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Plantinga's God and other monstrosities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Patrick Grim
Patrick Grim
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, Washington University, St Louis State University of New York at Stony Brook
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Extract

In God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga presents a new form of the ontological argument for the existence of God. Though he has reservations concerning its evangelical efficacy, Plantinga considers the proof both valid and sound, and presents it as a defence of the rational acceptability of theism.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 1979 , pp. 91 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

page 91 note 1 Plantinga, Alvin, God, Freedom, and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).Google Scholar

page 91 note 2 Gaunilo's On Behalf of the Fool is an eleventh-century parody of Anselm's original form of the argument. See also David Haight and Marjorie Haight, ‘An Ontological Argument for the Devil’, The Monist LIV, 2 (April 1970).

page 91 note 3 Plantinga, Alvin, op. cit. pp. 111–12.Google Scholar

page 92 note 1 Ibid. p. 112.

page 92 note 2 Ibid. p. 108.

page 92 note 3 Plantings, Alvin, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

Purtill, R. L., ‘Plantinga, Necessity, and God’, New Scholastic, Winter 1976, pp. 46–60.Google Scholar

page 95 note 1 Plantinga rejects Gaunilo's parodies of Anselm on the grounds that the qualities which make for greatness in islands and the like have no ‘intrinsic maximum’. My parodies are designed to avoid such an objection either by appealing to qualities which as plausibly have an ‘intrinsic maximum’ as those which Plantinga gives his God or by concentrating merely on ‘specials’ and avoiding ‘maximals’ altogether.

page 97 note 1 Plantinga, Alvin, op. cit. p. 112.Google Scholar

page 97 note 2 This paper was revised under the auspices of a Mellon Faculty Fellowship administered by Washington University.