If you were to survey what analytic philosophers have said about God’s omniscience over the past 50 years or so, you’d find that the vast majority of them define omniscience in strictly propositional terms. For example, William Lane Craig in vol. 2a of his recent Systematic Philosophical Theology (2025), defends the following definition of omniscience… Read More »
A few months ago I wrote a post exploring an aporetic triad related to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In this post I want to approach the topic from a different angle by considering three different models of the Trinity. By “the Trinity” I mean a tri-personal version of monotheism such as is depicted… Read More »
Prominent Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig recently (2016) published a book God over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism (Oxford) focused on divine aseity, i.e., the idea that God exists a se, from Himself alone. Aseity is a standard commitment of monotheism. It means that nothing is more fundamental than God… Read More »
This post is about the essence–energies distinction, that is, the distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies. The distinction is central to Eastern Orthodox theology, but is largely ignored and often denied in Western Christianity. So what gives? What is this distinction supposed to be? Why do Eastern Christians think it’s vitally important? And why… Read More »
If one starts with absolute simplicity, then the only way to develop trinitarianism is to view the divine Persons as relations of the simple divine essence (e) to itself. We might, for example, think of the Father, Son, and Spirit in terms of the three relations entailed by identity. Thus, the Father is a monadic… Read More »
This post is the third in a series on a recent book by James D. Gifford, Jr. titled The Hexagon of Heresy: A Historical and Theological Study of Definitional Divine Simplicity (Wipf & Stock, 2022). In the first post I discussed the problem of the One and the Many and why the idea of absolute… 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 six 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 6 by Katherin Rogers, “Foreknowledge, Freedom, and Vicious Circles: Anselm vs. Open Theism” (pp. 93–109). Rogers is a well-respected philosopher of religion and a… 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 »
With this post I begin a series of responses to eleven essays in a book edited by Ben Arbour titled Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). (As an aside, Ben was a friend, a good scholar, and a model Christian. In November of 2020 he and his wife Meg were both tragically killed by… Read More »