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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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, […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

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