In his Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article entitled “Foreknowledge and Free Will,” Norman Swartz defends the view that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human free will and contends that arguments for incompatibilism inevitably commit a certain modal fallacy. I think he’s wrong on both counts, but I want to focus here just on the second… Read More »
I’m just about finished listening to an audio CD lecture series entitled “The Historical Jesus” by Bart Ehrman. It’s an interesting series by a scholar who, I gather, represents more-or-less a mainstream position in biblical scholarship. In other words, Ehrman is neither an out-and-out debunker of orthodox Christianity nor an out-and-out advocate and apologist. Rather,… Read More »
This is quite an entertaining dialogue (HT: Victor Reppert). It makes a good point about the concept of tolerance, namely, that to be tolerant of something is not to accept it, but to graciously put up with it while rejecting it. Another important issue that comes up near the end is that of discrimination. What,… Read More »
A reader of this blog, Patrick, submitted a comment to my previous post, but because of some technical glitches I was experiencing with the Blogger software, I think I deleted the post his comment was attached to. Anyway, his comment is worth a response. Interesting, Alan. You say, “Let us suppose that the time is… Read More »
Over the past four months I’ve been working off-and-on on a paper on tense logic, in which I argue against the common assumption (common, that is, in philosophy of time circles) that the mere fact that some event happens at time t is sufficient for it to have always been the case prior to t,… Read More »
In a recent issue of The Harvard Crimson, well-known psychology prof. Steven Pinker has an interesting editorial critique of a new report by the Harvard Committee on General Education. The editorial gets off to a pretty good start, but then descends into absurd posturing on the relation between faith (= religion) and reason (= science),… Read More »
Linda Zagzebski thinks not. In her book The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, she argues that the classical doctrine of divine timelessness is compatible with an A-theory of time. She begins by laying out her understanding of the B-theory of time in terms of four theses, and then argues that denials of at least the… Read More »
Can you spot the typo? As reported by the New York Times (may require a subscription), this is a poster for a gathering of what might appropriately be called “evangelical atheists”, that is, atheists of the Richard Dawkinsesque sort who think that theism is intrinsically bad and therefore something vigorously to be opposed. They’re quite… Read More »
The great polymath Leibniz is famous for his advocacy of the “Principle of Sufficient Reason” (PSR). He states it in various ways throughout his writings, but it basically runs like this: (PSR-1): Necessarily, for everything that exists, there is a sufficient reason why it exists and why it exists as it exists rather than otherwise.… Read More »
Does open theism have any advantages vis-a-vis other theories of divine providence, in particular, theological determinism (hereafter ‘Calvinism’) and theological compatibilism (hereafter ‘Molinism’), with respect to the problem of evil? The answer, I think, is a clear ‘Yes’. Before stating my case, let me briefly define my terms. By Calvinism I mean the view that… Read More »