God is just fine: a reply to De marco

According to De Marco, against the thesis defended by Sehon (2011), an interventionist god is logically possible, but it does not follow that there is compossibility between him and deterministic worlds. Against the 'impossibility argument' (De Marco, 2016: 471), De Marco suggests a false dichotomy between the possibility of an interventionist god and the notion of determinism. Against 'revision argument' (De Marco, 2016: 472), De Marco suggests that there is no incompatibility alleged by Sehon, making the proposed revision somewhat unnecessary. In addition, a revision of the notion of determinism would be undesirable, insofar as it would affect not only the argument of consequence and all the underlying literature but many debates in which the same notion or equivalents are used (De Marco, 2016: 469). In this article, I will argue that the De Marco's thesis has important consequences, implied in a revision of the notion of 'God' bequeathed by tradition, stemming from Anselm's ontological argument (1965). This revision is vastly greater than the revision to be made on the notion of determinism, and the motivation underlying De Marco's argument is also a reason to reject it, i.e., the undesirability of rejecting notions with a long history of use and acceptance. Lastly, I will present an argument for the defence of compossibility between determinism and existence of an intervening god, and claiming that the deterministic status of any world is irrelevant to know whether the IG is possible or not, at least if we accept some version of an interventionist account (Woodward 2003, Menzies 2017), or even a 'space invader' version of it (Handfield 2001). The conclusion might be a proposal of a Ceteris Paribus Determinism, even if it is incompatible with De Marco's notion. The most important thing is to consider the role of the laws of nature, whether we can break them or not, more than the definition of determinism that we would consider.