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Philosophy

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  • Perhaps I should have said, "But it seems strange to be able to deduce that the world was not created from nothingness." The nonexistence of God is of a piece with the nonexistence of everything else, here, per the presuppositions involved (but it would not be appropriate to describe oneself as an atheist merely because one did not think that the word "existence" had much use at all).
    – Kristian Berry
    Commented Dec 27, 2022 at 16:42
  • I’m not even sure that gets around the semantic problem - what could it mean to “create the world”? Such an account seems to be properly theological, and I don’t think you can start down the path of theological metaphysics with a placeholder theology.
    – Paul Ross
    Commented Dec 27, 2022 at 17:23
  • The only two other definitions of creation that I'm aware of are from-unorganized-matter and by-emanation. (Maybe three, depending on how Kant's notion of intellectual intuition can be cashed out.) Offhand neither seems to involve the transfer of a bare existence predicate to otherwise nonexistent objects, but they seem susceptible of translations that eliminate the naive/free-floating use of the word "existence." So for now, those flavors of theism seem admissible, here.
    – Kristian Berry
    Commented Dec 27, 2022 at 17:53