I’ve recently been reading a book critical of open theism by the late Ben Arbour. In later chapters he contends that open future open theism presupposes presentism as the ontology of time and claims, without any supporting argument other than footnotes to an essay by Tom Crisp, that presentism is metaphysically contingent. That is, Arbour… Read More »
I intend in the near future to do an extended blog review/critique of Tom Oord’s provocatively titled book The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (2023). Partially in preparation for that, I thought I should do some reflection on the concept of omnipotence. This is me grappling with the topic from my “armchair.”… Read More »
Prominent Christian philosopher, apologist, and analytic theologian William Lane Craig is in the process of releasing his magnum opus, a 5-volume Systematic Philosophical Theology (Wiley Blackwell, 2025–2026). Volume 2a (released in 2025) focuses on God’s attributes and includes a 100-page chapter on omniscience. Now aged 76, Craig presumably intends this chapter to be the crowning… Read More »
Prominent Christian philosopher, apologist, and analytic theologian William Lane Craig is in the process of releasing his magnum opus, a 5-volume Systematic Philosophical Theology (Wiley Blackwell, 2025–2026). Volume 2a (released in 2025) focuses on God’s attributes and includes a 100-page chapter on omniscience. Now aged 76, Craig presumably intends this chapter to be the crowning… Read More »
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 »