In a short essay entitled “Is There a God?” Betrand Russell famously compared religious belief, including belief in God, to believing in the existence of celestial teapot: Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a… Read More: God Is Not a Celestial Teapot »
Here’s a link to a recent critique of William Lane Craig’s defense of Molinism, a theory of divine providence that claims to reconcile unconditional (i.e., libertarian) human freedom with meticulous providence (the notion that God has sovereignly decreed everything that happens) by attributing to God “middle knowledge”. Middle knowledge is said to be infallible, comprehensive… Read More: A Critique of Craig on Middle Knowledge »
Regarding the meaning of life, Bertrand Russell famously had this to say in “A Free Man’s Worship”: Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product… Read More: Rationality and the Meaning of Life »
According to the ‘redundancy’ theory of truth, “p is true” has the same content as “p”. The predicate “is true” adds nothing and so is eliminable salva significatione (without change of meaning). It seems to me that this position is deeply, though instructively, mistaken. The basic mistake of the redundancy theory, as I see it,… Read More: Some Reflections on Truth and Assertion »
I find the following argument persuasive: I have an intrinsically first-person awareness of myself as a self, i.e., as a center of first-person awareness. All purely physical phenomena can be wholly understood in strictly third-person terms. The self qua self (first-person qua first-person) cannot be wholly understood in non-self (third-person) terms. Therefore, I am not… Read More: Against Mind-Body Physicalism »
Last year I was going through a real dry spell – it seemed like I couldn’t get anything published. So far this year, however, things have gone pretty well. I’ve had three papers accepted at three different journals: Fumerton’s Principle of Inferential Justification, Skepticism, and the Nature of Inference (forthcoming in Journal of Philosophical Research)… Read More: Some of My Recent Publications »
A few months back during one of the presidential primary debates someone asked the nominees “Do you believe in evolution?” Some answered ‘yes’ and some answered ‘no’, but frankly, both answers are misguided. The problem is that the term ‘evolution’ is multiply ambiguous, a fact which has resulted in massive amounts of confusion in discussions… Read More: On Evolution and Ambiguity »
There’s an interesting post at Uncommon Descent that raises a very good question for the biological debate over intelligent design. For those who don’t know, biological intelligent design (BID) is the view that the combination of random mutations + natural selection + deep time is not sufficient to account for the existence of life on… Read More: Irreducible Complexity – What if? »
This post is a somewhat belated reply to Ian’s last comment on this post. He and I have different theories of time – he defends the ‘static block’ view, whereas I am a presentist. As part and parcel of that larger debate we have been arguing about “tensed facts”. As a presentist, I hold that… Read More: On Tensed Facts and Terminological Disputes »
I say that God cannot have infallible foreknowledge of creaturely libertarian free choices. By ‘infallible’ I mean the impossibility of error. By ‘foreknowledge’ I mean knowledge of an event that is temporally prior to that event. Thus, “S foreknows that event E will occur” means that at some time t S knows that E will… Read More: Why There Can’t Be Infallible Foreknowledge of Libertarian Free Choices »