The other day, as you may recall, I blegged for help with PowerPoint. Two readers—Stephen J. K. and Darin Johnson—answered the call. Thanks, guys. I liked the fact that Stephen's PowerPoint had braces rather than arrows, but I couldn't figure out how to change the size of the boxes or get the text to fit in the boxes. Darin's PowerPoint allowed me to do these things, but I ended up using arrows instead of braces. That's okay, but I had to explain it to my students this morning. Here is the PowerPoint that I printed, copied, and distributed to the students. It shows, in diagram form, Samuel Clarke's cosmological argument, as reconstructed by William L. Rowe.
By the way, Rowe is an atheist. In his 1970 essay "Two Criticisms of the Cosmological Argument," he criticizes two critics (David Hume and Bertrand Russell) of Clarke's argument. Think about it. Rowe, an atheist, is defending a theist from two atheists (using "atheist" in the broad sense to mean nontheist). The irony is palpable. But as I explained to my students, Rowe, unlike some philosophers, is intellectually honest. He wants to reject Clarke's argument for the right reason, not for the wrong reason(s).
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 