Blog Archive

  • Fear of the Lord

    ,

    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 them, which is not necessarily the case with reverence. And it often connects fear of God with an active response, whereas being in awe of something is mostly (if not entirely) passive. In this post, I want to give a more nuanced analysis of fear…

  • Potentiality, diversity, and limitation

    ,

    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 idea that potency “limits” act, though I still do not quite understand it. It seems to me that “relative non-being” really presupposes diversity in being rather than explaining that diversity; if so, it would be better just to take the diversity as primitive. We could…

  • Potentiality underlying change

    ,

    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 telling us how potentiality functions within change—it simply posits potentiality as a necessary condition for change. In this post, then, I’d like to develop the picture further, and specifically discuss the special sorts of potentials that underlie the process of change. When something changes from…

  • Potentiality from first principles

    ,

    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 Schmid quotes Merricks (a recent critic of the view) giving the following general idea: Monism about being (monism for short) says that everything enjoys the same way of being. So monism implies, for example, that if there are pure sets and if there are mountains, then pure…

  • God causes evil actions without causing the evil in actions

    ,

    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, on the other hand, is a proponent of the compatibilist model of providence common among Reformed theologians, which posits that divine determinism is compatible with human freedom because the latter doesn’t require alternate choice.[1] In the course of this discussion, Craig presents an argument for thinking…

  • Judgement according to works in Romans 2

    , ,

    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 and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.…

  • A simpler argument about essentially ordered series

    ,

    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 conclusion. Start with a case of one thing causally influencing another, say Alice picking up her mug from the table. The thing doing the causing (Alice) is the agent and the thing being influenced (the mug) is the patient. Both the agent and the patient contribute something that enables…

  • Every essentially ordered series has a first member

    ,

    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 the casual series there could be, but they do pick out important groups. The difference between these two types of causal series can be illustrated with paradigm examples. A paradigm case of accidentally ordered series is that of parents begetting children: x begets y, y…

  • Feser on Koons on relative actuality

    , ,

    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 on his blog post; I will assume a general familiarity with it in this post. The objection is as follows: Suppose someone suggested that time was nothing more than a spatial dimension.  I reject this view, and Rob wants to avoid it too.  One problem…

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

    ,

    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), to all of the final product (complete), and to every detail of the final product (total), but not in the same way (different modes). It’s because they contribute according to different modes that both God and creature can influence the effect without rendering the other…

Categories

Posts by Month