Ben Page

Background

Ben Page is a contemporary philosopher of religion working on the metaphysics of laws, dispositions, and divine action. His "The Dispositionalist Deity" (Zygon 50(1), 2015, 113–137 — in corpus as an author-posted preprint) argues that "laws of nature are not external to the objects they govern, but instead should be thought of as reducible to internal features of properties," so that particulars are "internally powerful rather than being governed by external laws of nature, making external laws in effect ontologically otiose" (Page 2015, p.1). The theological payoff: "God on this view does not govern the world through external laws of nature, but rather through internal aspects of powerful properties" (Page 2015, p.1). {{UNSOURCED: institutional affiliation and career details — not stated in the corpus preprint; do not specify beyond "contemporary analytic philosopher of religion"}}

Positions held in this wiki

• Miracles and the Laws of Nature — the contemporary metaphysical engine of the view that miracles involve no "violation" of law. Page's test case is the fiery furnace of Dan 3:27 (bib): mere conservationism struggles (God must rewire fire, rewire flesh, or interpose a barrier — "a distinct inability to exercise sovereignty"), occasionalism dissolves natures entirely, while on concurrentism God simply withholds the cooperation without which no created cause acts — quoting Molina, "it was only because God did not concur with the fire in its action that the young men were not incinerated by it" (Page 2015, pp.8-9). His conclusion: "theists who wish to embrace dispositionalism should be concurrentists regarding divine conservation" (Page 2015, p.10), a line he traces through Aquinas and Suárez; a second argument revives internal teleology against purely external design.

Key works in our corpus

• The Dispositionalist Deity (preprint, PhilArchive) — the complete argument: the taxonomy of law-ontologies (governing, Humean-reductive, dispositionalist), the Freddoso-derived threefold taxonomy of conservationism/occasionalism/concurrentism, the Daniel 3 analysis, and the teleology argument.

Principal critics

• David Hume — the redefinition of law leaves Hume's Part-2 testimony arguments untouched; they never depended on the word "violation" (Miracles and the Laws of Nature counter-arguments).
• J. L. Mackie — atheist author of the standard non-violationist definition ("a miracle occurs when the world is not left to itself"), showing the revisionist conception is evidentially neutral, not apologetically decisive.
• Jaeger — presses that dispositional essentialism's necessary laws yield a God who "cannot alter the causal roles of the properties he creates," a diminished sovereign (engaged at Page 2015, p.14 context; see article).

See also

• Thomas Aquinas — the concurrentist tradition (miracles contra naturam without violation) Page recovers.
• Richard Swinburne — the alternative "non-repeatable counter-instance" repair of the violation definition.