•  381
    A review of Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos.
  •  145
    We all have an intuitive grasp of the concept of evidence. Evidence makes beliefs reasonable, justifies jury verdicts, and helps resolve our disagreements. Yet getting clear about what evidence is is surprisingly difficult. Among other possibilities, evidence might consist in physical objects like a candlestick found at the crime scene, propositions like ‘a candlestick was found at the crime scene,’ or experiences like the experience of witnessing a candlestick at the crime scene. This dissertat…Read more
  •  3567
    St. Thomas Aquinas on Intelligent Design
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 85 79-97. 2011.
    Recently, the Intelligent Design (ID) movement has challenged the claim of many in the scientific establishment that nature gives no empirical signs of having been deliberately designed. In particular, ID arguments in biology dispute the notion that neo-Darwinian evolution is the only viable scientific explanation of the origin of biological novelty, arguing that there are telltale signs of the activity of intelligence which can be recognized and studied empirically. In recent years, a number of…Read more
  •  1272
    Against Contextualism: Belief, Evidence, & the Bank Cases
    Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 17 (1): 57-70. 2013.
    Contextualism (the view that ‘knowledge’ and its variants are context-sensitive) has been supported in large part through appeal to intuitions about Keith DeRose’s Bank Cases. Recently, however, the contextualist construal of these cases has come under fire from Kent Bach and Jennifer Nagel who question whether the Bank Case subject’s confidence can remain constant in both low- and high-stakes cases. Having explained the Bank Cases and this challenge to them, I argue that DeRose has given a reas…Read more
  •  216
    Jerry Root: C.S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil (review)
    Theological Book Review 23 (2): 80-81. 2011.
    A review of Jerry Root's book C.S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil.
  •  231
    In a time when conservatives believe that the traditional family is under increasing fire, some think an appeal to Darwinian science may be the answer. I argue that these conservatives are wrong to maintain that Darwinian theory can serve as the intellectual foundation for the traditional conception of the family. Contra Larry Arnhart and James Q. Wilson, a Darwinian philosophy of nature simply lacks the stability the traditional family requires; it cannot support the traditional conception of h…Read more
  •  533
    Can a Thomist Be a Darwinist?
    In Jay W. Richards (ed.), God and Evolution, . pp. 187-202. 2010.
    A discussion of several tensions between Thomistic philosophy and modern Darwinian theory as well as several recent Thomistic criticisms of intelligent design.