Today we are moving on from the existence of God to look at the philosophical debate surrounding the traditional divine attributes - omnipotence, omniscience, omnitemporality, and omnibenevolence. We are exploring the puzzles that these attributes create as well as some possible solutions to those puzzles, from Aquinas’ ideas of analogical predication, to the work of Eleanor Stump.
5 May 2016
Salon: Donald Trump will not be president: History, polling data and demographics all point to a single result
Donald Trump thinks he can reverse that trend by appealing to angry white voters, but the 2012 results show why that won’t work. Lost in the uproar over Trump’s divisive appeals is the fact that Republicans already win whites by huge margins. For example, in 2012 Romney carried white voters by 20 points, and yet he still lost. [...]
Women made up 53 percent of the electorate in 2012, which makes them the single largest demographic group. Female voters made the difference for Obama. Although Romney carried men by 8 points, Obama won the 2012 election because he carried women by 10 points.
The Guardian: Spain issues arrest warrants for Russian officials close to Putin
The Spanish prosecutor’s moves bolster longstanding allegations that the Russian government is a mafia state involved in corruption and organised crime. The reputed head of the Tambov gang, Gennady Petrov, has previously been tied to several of Putin’s closest allies. [...]
The arrest warrants follow a major, multi-stage investigation by prosecutors and Spain’s intelligence services into Russian mafia activity. Russian criminals began using Spain as a base of operations back in the mid-1990s. They laundered profits from illegal activities in Russia and invested them in Spanish real estate.
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4 May 2016
The New York Times: Indiana Primary Takeaways: For Donald Trump, Now Comes the Hard Part
This was wishful thinking, and in Indiana, Mr. Trump put an end to the mirage. He defeated Mr. Cruz by more than 15 points and won more than half the vote in a seventh consecutive state — this time, in the Midwest.
There was no anti-Trump majority left to rally, if it ever existed in the first place. [...]
Mr. Trump’s emergence as the all-but-anointed Republican nominee may change this dynamic. Giving him a monthlong head start to rally skeptical Republicans behind his campaign, while Mrs. Clinton continues to grapple with Mr. Sanders’s challenge on the left, could become an intolerable prospect for Democrats eager for a free hand to engage Mr. Trump.
Salon: Ted Cruz’s epic downfall: How the Texas senator took Donald Trump to the brink — and then watched it all fall apart
With Cruz, no myth was too outlandish or ridiculous to be stated as fact to his audiences. (That he is losing to a conspiracy theorist like Trump only makes this more hilarious.) But it is not enough to just repeat this nonsense to people. You have to make them believe that you believe it. And in that, Cruz failed. His weird and offputting attempts to ingratiate — the terrible Mr. Burns impressions, the unctuous speaking style that made him sound as if he was leading a seminar on a get-rich quick scheme — all of it came off as calculated and phony. [...]
How did Cruz cover up his incompetence for so long, to the point that 14 other candidates were gone from the race before him? Well, for one, even Cruz’s worst enemies say that he is incredibly smart. (In fact, that is one of the traits they find most frightening about him.) He and his team came in prepared. He had a delegate-wrangling scheme in place from the get-go and used it to great effect, going into state conventions and picking off delegates that would have otherwise been bound to Trump. His campaign put on polished and slick rallies while those of his competitors, including Trump, sometimes felt ramshackle, thrown together.
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