Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2018)

God and Possible worlds

  • Alexey Chernyak,
  • Andrey Veretennikov

DOI
https://doi.org/10.15382/sturI201877.29-44
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 77, no. 77
pp. 29 – 44

Abstract

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This article investigates the problems which arise when the concept of possible worlds is applied to modal and existential judgments about God. In presentday logic, philosophy and linguistics, modal statements are conventionally understood as coordinating the situation described or relationships between situations with possible worlds. Existential statements are in this case seen as coordinating what is being stated by default with reality. But a judgment about God does not always imply a link between His existence or His possession of certain properties and some concrete world or even the whole array of possible worlds. Having studied the problem, the author of the paper has come to the conclusion that semantics of possible worlds is compatible with preferable (from the point of view of theism) readings of diffi cult cases of the type in question if one of the two requirements is met, namely if these statements are not assigned the sense of the truth or they are understood as hidden metaphors.

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