prior conditions, a possibility actualist realism forecloses by denying reality to non-actual alternatives.
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    • 3.Therefore, invoking absolute explanation commits the traditional cosmological arguer to a determinism incompatible with the very volitional act of a creator freely choosing to create.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Van Inwagen's consequence argument shows that if determinism is true, no agent is the ultimate source of their actions, which would strip the theistic God of the libertarian agency classical theism requires.
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    • 2.An absolute PSR applied to modal space collapses the Kripkean distinction between metaphysical necessity and contingency, since every 'contingent' truth would be fully explained only by what could not have been otherwise.
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    • 3.Classical theism's doctrine of creation ex nihilo presupposes a genuine modal alternative—non-existence of the universe—which an absolutist PSR within actualist realism renders incoherent.
      ?

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