Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Short answer: metaphysical good is objective; moral good is intersubjective; the good of happiness is subjective.

The reason why Hartshorne privileges becoming over being, as I understand it, is that he thinks that becoming involves new experiences or novelty or creative advance; it embodies change and therefore life. Being, on the contrary, is static and dead. This reminds me of Mises: The state of absolute perfection must be conceived as complete, [...]

The argument looks like this (from Wikipedia): It is proposed that a being has maximal excellence in a given possible world W if and only if it is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good in W; and It is proposed that a being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in every possible world. Maximal [...]

Suppose we can prove that God exists in the actual world. Can we by examining His properties determine that He must exist in every possible world? I don’t think so. In every world, if we lived there, we would have to prove God’s existence anew. But I also say that God does indeed exist necessarily. [...]

It is such, because every thing, even space-time, suffers from a fundamental defect: its essence differs from its existence: what a thing is differs from that it is. Therefore the “what” can be separated from the “that” and the thing corrupt or disappear. One can say that matter or human souls or angels are necessary [...]

“America’s Police Brutality Pandemic” by Paul Craig Roberts.

1. One question that immediately arises is: is the Father-Son-and-Holy-Spirit produced (I can’t say “begotten,” because that’s the relationship between the Father and the Son; nor “does He proceed,” because that’s the relationship between the Father/Son and the Holy Spirit; nor “created,” because that’s the relationship between God and the world) by charity, or is [...]

The insight to which I have slowly been led needs to be spelled out in more detail. There are three levels of being, described by (1) necessity, (2) self-interest, and (3) charity, and three paradigmatic sciences studying them: physics, praxeology, and theology. In this post I argued that praxeology cannot be used for understanding God. [...]

Private individuals who use low miles per gallon vehicles such as SUVs are condemned by environmentalists as morally depraved. But when, as Lew Rockwell points out, the government uses gas-guzzling tanks, no condemnation is forthcoming, because the state-god can do no wrong. The use of tanks is fully justified, even from the environmentalist standpoint, and [...]

1. Hartshorne’s God is metaphysically perfect to the point of being his own existence. But that means that everything that exists, all actuality, including matter, must be from God. And that’s a theistic not a panentheistic notion. (In process theology God creates ex materia, not ex nihilo.) If we backpedal and say that God is [...]

I was so impressed with this post by Just Thomist the first time I read it that I thought of emailing it to my heathen physicist uncle. But then, on second thought, it occurred to me that my uncle might get pretty upset with me for not getting the basic physics right. The comment I [...]

No, it’s the same old world. The only differences are: the World Trade Center is gone, 3,000 people are dead as a direct result of the attacks, and the US government has used this tragedy as a pretext to do what it had always wanted to do: start wars in the Middle East (thereby killing [...]

A reader of this LRC article asked me for some examples. I wrote back that the argument we are concerned to counter is as follows: Major premise: Giving up liberties is sufficient to gain security, necessary to gain security, or both. Minor premise: We want to attain greater security. Therefore, We must give up some [...]

“With the capture of the Elven Runestone, Gul’dan has been able to warp the power it contains to mutate an entire legion of his loyal and ruthless Ogres into wielders of arcane magiks. Along with this transformation these Ogre-Magi have been granted deadly magiks and a malicious cunning rivaling that of Gul’dan himself.” – Warcraft [...]

In Reality As Social Process Hartshorne repeatedly equates human freedom with chance or randomness, e.g., “Chance is the particularity of the particular, its Peircian firstness, freshness, spontaneity, originality — or, in Whiteheadian language, its self-creativity.” (87) Now I agree that quantum randomness shares with human freedom one property: unpredictability. But that’s where the similarities end. [...]

Earlier I argued that one of the reasons for the existence of very intense evils is that it is the price paid for the possibility and existence of very intense good/virtues/happiness of and in humans. Hartshorne in Reality As Social Process provides a nice illustration of this line of thought: That chances of evil remain [...]

In a spectacularly argued review of Richard Carrier’s Sense and Goodness Without God David Wood does many things, and among them is a presentation of a distinctively Christian theodicy and at the same time an answer to the problem of divine hiddenness. He argues that existence of evil is a sign that something in the [...]

There are two kinds of love with respect to the subject: sensuality and the will. And there are two kinds of love with respect to the object: love of concupiscence and love of friendship. The former is love for an object whose possession you believe will make you or someone you love happy. The latter [...]

On a discussion board the following opinion was expressed: “The idea that an all-powerful god would ‘prove his identity to the world’ by providing a demonstration of power for a tiny, tiny fraction of humanity in a remote outpost of civilisation, and decreeing that word of mouth would have to be good enough for everyone [...]

The analogy of the human soul’s quickening and commanding the body as master commands the slave is used to postulate a world-soul God which must, though Hartshorne does not say it in so many words, quicken and animate the universe. We have already criticized Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s conception of God. But how does the universe [...]