Author: Roland

  • Independence or community?

    Every now and then I contribute to a Christian magazine published at the University of Cape Town called The Good News. This time round a question was posed to a Christian (me) and an atheist. Each of us were given 350 words to answer it from our respective worldviews. The question this time was, “Were… →

  • An historical overview of natural law theory from Budziszewski

    In the preface to the second edition of J. Budziszewski’s What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide he gives a brief account of the history of natural law theory (a meta- and normative ethical theory very much at home in, but not limited to, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy). I liked it, so I’m quoting it at length: Speaking… →

  • Whatever begins to exist has a cause

    Consider the following argument: If it’s possible for a thing to come into existence without a cause, this possibility is grounded in a property of the thing itself, or a property of nothingness. This possibility is not grounded in a property of the thing itself, nor in a property of nothingness. Therefore, it is not… →

  • Divine simplicity and the bootstrapping objection

    Divine simplicity is the thesis that God has no parts, and that he is identical with his nature, his existence, and all his properties. Absolute creationism is the thesis that abstract objects exist and that God created each one of them [1]. Now, without divine simplicity, we can raise the bootstrapping objection against absolute creationism:… →

  • Middle knowledge or Molinism?

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    [UPDATE: I’ve actually modified the related post since I wrote this one. I’m leaving this post here, though, because I still think it’s got an interesting thought in it] In my recent post on God’s providence I discussed a view which I called “middle knowledge”. To some this might have been confusing, for this position is… →

  • Divine simplicity and constituent ontologies

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    I’ve recently begun reading about Aristotelean-Thomistic philosophy. In A-T metaphysics, the doctrine of divine simplicity has a central place. This is the doctrine that God has no parts, be they physical or metaphysical. From this it follows that he is identical to his nature, to his existence, and to each of the divine attributes. Now… →

  • God’s control and our free will

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    This is the second post in a series of posts on God’s providence. Last time we looked at a bunch of passages from Scripture which weigh in on the question. This time, as the title suggests, we’re going to talk about the relationship between God’s control and our free will. In our first post, we… →

  • What’s a negative property?

    In discussing the Gödelian ontological argument recently articulated by Alexander Pruss[1] (here and here) there was a need to define what we mean by “positive property”. In the first post, we defined a positive property (in a very Anselmian way) as a property that is better or greater to have than not. In his second paper,… →

  • The gap problem

    In the previous two posts (here and here) we looked at a Gödelian ontological argument from Alexander Pruss, which we’ll use a bit in this post. The gap problem Right, so what is the gap problem? Simply put, solving the gap problem involves bridging the gap between (i) the first cause or necessary being that… →

  • Regent nomadic educated oligarchy

    My brother studies politics and economic history, so sometimes we get into discussions about how governments should be structured. Yesterday we had an interesting discussion, so I thought I’d write something about it. Anarchism and the problem of greed We started by discussing anarchism. Now if you didn’t already know, anarchists aren’t proponents of chaos, they’re… →