One of the reasons I named this blog ‘Alanyzer’ is because that’s an anagram of “analyzer”, which is what I like to do. I just discovered a cool website that generates anagrams from a target input phrase into one of several different languages. To my chagrin, anagrams of my full name ‘Alan Robert Rhoda’ include:… Read More »
William Lane Craig has done much in recent years to develop and defend what’s now known as the kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. The core of the argument runs as follows: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. As it stands… Read More »
I recently learned that Dr. Francis Beckwith, one of my favorite philosophy professors here at UNLV when I was an undergraduate and an affable and prolific scholar, has been denied tenure at Baylor University. From the published accounts so far, it looks like Beckwith’s open support of a pro-life, pro-intelligent design position is what did… Read More »
I’ve just starting reading a neat book that a friend clued me in to. It’s called The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, by A. G. Sertillanges, O.P. First published in 1920 and revised in 1934, the book is written by an accomplished Thomistic scholar as a guide for anyone who is interested in pursuing… Read More »
I’m involved in a vigorous discussion with Ocham and Tom on a couple earlier posts (Link1, Link2) concerning presentism and causation and we’ve gotten onto the issue of the relation between truthmakers and truth conditions. Are they the same thing? If not, what’s the difference? For what it’s worth, here’s my take. Most philosophers, myself… Read More »
Biologist Eric Pianka advocates using the ebola virus to kill 90% of world’s population and gets a standing ovation from the Texas Academy of Science (Link). The scary thing is that he seems to be serious. (HT: Victor Reppert) Update (4.12.06): There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere over this incident and over… Read More »
My friend, commentator, and sometime collaborator, Tom Belt, makes some good suggestions regarding the problem of reconciling presentism with diachronic causal relations (my emphasis in bold): What about distinguishing between two kinds of causality? You could posit a proper/direct sort of causality as ‘the effect of t1 upon its immediate successor t2′. The temporal transition… Read More »
I’m rather attracted to presentism, the view that the present is coextensive with the real. The past is no more; the future is not yet; whatever exists simpliciter exists now. Presentism is one of several views that affirms an A-theory of time (roughly, the A-theory says that temporal becoming is real, and not merely apparent).… Read More »
Picking up where I left off in my last post … On Thursday evening I sat through an interesting exchange between two process theists (Donald Viney and Randall Auxier), an open theist (David Basinger), and C. Steven Evans, well-known Kierkegaard scholar (I’m not sure where Evans stands vis-a-vis open theism. He’s definitely not a theological… Read More »
Well, it’s Friday morning here in Portland, Oregon, where this year’s Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association is being held. On Thursday morning, I went to an interesting session on the philosophy of time. The first paper, by well-known B-theorist Nathan Oaklander, was entitled “Is the Future Open?” As one would expect for… Read More »