Blog Archive

  • Happiness and joy

    I was thinking about the difference between happiness and joy, considered psychologically. The tricky thing with accounting for the difference is that any account of these two has to explain why happiness and joy seem related, but nonetheless why one can rejoice (ie. express joy) in the face of suffering (that is, experiencing sorrow, which is contrary to happiness). It seems to me that happiness is experienced in actively achieving a perceived good (experienced as pleasure), or in passively not lacking a perceived good (experienced as contentment), or in an action insofar as it is directed towards one of these…

  • New blog title

    I’ve just changed the name of this blog from “//Roland’s Comments” to “Thinking Thought Out”. I’ve also changed the tag line from “Theology, Philosophy, Mathematics, Computer Science” to the quote from GK Chesterton that inspired the new name. I originally started this blog thinking I’d write about my four interests previously listed. On reflection, I’ve seen that I predominantly write about philosophy and theology. The previous name, which was a programming “joke”, didn’t seem to fit any more (also, while I like my new theme, I don’t like my name showing up big and bold on the front page).

  • New resources page

    I’ve added a new resources page to the blog. I’ll be updating it as I find new resources on various topics. I’ll try write posts that keep readers updated about new resources appearing.

  • “Knowing” versus “knowing about”

    We can all agree that there is more to knowing someone than merely knowing a collection of facts about them. The latter we might call knowing about them, whereas the former is simply knowing them. James Chastek has recently written a blog post in which he distinguishes two senses of experience: (i) experience as sensation, and (ii) experience as an ordering idea. I wonder if this knowing someone or something is not closely related to this second sense of experience? Perhaps to know someone just is to have an ordering idea about them.

  • Natural and moral goodness

    “Cats have four legs.” What an innocent statement. Who would’ve thought that unpacking it would lead us to a system of ethics? Natural goodness We start by noting that statements like this one don’t tell us some quantifiable fact about cats. Rather they tell us what features a cat has by virtue of which it is called healthy or flourishing. That is, healthy cats have four legs, they eat specific kinds of food, they have tails which are certain proportions to their bodies, they have ears structured in a certain way, they procreate, etc. Similarly, it is by virtue of…

  • Craig’s timeless moment sans creation

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    William Lange Craig’s model of how God relates to time can be stated succinctly: God is timeless sans creation, and temporal since creation.[1] The reason we word it like this is obvious: he can’t be timeless before creation, since before-ness is a temporal relation and creation includes time itself. Craig holds this view largely because he is a presentist,[2] believes that time is relational,[3] and that the past is finite. Ok, now let’s talk about “states.” Let’s say that a state is constituted by a collection of things exemplifying properties, and that an event is a change from one state to another.[4] We’ll say…

  • Independence or community?

    Every now and then I contribute to a Christian magazine published at the University of Cape Town called The Good News. This time round a question was posed to a Christian (me) and an atheist. Each of us were given 350 words to answer it from our respective worldviews. The question this time was, “Were humans born to live independently from each other with an ‘every-man for himself’ kind of mentality?” My answer is as follows: The short answer is no. On the Christian worldview we are born as distinct individuals to participate in loving community. We are called to…

  • An historical overview of natural law theory from Budziszewski

    In the preface to the second edition of J. Budziszewski’s What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide he gives a brief account of the history of natural law theory (a meta- and normative ethical theory very much at home in, but not limited to, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy). I liked it, so I’m quoting it at length: Speaking in the broadest possible terms, the natural law tradition has passed through three historical phases and is now entering the fourth. Phase one belonged to the philosophers. Ancient thinkers like Aristotle discovered that beings have natures, and tried to develop intellectual tools for thinking about…

  • Whatever begins to exist has a cause

    Consider the following argument: If it’s possible for a thing to come into existence without a cause, this possibility is grounded in a property of the thing itself, or a property of nothingness. This possibility is not grounded in a property of the thing itself, nor in a property of nothingness. Therefore, it is not possible for a thing to come into existence without a cause. That possibilities are grounded in properties of things seems quite intuitive. In (1), we exclude the option of there being a property of an external thing that grounds this possibility, for it’s difficult to…

  • Divine simplicity and the bootstrapping objection

    Divine simplicity is the thesis that God has no parts, and that he is identical with his nature, his existence, and all his properties. Absolute creationism is the thesis that abstract objects exist and that God created each one of them [1]. Now, without divine simplicity, we can raise the bootstrapping objection against absolute creationism: logically prior to God creating anything (abstract objects included) he exemplifies the property of omnipotence, and therefore, the property of omnipotence exists externally to God prior to God creating it. Clearly, this is a contradiction. However, if divine simplicity is coherent and true (which we…

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