A debate about the existence of God

At some point, I was involved in teaching the course Film en Filosofie for the BA students at ESPhil. For this course, a theme is selected and each lecturer involved selects a movie and prepares an accompanying lecture about that theme. In 2017, the theme was Reason and Religion. As a logician, I was planning a lecture on the different types of arguments that have been advanced for the existence of God. However, when I started to prepare for the lecture, I found out that Dutch philosopher Emanuel Rutten, in A Modal Epistemic Argument for the Existence of God (Faith and Philosophy, 2014) had recently published a novel such argument. When scrutinizing his argument, I found it to be flawed, which resulted in my The Modal-Epistemic Argument for the Existence of God is flawed (2018). In Rutten’s The Modal-Epistemic Argument Defended: Reply to Wintein (SOPHIA, 2021) he defends his argument against my objections but, as I argue in The Modal-Epistemic Argument Self-Undermined (2023), the defense is wanting and, actually, makes things worse. Rutten disagrees, as he explains in his The Modal-Epistemic Argument: Wintein’s Rebuttals Rebutted (Acta Philosophica, 2025) which, at the time of writing, is the latest, but presumably not the last, publication in the debate.

It should be noted that the notion of `God’ that is at stake in the debate is that of a personal first cause, i.e. a conscious entity X which is the cause of everything except for X itself and which is itself uncaused. Although this research is really a side project, I do think it is instructive as it forces me to explicitly engage with the (methodological foundations of) analytic metaphysics. Moreover, it is plain fun to be involved in a back-and-forth debate!