Reddit reviews Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God
We found 6 Reddit comments about Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Colin Howson – Objecting to God
George H. Smith – Atheism: The Case Against God
Graham Oppy – Arguing about Gods
Graham Oppy – The Best Argument Against God
Herman Philipse – God in the Age of Science
J. L. Mackie – The Miracle of Theism
Jordan Sobel – Logic and Theism
Nicholas Everitt – The Non-Existence of God
Richard Gale – On the Nature and Existence of God
Robin Le Poidevin – Arguing for Atheism
Andrew Melnyk – A Physicalist Manifesto
For the philosophical case for the existence of God, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology is where it's at. Most of the arguments in this book are aimed at a "god of the philosophers" rather than Christianity specifically, but it's a much smaller leap to Christianity from a god of the philosophers than from agnosticism. The last chapter makes an argument from miracles, presenting a historical case for the Resurrection. It's not aimed at lay readers, though.
You might consider the atheistic Logic and Theism as a companion work.
If you are being persecuted because you believe in God, then that is unacceptable. I don't know enough about your, or your friends', situation to make a judgement. I'm inclined to trust people, but the claim that someone was fired from an Academic institution for their beliefs is a very serious charge.
I generally don't go to people like Stephen Meyer. When I want to investigate reasons for and against faith I tend to open these books.
Arguing about Gods
Logic and Theism
The Miracle of Theism
Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology
Existence of God
Warranted Christian Belief
Lot of people in this thread giving some very bad or lazy responses. My undergraduate philosophy thesis was on Plantinga's freewill theodicy but my courses covered the breadth of religious philosophy and so I've actually had to read and discuss this book before.
I don't know how to do the symbols on my keyboard so apologies in advance but if you are looking for a book that provides an insanely comprehensive refutation of "modern-logic" formalized versions of the ontological argument, you want Jordan Howard Sobel's "Logic and Theism", which goes into great detail with the formal logic notation.
Sobel's explanation of why modal axiom S5 is superficially correct but entirely redundant and not applicable to this problem is as good as Mackie's but stated with needless complexity so for that you should read J.L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism for the goodies there. Mackie and Sobel both think that Plantinga crudely overextrapolates <>[]X-->[]X from <>X->[]<>X. Mackie does it better than I do.
The long and short of it is that Plantinga's argument, while more sophisticated than Anselm's in its formalization, is really not that much more sophisticated in its premises. Sobel hammers on the point that there is a crucial amphiboly on "maximally excellent in possible world X" between "maximally excellent [given the conditions of] possible world X" and "maximally excellent [and also existing in] possible world X" more than he needs to in an otherwise very efficient textbook. His more interesting counterclaim attacks another amphiboly in the inference from "<>[]X(^01&02) in W" to "[]X(^01&02) where X^01 & 02 can stand for whatever property he's looking to establish. He shows through the formulation that there is a "floating," unresolved <> in the argument that actually reduces the entire ontological argument to "<>x" where x is the entire ontological argument.
I won't be in front of the book for a few hours but if you like you can message me and I can try to scan or take pictures of the pages from his book, it's a little expensive to buy just to beat your friend in an argument, but I've never seen it refuted in print.
I am fascinated with both topics as well.
Recommendations on anthropology of religion:
Recommendations on philosophy of religion:
>God isn't the greatest conceivable being
That's the classic definition. I suppose you can dispute it. But you can do that with anything: "Unicorns don't have any horns."
>Things don't exist in possible worlds, unless said possible worlds exist.
It's a concept from modal logic. If you have to dispute modal logic to get out of the argument, then I suppose that's a complement to the argument.
>Omnipotence and free-will are necessarily mutually exclusive.
If this carries weight in atheism, I haven't seen much support for it. The best current books in atheism don't seem to list it. The main atheistic argument these days is Rowe's evidential problem of evil, which is not a logical absurdity argument.