I received the following reply to an earlier blog post concerning whether it was possible for someone to rationally believe in the miraculous. Dear Alan, I am a Czech grad student in philosophy who wants to write a dissertation concerning contemporary analytical philosophy of religion, mainly the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I… Read More »
Here’s another recent review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. This one from The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2007 edition. It’s written by H. Allen Orr, a biologist, religious agnostic, and noted critic of the Intelligent Design movement. All in all, Orr’s review strikes me as a balanced one. He’s got no particular… Read More »
Roughly stated, presentism is the view that the only time at which anything exists is now. Past events are no more; future events are not yet. If it doesn’t exist now then it doesn’t exist, period. One common objection to presentism is known as the triviality objection. According to this objection, presentism is either (a)… Read More »
I just came across a review by Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished Christian philosopher, of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. It’s a fun read, and Plantinga does a good job of skewering Dawkins’ woefully overrated “Who designed the Designer?” objection against theism. Here’s Plantinga’s summary prior to his examination of the particulars of Dawkins’ main argument:… Read More »
In his Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article entitled “Foreknowledge and Free Will,” Norman Swartz defends the view that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human free will and contends that arguments for incompatibilism inevitably commit a certain modal fallacy. I think he’s wrong on both counts, but I want to focus here just on the second… Read More »
I’m just about finished listening to an audio CD lecture series entitled “The Historical Jesus” by Bart Ehrman. It’s an interesting series by a scholar who, I gather, represents more-or-less a mainstream position in biblical scholarship. In other words, Ehrman is neither an out-and-out debunker of orthodox Christianity nor an out-and-out advocate and apologist. Rather,… Read More »
This is quite an entertaining dialogue (HT: Victor Reppert). It makes a good point about the concept of tolerance, namely, that to be tolerant of something is not to accept it, but to graciously put up with it while rejecting it. Another important issue that comes up near the end is that of discrimination. What,… Read More »
A reader of this blog, Patrick, submitted a comment to my previous post, but because of some technical glitches I was experiencing with the Blogger software, I think I deleted the post his comment was attached to. Anyway, his comment is worth a response. Interesting, Alan. You say, “Let us suppose that the time is… Read More »
Over the past four months I’ve been working off-and-on on a paper on tense logic, in which I argue against the common assumption (common, that is, in philosophy of time circles) that the mere fact that some event happens at time t is sufficient for it to have always been the case prior to t,… Read More »
In a recent issue of The Harvard Crimson, well-known psychology prof. Steven Pinker has an interesting editorial critique of a new report by the Harvard Committee on General Education. The editorial gets off to a pretty good start, but then descends into absurd posturing on the relation between faith (= religion) and reason (= science),… Read More »