Arguments for God's Existence: Recent Work on Ancient Arguments | Prof. Robert Koons

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2020

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was delivered on October 23, 2020 at Florida State University. Prof. Koons' lecture concludes around the 28:50 mark. The rest of the recording is Q&A with students.

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Speaker Bio:

Robert C. (“Rob”) Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught for 33 years. M. A. Oxford, Ph.D. UCLA. He is the author or co-author of four books, including: Realism Regained (Oxford University Press, 2000), and The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics, with Timothy H. Pickavance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). He is the co-editor (with George Bealer) of The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2010), and co-editor (with Nicholas Teh and William Simpson) of Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge, 2018). He has been working recently on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum theory, on defending and articulating Thomism in contemporary terms, and on arguments for classical theism.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:10.0	So I'm going to go through several arguments here real quickly.
0:14.5	Evidence of the universe, which I mean by that space, time, and matter had a supernatural cause.
0:22.1	So I'm going to talk about two philosophical arguments, argument inspired by St. Thomas,
0:27.4	a domestic argument, and then a kalam argument inspired by a different tradition
0:32.1	that comes to us from the ancient and medieval worlds.
0:35.2	Then briefly talk about scientific evidence for supernatural cause,
0:40.0	the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of our universe. And at the very end of time permits,
0:44.1	I'll talk a little bit about science as an argument for God's existence. The very possibility
0:48.5	of science, I think, points to God. So that'll be the third part of this if we get there.
0:53.9	And then this is just a little
0:54.8	bit of the biography for the talk. It's going to be based, well, really, what I'm going to talk
0:59.8	about today, based mostly on the first two ways of St. Thomas's work in the Semaphologica.
1:06.1	And you should also check out his longer similar country and TVs. And then in terms of more recent work, I'd point you to work by Alexander Pruss,
1:15.7	read to mine at Baylor, written an important book 10 years ago called The Principle of Discussion
1:20.0	Reason.
1:20.8	And then more recently, Cruz and Josh Rasmussen written a book on Necessary Existence.
1:25.9	And then there's some work on my own, which includes the new Kalama argument from 2013,
1:32.9	and then very recently with Alex Bruce, the principle of sufficient reason and skepticism in Phil Studies in this year, 2020.
1:40.8	So the first argument, philosophical argument I'm talking about, the to mystic argument, has a very long history, actually.
1:47.0	It's accepted by philosophers from at least six great traditions, ancient pagan, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Indian, and early modern European traditions.
	...

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