David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

In “The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology,” Alvin Plantinga argues that belief in God need not be justified by the proofs and arguments of natural theology in order to be held rationally by believers. In order to show this, he develops an epistemological position in which some beliefs are properly basic, or rightly held with [...]

L. Stafford Betty and Bruce Cordell argue that for the Universe to have evolved to its present state as the result of randomly-determined initial conditions is so improbable, that it is relatively likely that these conditions were determined by an intelligent designer. To the contrary, I argue that since the Big Bang was atemporal, our [...]

Can we conceive of a being so great that to disbelieve its existence only leads to absurdity? St. Anselm thinks that we understand “something greater than which nothing can be thought,” and he argues that our understanding of this being is such that we contradict ourselves upon thinking that such a being does not exist. [...]

Confessions documents an extremely impressionable man’s tenacious search for a consistent and comforting worldview. Augustine transitions from quantitative hedonism, to Manichaeism, to Aristotelianism, to Neoplatonism, and, as far as we know, ultimately to Catholicism, with the intermittent hiatus in Astrology, Aestheticism, and more hedonism. He is motivated successively by the vicissitudes of youth, by the [...]

When Aeneas consults with the ghost of his father, Anchises, we find a passage heavily influenced by Neoplatonic thought. Anchises mentions “a celestial energy… slowed and dulled by mortal frames,” (VI 867) and warns that upon death “many corporeal taints remain, ingrained in the soul in myriad ways” (874). This is redolent of the Phaedo, [...]

Thomas Aquinas delivers a proof for the existence of God in which he first shows that there is something that necessarily exists, and then goes on to show that among the things that necessarily exist there must be something that derives its own necessity, and this “all men speak of as God.” The main objection [...]