Thesis: Whatever anyone must believe in order rationally to assert a proposition p is part of the meaning of p. Obvious case: One cannot rationally assert p unless one believes that p. If the thesis is right, then it provides a test for whether a given proposition q is part of the meaning of p.… Read More »
I’v just read an interesting paper on Enigman’s website entitled “Omniscience and the Odyssey Theodicy”. At one point in the paper, he employs Patrick Grim’s well-known Cantorian argument against omniscience to argue for open theism over against an essentially epistemically static (EES) deity (my term, not his). The argument is intriguing. According to set theory,… Read More »
This is an insightful interview with author and sociologist Tom Wolfe. He discusses a variety of topics including political correctness, coed dorms, and feminism. The general theme is that many people and institutions today are too concerned with ephemeral goods like social status, and for the sake of them sacrifice timeless goods like courage, temperance,… Read More »
In philosophical discussions, and especially in philosophy of religion, the term “incompatibilism” comes up in wide variety of contexts. I’ve discerned five different types of incompatibilism. Moral incompatibilism: The thesis that human moral responsibility is incompatible with thoroughgoing causal determinism. Ontic incompatibilism: The thesis that foreexistence is incompatible with future contingency. More precisely, the thesis… Read More »
During my year at Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion, I’m going to be working on a book-length research project on open theism, a relatively new proposal for understanding divine providence that has gotten a lot of discussion over the last 15 years, especially in philosophy of religion and evangelical theology circles. Roughly stated,… Read More »
My family and I are now living in South Bend, Indiana. We survived the move well enough, though unfortunately some of our furniture didn’t. (The movers wrecked the baby’s crib, broke all four of our floor lamps, and lost a box containing three of wall pictures. Next time we go U-Haul.) Anyway, my first blog… Read More »
Over at Bill Dembski’s blog, Uncommon Descent, I recently got into an extended discussion on the relation of intelligent design and open theism (short answer – neither entails anything regarding the other). For those who might be interested, here’s the link. (The initial comment on open theism that prompted my reply occurs near the end… Read More »
A blogger named Brandon has criticized the argument of my previous post as follows: What Rhoda calls “Trumping” is in fact simply a tendentious way of saying “correcting one’s own reasoning on the basis of authority”; and the Trumper Rhoda particularly has in mind is someone who says that on matters where Scripture speaks plainly… Read More »
In his contribution to a recent book, Perspectives on the Doctrine of God (Bruce A. Ware, ed.), Paul Helm leads off with an epigraph from Anselm (the exact source is not given): But if Scripture indubitably opposes our understanding, even though our reasoning appears to us to be impregnable, still it ought not to be… Read More »
1) Philosopher William Vallicella argues that the Buddhist “no-self” doctrine (the view that nothing has an enduring self-nature) is self-refuting here. (Incidentally, if any of you want to write a paper on Buddhism, this would be a fine article to comment on.) 2) Yandell remarks that contemporary dismissals of mind-body dualism (an assumption of Jainism… Read More »