Blog Archive

  • Fear of the Lord

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    The idea of “fear” in relation to God is often downplayed as consisting in merely reverence or awe, especially in the New Testament. But while these are no doubt part of it fear, they are inadequate accounts of it on their own. Scripture routinely pairs fear of God with terrifying things and people’s trembling at […]

  • Potentiality, diversity, and limitation

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    Over on my post introducing potentiality from first principles, a reader raises some important questions that I thought would be worth answering in a separate post. If you haven’t read that post yet, I would encourage you to before continuing here. This idea of “relative non-being” is the best explanation I have come across of the […]

  • Potentiality underlying change

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    In my previous post I explained how we arrive at the notion of potentiality from reflection on two different phenomena, resulting in two equivalent accounts of potentiality: potentiality is relative non-being as well as the passive capacity for act. The second of these accounts arises from considerations of causation and change, but it doesn’t actually end up […]

  • Potentiality from first principles

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    In his gigantic post on existential inertia (section 7.13), Joe Schmid gives an argument against the act-potency distinction which can be roughly summarized as follows: the act-potency distinction commits us to pluralism about being, but pluralism about being is false, therefore we should reject the act-potency distinction. I had not heard of pluralism about being before, but […]

  • God causes evil actions without causing the evil in actions

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    On a recent episode of Unbelievable?, William Lane Craig and James White discussed whether Molinism or Calvinism provide the better approach to God’s providence in light of the reality of evil. Craig is a proponent of Molinism, which seeks to reconcile libertarian freedom with divine providence by positing a special kind of knowledge in God called middle knowledge. White, […]

  • Judgement according to works in Romans 2

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    In Romans 2, Paul says the following: [God] will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath […]

  • A simpler argument about essentially ordered series

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    In the previous post I explained what an essentially ordered series is and gave an argument to the effect that every such series must have a first member. While I still think the argument works, discussions about the post with others have led me to realize that we can give a considerably simpler argument for the same […]

  • Every essentially ordered series has a first member

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    A causal series or chain is an ordered collection of members, where earlier members cause or explain later members. Every member other than the first is preceded by one other member, and every member other than the last is succeeded by one other member. We can distinguish between accidentally ordered series and essentially order series. These don’t exhaust all […]

  • Feser on Koons on relative actuality

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    In a recent blog post, Edward Feser outlines a problem he sees with Rob Koons’ usage of relative actuality/potentiality to explain how an Aristotelian B-theorist might explain the reality of change. If you want to see Koons’ proposal then take a look at section 6 of his paper or take a look at Feser’s brief summary of it […]

  • The sense in which an agent is directly involved in producing the effect

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    In my second post on omni-instrumentality I said the following with respect to God’s essential cooperation with the natural powers of his creatures: … the influences of both God and creature on the final product are direct (or immediate), complete, and total, but according to different modes. That is, they both extend to the final product (direct/immediate), […]

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