Divine Bootstrapping: Do Abstract Objects Lead to Atheism?

Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers - New Brunswick)

On 11 March, Professor Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers) will deliver a talk entitled "Divine Bootstrapping:  Do Abstract Objects Lead to Atheism?" at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford.

This event is free and open to the public.

Abstract: Realism about a certain kind of “abstract object”, namely, universals or properties, has been thought to pose a problem for theism.  To be a realist about universals or properties is just to believe that they exist.  First, I talk about two different kinds of reason to believe in them, which lead to two different roles they are supposed to play.  For the sake of argument, I’ll assume they’re both good reasons.  Does realism about universals lead to a problem for theism — for a certain specific kind of theism, one that says only God exists “a se”, not dependent upon anything?  We’ll look at two arguments that say there would be a bad kind of circle of dependence.  Paying attention to the two roles universals are supposed to play will show that the two arguments fail, for two different reasons.  The arguments were developed before the relatively recent growth of the “grounding” literature; but they have to do with inadmissible grounding structure; so I’ll be connecting these debates, which make use of notions of priority, to the metaphysics of grounds.

Dean Zimmerman (Ph.D., Brown University) has taught at the University of Notre Dame, Syracuse University, and Rutgers University, where he is a Distinguished Professor in the philosophy department and co-director of the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion.  Zimmerman is founding editor of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (now co-edited with Karen Bennett), and co-editor of Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (with Lara Buchak).  He has co-edited several other books, including Persons:  Human and Divine (Oxford University Press, 2007), and God in an Open Universe (Pickwick, 2011).  His publications include over 60 articles in scholarly journals and books.  Zimmerman is also the U.S. Representative of The Friends of Arthur Machen.