Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2008

Abstract

God is traditionally understood to be a perfect being who is the creator and sustainer of all that is. God’s creative and sustaining activity is often thought to involve choosing a possible world for actualization. It is generally said that either there is (a) exactly one best of all possible worlds, or there are (b) infinitely many increasingly better worlds, or else there are (c) infinitely many unsurpassable worlds within God’s power to actualize. On each view, critics have offered arguments for atheism that turn on God’s choice of a world. In what follows, I first discuss some background issues, and I then survey the contemporary literature on these arguments.

Comments

This paper appears in Philosophy Compass 3 (2008): pp. 854-72. The published version can be found

online at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00159.x/pdf


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