Zain's Guide to Overthinking Everything

On The Existence of God: An Ontological Argument From Necessary Truth E is evidence for H if and only if it raises the probability for it to be true. God is a conscious thinking mind. God is an eternal agent and a being that performs actions, is the creator of all, and is the foundation for all knowledge and truth. There must be a necessary being and this has been proven extensively in my other blog articles through different cosmological and ontological arguments. This article will prove that the necessary being must be God through a different type of ontological argument presented by Jake Brancatella in his debate against Aron Ra.   Argument from Necessary Truth:   P1: Necessarily either the Law of Noncontradiction (states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time) is true or it is not. P2: P1 is necessarily true and could not fail to be true. P3: True propositions exist. C1: Therefore, at least one true proposition exists necessa...

The Birth of Nominalism: Ash'ari Impact on Medieval Philosophy “Al-Ghazâlî’s critique of twenty positions of falsafa in his Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahâfut al-falâsifa) is a significant landmark in the history of philosophy as it advances the nominalist critique of Aristotelian science developed later in 14th century Europe.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Prior to reading this blog post, one should read my other blogs in this order: 1. https://zainphilosophy.blogspot.com/2023/04/universals-and-particulars.html 2. https://zainphilosophy.blogspot.com/2023/06/overview-of-athari-metaphysics.html 3. https://zainphilosophy.blogspot.com/2023/11/ibn-taymiyya-on-universals-and.html Nominalism came to medieval philosophy from Islam, through the works of the Ash’aris who are a school of thought in Sunni Islam. It was the Ash’ari school, in its attack on Aristotelian physics and metaphysics that paved the way for nominalism and empirical science. Without the works of the Ash’a...

Hidden Nestorianism: Unveiling the Orthodox Dilemma of The Two Sons Worry     The Oxford English Dictionary defines Nestorianism as “The doctrine of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople (appointed in 428), by which Christ is asserted to have had distinct human and divine persons.” Nestorian Christology promotes the concept of a prosopic union of two persons that are divine and human in Jesus Christ, thus trying to avoid and replace the concept of a hypostatic union. This Christological position is defined as radical Dyophysitism, and differs from orthodox Dyophysitism, or that Christ was one divine person with two natures, which was reaffirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Such teachings brought Nestorius into conflict with other prominent church leaders, most notably Cyril of Alexandria, who issued 12 anathemas against him. Nestorius’ teachings were deemed heretical at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and again at the Council of Chalcedon. The early church fathers belie...

The Essence-Existence Distinction Under Thomas Aquinas One of my previous blogs discussed the doctrine of Divine Processions and specifically the procession of the Son by way of knowing was explained. In that blog I wrote,  “However, God knows himself perfectly and he is the only thing that can possibly understand his own essence. In his act of understanding himself it will be a perfect image with the same essence as it will be identical as it will be a reflection of his essence. Therefore, the Son proceeds by way of knowing. Knowledge is a procession. The reason why it becomes a person is because it is the perfect image of the divine essence.” This made me ask why this is the case? Could God imagine anything such as a unicorn and “by way of knowing” it exists? But then I continued to think and it hit me! Perhaps the difference between the Logos and a unicorn is that the former procession presupposes that existence is part of essence. God could imagine a perfect unicorn but that al...

Exploring Monism in Kantian Philosophy and Schopenhauer’s Will Through Advaita Vedanta     This blog post explores monism within Kantian philosophy and Schopenhauer’s concept of the “Will” through drawing parallels with Advaita Vedanta, a school of thought in Hinduism, as the title suggests. In Kant's philosophy, the noumena, or the “thing-in-itself” represents the ultimate reality of objects independent of our perceptions. Kant argued that we can never have direct knowledge of the noumenal realm because our knowledge is necessarily mediated by the structure of our minds and senses. This is explored much more in-depth in my other blog posts on the basics of Kant. While we can perceive and understand phenomena—how things appear to us—the nature of the noumena remains inaccessible. Kant posited that our experiences are shaped by the 12 categories of the understanding and the forms of intuition, and these mental structures impose limitations on what we can know about the underl...

Trinitarian Dynamics: Exploring Divine Processions and Relations in Thomistic Theology     Under a Thomistic interpretation of Christianity, God the Father is the one who possesses the divine essence in an absolute sense such that he is unbegotten. Before all ages he has always been and will be an eternal act of communicating the divine essence out. Imagine having an idea about yourself, this idea is like you but it will not be exactly you due to human limitations of imagination and therefore, will not be a perfect image. However, God knows himself perfectly and he is the only thing that can possibly understand his own essence. In his act of understanding himself it will be a perfect image with the same essence as it will be identical as it will be a reflection of his essence. Therefore, the Son proceeds by way of knowing. Knowledge is a procession. The reason why it becomes a person is because it is the perfect image of the divine essence.       ...