Blog Archive

  • Aristotle and the egoist worry (part 1)

    Aristotle famously held that happiness is the ultimate goal of human life, or — to use language more in keeping with Aristotle — that happiness is the chief good and last end of human life: Let us resume our inquiry and state… what is the highest of all goods achievable by action. Verbally there is very general agreement; for both […]

  • Notes on the Genesis Prologue and Leviticus

    I don’t have a track record for writing blog posts particularly frequently, but even if we take this into account my output over the past few months has been less than usual. The reason for this is that I’ve been working on bigger projects, two of which I’d like to share here. I lead a […]

  • Natural law vs the moral argument

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    Up until recently, I had thought that natural law theory was compatible with moral arguments formulated as follows: If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist. Objective moral values and duties do exist. Therefore, God exists. Moral arguments of this kind have been made popular by defenders such as […]

  • Self-perfective immanent activity

    At the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes two ways an activity can be related to the end for which that activity is done: either the activity is distinct from its end, or they are the same. We call those activities that are distinct from their ends transient and those that are the same immanent. Now, because an […]

  • Review of The Dictionary of Christianity and Science

    Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of this book so that I could do this review. The question about the proper relationship between science and religion has a long history in Western thought, going back to at least as far as the fifth century with St. Augustine. Over the centuries Christians have approached this question […]

  • A simple matter made complex

    Alice: I just bought a shelf from Ikea. Bob: Strictly speaking, you bought the matter of a shelf from Ikea. Alice: Well, that’s the thing that matters, isn’t it? 😛 Bob: Not really, since it’s the form that makes the matter a shelf. Alice: That’s a different matter entirely, I was just — Bob: Not […]

  • A web of links

    I’ve been working on a number of larger projects over the past few months, and so haven’t had the opportunity to post anything in a while. I hope to be finishing up with some of these in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I’ve collected a number of interesting links (mostly videos) for your […]

  • Fear of the Lord

    Throughout Scripture — both Old and New testaments — God’s people are told to fear him, which at first glance seems to be an odd response to a God full of grace and love. Perhaps the most puzzling statement comes when the people of Israel first meet God at the mountain in Exodus 20. Notice […]

  • Dialogue on God’s interaction with the universe

    Bob: How can an immaterial God interact with a material universe? Alice: The question itself needs to be questioned before we can answer it. Bob: How so? It seems like a fairly straightforward question. Alice: Well, consider the word “interact.” God does not interact with anything. To interact requires action going in both directions, and […]

  • Patience

    A while ago my church was doing a series on the fruit of the Spirit, listed in Galatians 5:22-23. I did the sermon on patience, and below are the notes for this. The audio can be found at my church’s website. In addition to reading the list of the fruit in Galatians, we also read […]

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