| dc.description.abstract | My thesis is that there is a defensible argument for the existence of God from the necessary existence of the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). James N. Anderson and Greg A. Welty (A&W) offer such an argument. The purpose of my thesis is to improve and defend some of the key premises of their argument.
One of the key premises which takes up the majority of my thesis is that LNC is a necessarily true proposition. With the help from work by Tuomas E. Tahko and Francesco Berto, I explicate interpretations of LNC which are different from A&W’s interpretation and then defend them against some of the main objections in the literature. Specifically, I combine Berto’s emphasis on the mutual exclusivity of certain properties with Tahko’s notion of “genuinely possible configurations of the world.” Some of the objections include ones from Graham Priest, according to whom there are true contradictions in the actual world, and objections that there are abstract inconsistent objects in possible worlds. But I counter objections of the former by using Tahko’s strategy to show that Priest’s examples are issues of semantics, and for the latter I explicate one half of a dilemma by Ben Martin, according to which the actual world would be an impossible world if there were such inconsistent objects.
The other key premise of A&W’s argument is that all propositions are divine thoughts. Colin P. Ruloff argues that there is a better alternative theory of propositions in which propositions are not thoughts. But I counter this by arguing that his proposed theory is consistent with propositions being divine thoughts. | en |
