Blog Archive

  • Death before the Fall

    Depending on one’s view of Genesis, one might be committed to a position about death before the Fall. Typically, young earth creationists (YECs) hold that there was no animal death before the Fall and there was no human death either. Most old earth creationists (OECs) hold that there was animal death before the Fall. When it comes to human death before the Fall, OECs can go either way. Those OECs who think that (1) there was human death before the Fall and (2) Genesis 2-3 is best understood as historical narrative, typically understand God’s warning to Adam in Gen 2:16…

  • What objective moral duties aren’t

    In talking about the existence of objective moral duties with people I’ve found that there is some confusion as to what is meant by the term. I thought I’d use a small blog post to clear up some common misunderstandings of the term. To start, we have the following definition: Moral duties are objective if they are binding independent of anyone’s opinions[1] So there are certain actions that are right and wrong, and their rightness and wrongness are independent of what anyone thinks. People can be correct and incorrect about their moral evaluations of actions. This position could be called…

  • Explanations

    Recently[1] I’ve been doing some reading on (amoung other things) Leibnizian Cosmological Arguments and the Principle of Sufficient Reason. One thing that’s involved in these arguments is the idea of an “explanation”. We generally have a firm grasp or intuition of whether something is an explanation for some fact or not. Consider the following statements involving explanations: John sent his children to school A rather than school B because school A has good sports facilities The kettle is boiling because John turned it on and it was working properly The kettle is boiling because the heat of the flame is being conducted via the…

  • Piracy and moral duties

    I had a thought the other day. We have legal duties to our government who are established as qualified legal authorities by us voting them in. When it comes to piracy it seems many people apply the following premise to make themselves feel better: If I can’t see why a certain law exists or don’t agree with a certain law, then it is fine for me to ignore the duties established by that law. Now it clearly seems that we would disagree with this in cases like murder or rape, so why the restricted application? One possible answer is that…

  • Outrage, praise and empathy

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    I often defend the following formulation of the moral argument (taken from William Lane Craig): 1. If God doesn’t exist, then objective moral duties don’t exist 2. Objective moral duties do exist 3. Therefore, God exists In defence of premise (2) I usually offer the following three points: 2.1. If objective moral duties don’t exist, then everything is permissible. But some things are not permissible. 2.2. If objective moral duties don’t exist, then moral outrage and praise is irrational. But they aren’t irrational. 2.3. We are rationally compelled to trust our perceptions until we are given a defeater for them.…

  • Two meta-theological questions

    I’m not entirely sure how the term meta-theology is defined in general, but for the sake of this blog we’re going to define meta-theology as “thinking about theology”. Now sometimes, in systematic theology (defined a little later) we think about things like inerrancy and knowledge about God which, I guess, involve thinking about theology in some sense. So, by my definition, meta-theology shares at least some content with normal theology. I’m not really too fazed by this though. Moreover, we’ll define applied theology as “thinking about how our theological conclusions apply to current social, political and economic issues”. To get a…

  • Two problems of revelation

    Every now and then I’ve seen two arguments against religion with regard to revelation. They are the problem of contradicting revelations and the problem of unclear revelation. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t considered these arguments in any detailed way, but as far as I can tell each has a premise which is supposed to lead to the conclusion that God doesn’t exist or at least that the God hasn’t revealed himself in a specific religion. Problem of Contradicting Revelations Here the argument goes along the lines that since there are multiple religions in the world,…

  • Which Came First: Right or Law?

    I was thinking about the law today, as people do, and I was wondering which of the following two categories serves to ground the other: Inherent human rights, value or dignity (we’ll just call this “value”) Human duties or law (we’ll just call this “law”) By “duties” I mean [legal, moral and/or parental] obligations (what we “ought” do) and prohibitions (what we “ought not” do). For example, consider the following questions and their plausible answers if value grounds law: “Why shouldn’t we murder?” “Because human life is inherently valuable” “Why should we have freedom of speech?” “Because humans have dignity…

  • A Brief Treatment of the Problem of Evil

    The problem of evil is usually considered one of the strongest arguments for atheism. In this short post we’ll consider it and possible responses available to the classical theist. The argument goes something like this: If God exists, then he is all-powerful (omnipotent) and all-good (omnibenevolent) and all-knowing (omniscient). If God is all-powerful, then he is able to prevent all evil from occurring If God is all-good, then he wants to prevent all evil from occurring. Evil exists. Therefore God does not exist. The argument is certainly valid, but is it sound? Classical theists won’t deny premise 1, and premise…

  • A failed analysis of would-counterfactuals

    I was thinking about “would-counterfactuals” the other day and wondering how they’re meant to be understood on a libertarian account of free will that holds to contrary choice as a necessary condition for a free choice. I thought I had come up with some way of giving meaning to statements of the form “Agent S would do action A if put in circumstance C”. However, I realised that I had failed. Nevertheless, it was interesting thinking about metaphysics and mathematics so I thought I’d share it.

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