Noble_monkey wrote:

Camoden wrote:

I agreed with the first part and that wasn’t so much my issue. I think the crucial difference is whether there is a possible capacity for actuality in operation given the constituents. I agree in the gear series there isn’t. The last part is really helpful however, although I didn’t suppose the objector was trying to focus on anything other than the mundane aspects of it. Sorry if I was really unclear about what I was trying to convey.

Thanks and God bless you,

Cameron

It would apply to all essentially-ordered series.  

After rereading it I agreed with everything mentioned. It probably was just an example of mutual manifestation after all anyways. There is nothing about the First Way that requires more than qualitative priority just looking at the dependent members themselves.

Here is the video my friend drew the objection from:

https://youtu.be/XJzCYqiLWt0

I do think a moral epistemology question enters into the debate that essentially removes the probabilistic underpinnings of the modal argument from evil. It seems very improbable that our moral knowledge would be directed at something objective without theism, and this especially seems true given the modal status of these worlds. These problems seem to neutralize themselves.

That being said, if you do not believe that God is a moral agent in the classical sense, you can get past this problem a bit easier. I myself am unconvinced of that there is more than one possible world, if God's wisdom is weighed in the picture. I do not think that God can sin, but I believe that in so far as the project of perfect being theology involves mere attribute consistency and does not entail God's real relation to other things. God's not being able to issue a lie flows from the fact He is the First Truth. Moreover, God as His own beatitude cannot issue a command that does not follow from His perfectly simple blessedness, something that involves the comprehension of the exemplar causes that end up constituting the human nature. Moreover, a religious attribute like holiness seems to be a pure perfection that can exist in God without entailing a moral obligation. In fact, I think the standard Judeo-Christian idea of holiness makes a great sense with divine simplicity. The Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius argued that God could only be "set apart" if He was metaphysically simple. 

I think this neutralizes a great many of the concerns that I would have as a Christian, since God's covenantal faithfulness is very important to the whole scheme of the Old and New Testament. I do not believe that this limits God and I think the countless examples that Leibniz and Anselm give provide strong enough warrant to believe this. That being said, do we have to become fictionalists about possibilities? I am unsure we do. We can simply say that when we think about possible worlds, we are participating in

It gives us some knowledge of the formal behaviors of a thing. It just is not reducible to them. It also helps us know the similarities that things have by sharing certain constituent building blocks. This is particularly important in Chemistry I imagine, although I cannot say I am a Chemist. 

I think this is derivable from God being perfect. By virtue of God being perfect, and God’s essence just being His act of intellection, it follows God knows Himself perfectly. Now God has power, so God knows His power perfectly. And by virtue of knowing His power perfectly, God knows where His power extends to perfectly. Therefore God knows Himself perfectly and all that exists outside of Him perfectly, as God is the cause of all being.

God possessing intellection can be argued quite easily a priori. God is fully unparticipated and fully truth (by virtue of His status as the First Being). Truth is a certain relation between the intellection and being. But God cannot receive His truth from elsewhere, or else He would be a participated truth (and to deny truth is absurd). Therefore God’s Truth just has to be His Intellection, which just has to be His Being. This is why I am convinced it is probably possible to derive all of God’s attributes from the transcendentals.

Now how God possesses intellection is unknown. We don’t know truths about God in His essence. But it does follow that God possesses knowledge perfectly in a causal way we can’t comprehend. How this relates to other problems is obvious. God by virtue of knowing His power also knows the extent to which He imminently contains causal perfections. But all things that can be contain a certain perfection (which a stain determinatness towards existence). Therefore God knows possibles perfectly. Now some of the possibles in question are creaturely essences of the free variety. There are true counter factuals about what free creaturely essences would do if they were instaniated in certain state of affairs. Therefore God possesses middle knowledge, albeit in a non propositional way.

Now we can argue that God possesses the content of all true propositions in a sense, but in a non propositional way. We can’t pervade how this is true, but God does possess it. God also possesses knowledge of future cont