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35The pearl of great priceInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (1-2): 151-160. 2017.“The Pearl of Great Price” is a short story that explores the ways faith can go wrong. The central character, Janet, a single mom in a dead end job, is drawn into a multi-level marketing scheme, Benevite, by an unscrupulous salesman. She is encouraged to believe in herself and her dream and to give everything she has to it. She is fed the standard clichés to the effect that you can achieve whatever you want if you try hard enough. In the end her faith in her dream leads to the loss of her relati…Read more
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721The Christian Theodicist's Appeal to LoveReligious Studies 29 (2). 1993.Many Christian theodicists believe that God's creating us with the capacity to love Him and each other justifies, in large part, God's permitting evil. For example, after reminding us that, according to Christian doctrine, the supreme good for human beings is to enter into a reciprocal love relationship with God, Vincent Brummer recently wrote: In creating human persons in order to love them, God necessarily assumes vulnerability in relation to them. In fact, in this relation, he becomes even mo…Read more
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119How an Unsurpassable Being Can Create a Surpassable WorldFaith and Philosophy 11 (2): 260-268. 1994.Imagine that there exists a good, essentially omniscient and omnipotent being named Jove, and that there exists nothing else. No possible being is more powerful or knowledgable. Out of his goodness, Jove decides to create. Since he is all-powerful, there is nothing but the bounds of possibility to prevent him from getting what he wants. Unfortunately, as he holds before his mind the host of worlds, Jove sees that for each there is a better one. Although he can create any of them, he can't create…Read more
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40Degrees and Dimensions of Rightness: Reflections on Martin Peterson’s Dimensions of ConsequentialismEthical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (1): 31-38. 2016.Martin Peterson argues for two interesting and appealing claims: multi-dimensionalism and degrees of rightness. Multi-dimensionalism is the view that more than one factor determines whether an act is right. According to Peterson’s multi-dimensionalism, these factors are not simply ways of achieving some greater aggregate good. Degrees of rightness is the view that some actions are more wrong or less right than others without being entirely wrong. It is of course, compatible with this, that some …Read more
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92A Consequentialist Case for Rejecting the RightJournal of Philosophical Research 18 109-125. 1993.Satisficing and maximizing versions of consequentialism have both assumed that rightness is an alI-or-nothing property. We argue thal this is inimical to the spirit of consequentialism, and that, from the point of view of the consequentialist, actions should be evaluated purely in terms that admit of degree. We first consider the suggestion that rightness and wrongness are a matter of degree. If so, this raises the question of whether the claim that something is wrong says any more than that it …Read more
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16The power of logicMcGraw-Hill. 2012.Basic concepts -- Identifying arguments -- Logic and language -- Informal fallacies -- Categorical logic: statements -- Categorical logic: syllogisms -- Statement logic: truth tables -- Statement logic: proofs -- Predicate logic -- Induction -- Probability.
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42On These Two Commandments Hang All the Law and the ProphetsFaith and Philosophy 22 (1): 3-20. 2005.
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14Review of Peter van Inwagen, God, Mystery, and Knowledge (review)Faith and PhilosophyThis volume collects nine essays published by Peter van Inwagen between 1977 and 1995. Part I features, among other things, modal skepticism with respect to ontological arguments and arguments from evil. Part II addresses certain tensions Christians may feel between modern biology, critical studies of the New Testament, and the comparative study of religions, on the one hand, and Christian orthodoxy, on the other. Part III deploys a formal logic of relative identity to model the internal consist…Read more
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431The Rejection of Objective ConsequentialismUtilitas 9 (2): 241-248. 1997.Objective consequentialism is often criticized because it is impossible to know which of our actions will have the best consequences. Why exactly does this undermine objective consequentialism? I offer a new link between the claim that our knowledge of the future is limited and the rejection of objective consequentialism: that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ and we cannot produce the best consequences available to us. I support this apparently paradoxical contention by way of an analogy. I cannot beat Kar…Read more
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Religion |
Normative Ethics |