Faith and Philosophy

Volume 29, Issue 1, January 2012

Oppy on the Argument from Consciousness

Graham Oppy has launched the most effective criticism to date of an argument for God’s existence from the existence of irreducible mental states or their regular correlation with physical states (AC). I seek to undercut Oppy’s central defeaters of AC. In particular, I argue, first, that Oppy has not provided successful defeaters against the use of a distinctive form of explanation—personal explanation—employed in premise (3) of AC; second, I expose a confusion on Oppy’s part with respect to AC’s premise (5), and show that this confusion results in a failure to grasp adequately the dialectical force of (5). As a result, Oppy fails to offer adequate rejoinders to (5), or so I shall argue.