The Christian Vanguard

The following is a paper I wrote for my medical ethics class. The topic is lying. I had about 20 footnotes, but a simple copy-paste action won't carry those over, so, I'm not claiming to be original here or anything.  In this paper I will argue that lying to a patient is wrong because lying simpliciter is always wrong. This will be distinguished from other acts, such as reservation and deceit, in which the patient does not receive the truth but may be permissible. Cases will be considered which it may seem beneficial to lie to the patient and to lie for the patient. I will be drawing from St. Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers that interact with the Thomist tradition.  I begin with the assumption that man is a rational animal. That man is a kind of animal is not controversial, for the whole field of medical science deals with the reality of that animality, and how to treat it. That man is also rational also seems to be uncontroversial as shown by the medical fields...

What it means to be eternal and what it means to be timeless are two different questions. For God to be eternal means that He always existed and always will exist. God has no beginning and no end. To be timeless, on the other hand, means that God is outside time or doesn’t exist within time, has no temporal location and temporal terms don’t apply to God. Some reasons to embrace a timeless God is it emphasizes God’s transcendence over creation, it reconciles divine foreknowledge with human freedom, and it remains consistent with other attributes of God, such as His immutability, or unchanging nature. Davis has three arguments against God being timeless. It is not compatible with God as creator. For God created the world at some time T, then either at T God creates the world which would make God temporal, or God creates the world and the world firsts exists at T which would mean there is a need for a notion of a-temporal causation, which he doesn’t think there is. Davis thinks...

The three components of Perfect Being Theology are great making properties, compossible properties, and uniqueness. A great making property is any property that endows its bearer with some measure of values and greatness, or metaphysical stature, regardless of extrinsic circumstances, that it to say, it has intrinsic goodness. Compossible properties are collections of properties if it is possible that they all be had by the same individual at the same time or all together. There are no properties which are inconsistent with one another. Uniqueness means that God is the being such that no greater can be conceived, following St. Anselm.   Why think there is intrinsic goodness? I f all goodness is external goodness, then nothing would be good since they don’t terminate in some intrinsic goodness. So, if P is good for some other thing P1, but P1 isn’t worth pursuing unless it is itself good, which is denied when we deny intrinsic goodness or good for something else, P2, whic...