‘Maverick Philosopher‘ Bill Vallicella has written recently on the distinction between ‘de re‘ and ‘de dicto‘ beliefs. As he explains the distinction, a de dicto belief is a belief about a dictum (basically, a proposition). Thus, in “Sam believes that Cicero is a politician” the verb “believes” is followed by a ‘that’-clause which expresses a… Read More »
Here’s a nice short piece by Frank Pastore. It’s entitled “Why Atheism Fails: The Four Big Bangs”. The four problems, posed somewhat more precisely than Pastore himself does, are: How did the universe come about given that it’s non-eternal? How could life have emerged from non-living matter? How could mind and self-consciousness have emerged from… Read More »
Suppose that free will theism is true. Free will theism entails theism, the thesis that God exists, where ‘God’ is understood to denote a necessary being essentially possessing the greatest possible set of compossible great-making properties, including maximal power, knowledge, and goodness. Free will theism also entails that God has created a world of creatures… Read More »
What philosophers call ‘propositions’ are useful theoretical entities. They are useful because they help to unify a range of otherwise disparate mental and linguistic phenomena. Thus, propositions are often thought to be (a) the contents of our mental representations, (b) the objects of intentional attitudes, (c) the meanings of sentences, and (d) the primary bearers… Read More »
It is commonly held among philosophers that events are the kinds of things that can most properly be said to serve as causes and effects. On this view, the event of the rock’s hitting the window causes the event of the window’s breaking. Some, however, prefer to analyze causation in terms of states (or states-of-affairs).… Read More »
Just got a paper accepted for publication in Religious Studies. Entitled “Generic Open Theism and Some Varieties Thereof,” it will probably come out in early 2008. Here’s the almost final version. I’ll be reading a somewhat shortened version of this paper at the upcoming Pacific APA in early April.
My recent post on the problem of evil stirred up quite a bit of discussion. One issue that I brushed over in my post, but which came up repeatedly in the comments, was that theism is no better than atheistic materialism at explaining how there can be objective moral standards due to the infamous “Euthyphro… Read More »
Brilliant satire. Enjoy. (HT: Uncommon Descent)
The most oft-discussed objection against theism is the problem of evil, and it runs basically as follows: If an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God exists, then he obviously wouldn’t allow an evil unless he had a sufficiently good reason for doing so. Cite numerous examples of apparently gratuitous evils (i.e., evils for which there does not… Read More »
There’s an interesting post over at Bill Vallicella’s blog on whether belief in God is in the same rational boat as belief that there is a tiny china teapot orbiting the sun, an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon, or the flying spaghetti monster. Bill says no, and I agree. He notes… Read More »