Graham Oppy

Background

Graham Oppy (1960–) is an Australian philosopher at Monash University and the most systematic contemporary naturalist critic of arguments for theism. Where Mackie's Miracle of Theism surveyed the field to 1982, Oppy's Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (1995), Arguing About Gods (2006), and a long series of books and exchanges carry the program forward, organized around two theses: no extant theistic argument succeeds, and naturalism beats theism on theoretical simplicity at equal explanatory power. The SEP's survey of cosmological-argument critics lists him, with Martin, Mackie, Smith, Rundle, and Morriston, among those who "reason that no current version of the cosmological argument is sound or provides probabilistic evidence" (SEP CA §1). He is this wiki's chief contemporary steelman source for philosophical naturalism.

Positions held in this wiki

• Aquinas' Five Ways — the strongest contemporary reply to the Five Ways: explanation must stop somewhere, and the natural world's most fundamental state is the better terminus; existing things persist without concurrent sustaining causes (existential inertia).
• The Ontological Argument — Oppy's taxonomy structures the contemporary debate, and he co-authors the SEP entry the article draws on, which develops Gaunilo's perfect-island parody against Anselm's Proslogion II premise-by-premise (SEP OA §11).
• The Leibnizian (Contingency) Cosmological Argument — contemporary heir of the Humean critique; against Gale and Pruss he showed the weak PSR collapses into the strong PSR, so "the nontheist has no motivation to accept the weak PSR" (SEP CA).
• The Kalam Cosmological Argument — named there as the sharpest contemporary critic whose texts await ingestion; the article uses Hume as a rigorous in-corpus stand-in.

Key works in our corpus

• Oppy, review of Craig & Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Clarendon, 1993) — in corpus (author preprint). Assesses the Craig–Smith debate over kalām arguments and Big Bang cosmology, including Oppy's judgment that philosophers can contribute usefully to interpreting the physics.
• SEP 'Ontological Arguments' — in corpus; Oppy is lead author with Rasmussen and Schmid.
• Corpus gap: the monographs (1995, 2006, and later) are copyright-locked; represented via the SEP entries. Logged in meta/gap-report.md.

Principal critics

• William Lane Craig — Oppy's longest-running interlocutor on kalām and infinity.
• Edward Feser — the published Feser–Oppy exchanges on existential inertia and the Five Ways.
• Alvin Plantinga — the modal ontological argument Oppy's parody strategy targets; also Pruss, Gale, and Koons on the PSR (SEP CA §4.4).

See also

• J. L. Mackie — the predecessor whose program Oppy explicitly continues.
• David Hume — the common ancestor of both.
• Paul Draper — fellow contemporary critic; his SEP entry discusses Oppy's usage of "atheist" and "agnostic" (SEP 'Atheism and Agnosticism').