Let me see if I understand... So what makes God different from, more than, a necessary turtle is that while the necessary turtle's necessity is brute (unexplained), God's is explained (not brute) because he's "purely actual, immaterial, eternal, and whose essence just is its existence."? And we're not inventing something purely actual, immaterial, eternal, and whose essence just is its existence. That is what is required to explain the existence of contingent things. And anything purely actual, immaterial, eternal, and whose essence just is its existence must, by definition, be God. Am I right?
Yes, I think so. The fundamental point is it still makes sense to ask how something could be necessary (metaphysically) in the first place. Traditional cosmological reasoning consistently converges upon something which escapes the usual caused categories of being to terminate what must necessarily terminate in terms of explanation. After unpacking the nature of that entity, we see it offers a nice explanation of its necessity in virtue of having an existence non-distinct from its existence.
Just out of interest have you heard Oppy make the point I believe when he debated Ed Feser. That God choosing to create one thing over the other is a brute fact? That would increase the theortical cost of the theist position.
Yes, but this is wrong (about it being a brute fact). It is a self-explanatory fact given the nature of the will as an active power to end deliberation among finite alternatives.
Let me see if I understand... So what makes God different from, more than, a necessary turtle is that while the necessary turtle's necessity is brute (unexplained), God's is explained (not brute) because he's "purely actual, immaterial, eternal, and whose essence just is its existence."? And we're not inventing something purely actual, immaterial, eternal, and whose essence just is its existence. That is what is required to explain the existence of contingent things. And anything purely actual, immaterial, eternal, and whose essence just is its existence must, by definition, be God. Am I right?
Yes, I think so. The fundamental point is it still makes sense to ask how something could be necessary (metaphysically) in the first place. Traditional cosmological reasoning consistently converges upon something which escapes the usual caused categories of being to terminate what must necessarily terminate in terms of explanation. After unpacking the nature of that entity, we see it offers a nice explanation of its necessity in virtue of having an existence non-distinct from its existence.
Just out of interest have you heard Oppy make the point I believe when he debated Ed Feser. That God choosing to create one thing over the other is a brute fact? That would increase the theortical cost of the theist position.
Yes, but this is wrong (about it being a brute fact). It is a self-explanatory fact given the nature of the will as an active power to end deliberation among finite alternatives.
Thanks!