In Marilynne Robinson’s unforgettable novel Gilead, the congregationalist (and unapologetically Calvinist/Barthian!) pastor John Ames pens this provocative reflection to his young son about trying to “defend the faith.” It is meant to be read–like all of his letters–when the young lad has grown up, presumably long after Ames has died: “Well, I have had a certain amount of experience...
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Recently, I have been reflecting on the concept of magic – on the face of it, a profoundly un-Christian and un-philosophical subject, but one which I have found to be very instructive.
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Via exapologist, a paper by philosopher Erik J. Wielenberg which is essentially a response to various theistic criticisms of atheistic moral realism (or, more precisely, “non-natural non-theistic moral realism.”) His view is that there are ethical brute facts, which are metaphysically necessary and require no grounding or justification. I read the paper quickly, mostly...
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Christianity differs from non-religious philosophies not only in what it says about God, but also in what it says about mankind. According to (most) Christians, men have souls, free will, and other things that cannot be explained by science alone. Most atheists, on the other hand, would say that everything about humanity can, by...
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People have all sorts of objections to Christianity and to the Bible, ranging from the very reasonable to the not-so-reasonable. Some are philosophical, some scientific; others are historical or moral. All, however, are modern.
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Atheism’s just simpler, isn’t it? No spirits, no souls, no angels, no miracles, no God: just Dawkins’ “blind physical forces” operating the same way on everything, always and everywhere. God is a redundancy, a violation of Occam’s Razor, a hypothesis of which we (like Laplace) have no need. Right? Modern science has regularized our...
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This summer, I thought a lot about the problem of foreknowledge and free will. If God knows what we’re going to do beforehand – as certainly seems to be the case – how can our actions truly be described as “free”? There is far too much to say about this problem in one blog...
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