Browsing by Subject "Apologetics"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Resolving the causal paradox(2016-05) Davis, Richard Lawton; Koons, Robert C.; Bonevac, Daniel AThis report begins with a paradox which proceeds from roughly the following premises: (i) that every fact has a cause, (ii) that there is a fact which includes all facts, (iii) that whatever causes a given fact must cause whatever facts that fact includes, and yet (iv) that no fact can cause itself. These premises seem to entail a contradiction, since whatever causes the fact which includes all facts is itself one of the facts which the fact so caused includes, meaning that it must cause itself. Each of the four premises which generate this paradox is intuitively correct. This report resolves the paradox by describing a positive causal model on which all of the four premises have plausible and well-motivated interpretations, at least one such interpretation apiece, which are all consistently true. Much of the discussion is devoted to examining the root logical properties of causation and metaphysical explanation in order to discern which versions of these premises are in fact plausible and well-motivated. The positive model on which these interpretations are reconciled involves an infinite regress of efficient causal facts in which each subsequent fact is embedded as a remainderless proper conjunct of the fact that precedes it.Item Toward an understanding of the possibility of a religious leap in Kierkegaard's a literary review(Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) Berquist, Erik SvenIn his work A Literary Review, Kierkegaard bemoans much about "the present age" and in the text he presents an extremely bleak picture of the potential for one to live an authentically religious life. However, he also makes it clear that he believes the present age is in a uniquely superior position because a religious leap remains possible. The purpose of this thesis is to determine why Kierkegaard believes that a religious leap is possible in the present age. I attempt to understand one promising method of achieving a religious leap by appealing to another work by Kierkegaard entitled Philosophical Fragments. It is my position that, given a particular interpretation, Philosophical Fragments places some readers in a position where a religious leap emerges as a possibility.