After a several month blogging hiatus, I’m resuming my eleven-part series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 10 by Ken Perszyk, “Open Theism and the Soteriological Problem of Evil” (pp. 159–177). In this essay Perszyk compares and contrasts Open… Read More »
There’s a theoretical way for God to exercise quasi-meticulous providence (if He wants to) while respecting creaturely freedom and doing so without either having middle knowledge or exhaustive definite foreknowledge. In short, you can get (nearly) all the advantages of Molinism without the internal incoherence and metaphysical baggage. This is not to say that the… Read More »
This is part nine of eleven in a series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 9 by Greg Welty, “Open Theism, Risk-Taking, and the Problem of Evil” (pp. 140–158). Welty’s argument, roughly, is that open theism enjoys virtually no… Read More »
This is part eight of eleven in a series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 8 by James N. Anderson, “‘May It Have Happened, Lord!’: Open Theism and Past-Directed Prayers” (pp. 121–139). This is one of the more interesting… Read More »
This is part five of eleven in a series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 5 by Paul Helm, “The ‘Openness’ in Compatibilism” (pp. 80–92). Helm is a well-respected philosopher of religion and a long-time staunch defender of theistic… Read More »
This is part three of eleven in a series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 3 by Ben Arbour, “A Few Worries About the Systematic Metaphysics of Open Future Open Theism.” Unlike the previous chapter by Visser, this is… Read More »
This is part seven of eleven in a series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 7 by Robert B. Stewart, “On Open Theism Either God Has False Beliefs, or I Can Know Something That God Cannot” (pp. 110–118). This… Read More »
This is part two of eleven in a series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 2 by Sandra Visser, “God’s Knowledge of an Unreal Future.” Despite her not being an open theist, her essay is overall very congenial toward… Read More »
Since turning toward Eastern Orthodoxy about three years ago, I’ve become heavily interested in the history of Christianity and, in particular, the Church fathers, those influential individuals of, roughly, the first eight centuries AD who were instrumental in shaping what is now known as “orthodox” Christianity. One of those individuals was Athanasius of Alexandria (c.… Read More »
This is my third and final post on Kirk MacGregor’s book, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (2022). My first post dealt with chapters 1–3. My second post dealt with chapter 4. This post covers chapters 5–6 and part of the concluding chapter. In Chapter 5 MacGregor defends Molinism’s Biblical credentials against various open theism friendly prooftexts.… Read More »