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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, →
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Eternity’s relation to time
A few months ago, reader Ante asked this question on my What I Believe page: I am very much struggling how to combine a presentist account of time (like the A-theory for example) and the view that God is outside of time, in a Thomistic sense. I would be very thankful for your help, since it seems to →
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Natural law vs the moral argument
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 →
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Essentially ordered series
The notion of a series, or chain or regress, comes up a number of times in philosophical discussions. In this post, we’re going formalize the notion in general, and then develop this into a formalization of essentially ordered series in particular. Intuitively, a series is when we start with some member and from there we trace through →
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Crutches and culture
I was thinking about silly claims like “religion is a crutch” or “people are religious because of their culture.” It seems to me that these claims are either uninteresting or false. If taken as a claim that many religious people are religious because of perceived psychological benefits or cultural bias, it is uninteresting, at least →
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Craig’s timeless moment sans creation
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 →
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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: →
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Thinking Thought Out 