Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

It is part of the orthodox Christian doctrine that in heaven there cannot be any evil or danger to the blessed. For if there is, and the spiritual battle continues even there, as Kant thought, for example, then there is a possibility of failure and loss and punishment. Since in infinite time all possibilities are [...]

Is God atemporally eternal or temporally everlasting?
Arguments for the former:
1) God would seem to be dependent on the time slices that constitute Him. Since God is ontologically independent, this is not allowed. Morris argues that the dependence is actually two-way:
(1) The only way to get God is to put together a bunch of God’s time [...]

When I was a kid, once or twice I asked my mother and grandparents why the Americans wanted to nuke us. The answer they gave was unusual. Americans, they said, had never been invaded or had a real war on their territory. (This was factually incorrect, of course, because of the War between the States, [...]

In several posts I have accepted a possibility that God is a utilitarian Who seeks to maximize human happiness. At the same time, what has vexed me personally to some extent is the fact that God’s utilitarianism, which involves optimizing pleasure over the entire world population and all times, will inevitably trade off one person’s [...]

I have made use of the doctrine of divine simplicity a number of times in my reviews here. The doctrine is said to be “controversial” by many writers. No one, however, has taken Aquinas’s proofs of God’s simplicity in ST, I, 3 and refuted them. Thomas V. Morris has come closer than anybody in his [...]

With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor.
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door.
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast.
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will four years before we rest.
– from Grim Fandango
A beautiful poem [...]

A British tar is a soaring soul,
As free as a mountain bird.
His energetic fist should be ready to resist
A dictatorial word.
His nose should pant,
and his lip should curl.
His cheeks should flame,
and his brow should furl.
His bosom should heave,
and his heart should glow,
And his fist be ever ready for a knock-down blow.
His eyes should flash with [...]

Single Attributes Disproofs of the Existence of God
(1) The Concept of the Supernatural
(2) The Paradox of Omnipotence
(3) The Paradox of Omnipotence Revisited
(4) Against Omniscience: The Case from Essential Indexicals
(5) Is Omniscience Possible?
(6) Logic and Limits of Knowledge and Truth
(7) The Being That Knew Too Much

1. The Concept of the Supernaturalby Gilbert Fulmer
This paper is exactly [...]

In addition to creating unemployment, MW also reduces society’s productive efficiency. This is because some of the gains from the trades of the labor of the employees for the money of the employers that do not take place due to minimum wage legislation would have gone to the businessmen. The work that would have furthered [...]

At LRC.
Postscript. I appealed to man’s eternal destiny as a source of his dignity. But earlier in the article I mentioned that “What suggests that man’s control over nature is rightfully his may be his very accomplishments in understanding and controlling it. If nature is to belong to someone, it may as well be man, [...]

You probably didn’t know it, but I have a BS in computer science and worked for 6 years in the industry doing computer programming, mostly in Manhattan, NY. But only now have I realized what programming really is. It is like Nascar racing. It’s a union of man and machine. The computer becomes an extension [...]

If He is such a collection, then Alfred North Whitehead is absolutely right, at least as to his notion of God’s “primordial nature” consisting of “eternal objects” whose “ingressions” by God’s decrees in varying ways ultimately are “prehended” by and make up all “actual entities.” But, forgetting Whitehead and remembering St. Thomas, that would seem [...]

Multiple Attributes Disproofs of the Existence of God
(4) On the Compossibility of the Divine Attributes
(5) A Disproof of the God of the Common Man
(6) Conflicts Between the Divine Attributes
(7) Why God Cannot Think: Kant, Omniscience, and Consciousness
(8) God and the Best Possible World
(9) Agency and Omniscience
(10) The Incompatibility of Omniscience and Intentional Action: A Reply [...]