Hello everyone.
I was considering responses that atheists give to cosmological argument. If we set aside the "brute fact" one, a possible answer is that there's a necessary being, but it isn't God. Good enough: but if that's the case, they should be able to give some plausible account of its necessity, right?
So here I am. I actually know, or at least I'm acquinted with threes authors who did give such an account:

- Kant, which is basically agnostic about "true" modality outside mind;
- Spinoza, which I really need to read entirely one day;
- Leslie. Well, he's still some sort of theist with his infinities of "goddish" minds.

It would be rather strange to just say "matter is neccessary" without making its necessity as clear as possible.
Does any of you find one of these plausible? Or is there better account? Some reading advice would be great.

Brian wrote:

2) It's fairly clear that the good isn't pleasure in any standard way.  I can always ask, "Is this pleasure I am receiving good?"  Me asking that question demonstrates that, at least at a conceptual/linguistic level, we differentiate between pleasure and goodness.  

I don't think that's a good objection. You could always tell that to any account of morality.

Brian wrote:

6) There are certain painless acts that we find inherently shameful.  For example, having sex with dead bodies. Insofar as you are satisfying a desire, and no one else finds about it, you are increasing pleasure.  But would you really claim that necrophilia is an ethical action?

Even if I agree completly with you on that, I know by experience that people are prone to bite the bullet in that type of case. And the more the time passes, the more stranger things won't be consider immoral anymore.
For example, I was talking with some friend of mine on the issue of tradional mariage: I was telling him that given what ontological presupositions are for mariage today, something like desire + common agreement only, that we were bind to accept homosexual incestuous mariage. And he told me he was okay with that.
There's also Peter Singer, I think, that defended the morality some bestial relations and necrophilia.

I don't know if someone already developped this point in a analytic way, but I think that we can make something like this:

1. We have two types of phenomenological experiences: active and passive. The passives are such way that we feel determined, the others are the ones where we feel that we really act by choosing beetwen different options.
2. Everything which is purely subject-related can't be an illusion. In other words, everything we believe about us as subject is true.
3. Experience qua experience, is knowledge of us as subject.
4. Therefore, our experience of our self as really choosing between different options, which is libertarian free-will, is true.

DanielCC wrote:

Calhoun wrote:

Always interesting to read the blog posts.And also there is a new paper by Matthew James Collier on Modal realism and Classical theism, says their combination is either incompatible or lead to Modal collapse , among other things..

Ultimately I think any form of modal realism faces modal collapse because every being, or at least every worldbound being, is essentially the way it is. The indexical takes of existence and actual are just semantic ways of sugaring the pill.

Interestingly Almeida comes close to admitting this in his chapter on the cosmological argument and modal realism:  'Of course it is also true that the actual world and everything in it necessarily exists, since the actual world is one region of a necessarily existing pluriverse' (p79)

Something which seems very strange to me is to reconcile omnipotence and modal collapse: if God couldn't have done otherwise, in what sense can we say he's omnipotent?

Isn't this idea of teleological bias ultimately a petitio principii? Obviously, for every theists, every events comes from a personal source in the end.

I was also thinking about materialist accounts of mental life. Is there some clear account where even non-materialists, in general, agree that some parts of it is now explainable in a purely material way? (And where non-materialists were thinking that it wasn't possible.)