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: Philosophical Essays against Open Theism – ch. 8: Anderson »
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: Philosophical Essays against Open Theism – ch. 6: Rogers »
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: Philosophical Essays against Open Theism – ch. 5: Helm »
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: Philosophical Essays against Open Theism – ch. 1: Stump »
In 1 John 4:8, the Bible says categorically that “God is love.” This suggests a hypothesis, namely, that love is God’s fundamental essential attribute. Can we plausibly derive all of God’s other essential attributes from the central attribute of love? To do so we need three things: A clear and plausible definition of love or,… Read More: Perfect Love as God’s Fundamental Attribute »
As I remarked in my previous post, there are roughly two main views on divine impassibility. According to the “unqualified” view, which came to predominate in Western Christianity, God is absolutely impassible in the sense that He cannot be affected by creation in any way. Intrinsically considered, God is absolutely indifferent to creation. He remains exactly… Read More: God as Passible and Impassible – A Defense of Qualified… »
It is often insufficiently appreciated, I submit, that so-called “classical theism” is not a monolithic model of God. There are two main varieties: Unqualified classical theism (UCT) = God is absolutely simple, absolutely immutable, absolutely timeless, absolutely impassible, purely actual, etc. Qualified classical theism (QCT) = God is significantly simple, significantly immutable, significantly timeless, significantly impassible, etc.,… Read More: Two Varieties of Classical Theism »
This is part 5 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.) Chapter 5 is a relatively short chapter that initially focuses on how to understand divine omniscience in relation to… Read More: Todd (ch.5) – Omniscience and the Open Future »
If there’s a “poster child” of classical theism, it would have to be Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 AD). By the end of only the third question in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas has concluded that God necessarily exists and is the absolutely simple and purely actual first, uncaused cause of the moment-by-moment being of everything else.… Read More: Where Aquinas Goes Wrong »
All theists believe—or should believe—that God’s existence is necessary in a metaphysically robust sense of “necessary”. How, after all, could we unswervingly commit our lives and our futures to an ontologically fragile God, one who could—try as He might to avoid it—cease to exist? Or one who, because He simply got bored with eternity, commit deicide,… Read More: God’s Existence Is Not “Logically Necessary” »