On Herman Philipse’s Attempt to Write Off Cosmological Arguments

Philo 16 (1):77-94 (2013)
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Abstract

In his 2012 book God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason Herman Philipse argues that all known deductive versions of the cosmological argument are untenable. His strategy is to propose a few objections to two classical deductive cosmological arguments. The first argument is from the impossibility of there being contingent entities that are the sufficient cause for the existence of a contingent entity. The second argument is from the impossibility of there being an infinite causal regress. In this article I argue that Philipse’s attempt to write off all deductive cosmological arguments fails.

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Emanuel Rutten
VU University Amsterdam

Citations of this work

Science and the Ethics of Belief. An Examination of Philipse’s ‘Rule R’.René van Woudenberg & Joelle Rothuizen-van der Steen - 2016 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 47 (2):349-362.
Science and the Ethics of Belief. An Examination of Philipse’s ‘Rule R’.Joelle Steen & René Woudenberg - 2016 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 47 (2):349-362.

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References found in this work

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The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument.Alexander R. Pruss - 2009 - In William Lane Craig & J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 24–100.

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