There are two sides to the problem of evil: God’s responsibility for evil God’s response to evil. (1) is retrospective; it has to do with God’s complicity in past occurrences of evil. (2) is prospective; it has to do with God’s ability to respond to evil moving forward—to eliminate evil, to bring good out of… Read More »
In my previous post, I develop what I take to be a refutation of the simple foreknowledge (SF) view. In this post I want to look at little more carefully at that refutation, consider how a proponent of SF might try to get around it, and show that this response does nothing to resolve the… Read More »
In philosophical theology, simple foreknowledge (SF) is the view that Minimal monotheism is true, i.e., there is one, necessarily existing, personal, omniscient, etc. God who freely creates ex nihilo. God is temporally everlasting and therefore has a past, present, and future. The future is causally open, i.e., there are multiple causally possible futures, and therefore… Read More »
Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) was, and still is, an influential Eastern Orthodox theologian. I recently read an English translation of his book Orthodox Theology: An Introduction (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978) and was surprised to see several unambiguously clear endorsements of the idea that in creating free creatures, God has taken significant risks. That admission alone is… Read More »
Of all the objections that have been made against open theism, one of the most serious ones, to my mind, is the challenge of Church tradition. Simply stated, the objection is that open theism is not only too novel, but also contrary to Church tradition, and is therefore not a viewpoint that Christians should even… Read More »
During the past 8 months, I’ve journeyed from a relatively generic, low-church, broadly Wesleyan Protestantism toward Eastern Orthodoxy. In this post I’ll briefly recount my journey. In follow-up postings I’ll share some thoughts on how Open Theism relates to Church tradition in general and to Eastern Orthodoxy in particular. My initial catalyst for exploring Orthodoxy… Read More »
Introduction It’s been about a year since I last blogged. I plan to get back into it with more consistency. This last year my wife and I became foster parents and subsequently adoptive parents to a little girl (now 3 years old), and that coupled with a few other things has made it hard to… Read More »
My evaluation of Thomistic metaphysics begins where Feser does in his recent book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, namely, with the theory of act and potency.* His chapter on this topic is 57 pages long, so I’ll need to break the topic down into parts. I’m going to parallel Feser’s section numbering to structure my discussion.… Read More »
This post begins a series on Thomistic Metaphysics. In this introductory post I explain my motivations in undertaking this series. (1) Better understanding I went to graduate school at Fordham University. It’s run by the Jesuits, a Roman Catholic monastic order. And since Thomas Aquinas is in many respects “The Philosopher” of the Roman Catholic… Read More »
This post continues a series on issues related to truth. In previous posts I have looked at (a) the correspondence theory of truth and its relation to truthmaking, (b) disquotation principles, and (c) the conflict between correspondence and disquotation principles, to the detriment of the latter. In this post I want to look at a distinction… Read More »