In his On the Square this morning, Edward Feser tackles the questions of nothingness as they emerge in contemporary philosophy and theoretical physics:
John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn have published The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All? , a very useful anthology of classic and contemporary readings.Leslie is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, known for bringing his distinctive brand of Platonism to bear on questions in cosmology and the philosophy of religion. Kuhn is the creator and host of the PBS series Closer to Truth , whose interviews and roundtable discussions on the big questions have featured an amazingly diverse range of prominent scientists, philosophers, and theologians.
After sifting through the jargon of the arcane fields concerned with the ultimate questions of origins, he concludes:
Once we allow that there is something self-existent and that it cannot be the laws of physics or anything that depends on the laws of physics, some brand of theism is really unavoidable. The only remaining question is which brand. Pantheism? Panentheism? The classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Avicenna, Maimonides, and Aquinas? The “theistic personalism” or “neo-theism” of contemporary philosophers of religion like Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne? This question takes us well beyond Kuhn’s article, though it is certainly relevant to the subject matter of his and Leslie’s anthology.
Read the full analysis here .
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