-
510A new cosmological argumentReligious Studies 35 (4): 461-476. 1999.We will give a new cosmological argument for the existence of a being who, although not proved to be the absolutely perfect God of the great Medieval theists, also is capable of playing the role in the lives of working theists of a being that is a suitable object of worship, adoration, love, respect, and obedience. Unlike the absolutely perfect God, the God whose necessary existence is established by our argument will not be shown to essentially have the divine perfections of omnipotence, omnisc…Read more
-
46A recombinationist like the earlier Armstrong (1989) claims that logically possible worlds are recombinations of items found in the actual world, with some items reduplicated if need be and others deleted. An immediate consequence of this is that if an..
-
30“We are always already thrown into concrete factual circumstances, facing possibilities that we need to come to grips with. By choosing some we exclude others, thus making them no longer possible. What we are thrown into is the past and present, and the possibilities loom ahead of us, though we may try to turn our back on them. The future is the home of the possibilities while the present and past define the circumstances in which we make our choices, circumstances we can no longer affect.”…Read more
-
34Toner on Judgment and EternalismFaith and Philosophy 25 (3): 317-321. 2008.Patrick Toner has argued that eternalism, the doctrine that all times are ontologically on par, conflicts with the Catholic view of judgment as based on the state of the soul at death. For, he holds, it is arbitrary that judgment should be based on what happened at some particular time, unless, as presentism holds, that time is the only that really exists. I shall argue that his argument fails because the eternalist can say that judgment is simultaneous with the state of soul that is being judge…Read more
-
144Infinite Lotteries, Perfectly Thin Darts and InfinitesimalsThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (2): 81-89. 2012.One of the problems that Bayesian regularity, the thesis that all contingent propositions should be given probabilities strictly between zero and one, faces is the possibility of random processes that randomly and uniformly choose a number between zero and one. According to classical probability theory, the probability that such a process picks a particular number in the range is zero, but of course any number in the range can indeed be picked. There is a solution to this particular problem on t…Read more
-
185Possibility is not consistencyPhilosophical Studies 172 (9): 2341-2348. 2015.We shall use Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem to show that consistency is not possibility, and then argue that the argument does serious damage to some theories of modality where consistency plays a major but not exclusive role
-
"The evidential argument from evil: a second look Extracts from Religion in the Public Square [Liberal democracy and the place of religion in politics] Divine foreknowledge and human freedom are compatible Extract from Religion in the Public Square [Audi on religion9 politics, and liberal democracy] Why we should reject what liberalism tells us about speaking and acting in public for religious reasons Extract from" The Molinist account of providence'A new cosmological argument The being that knew too ...In William J. Wainwright (ed.), Philosophy of Religion, Routledge. pp. 1. 2009.
-
8Freedom, Will, and NatureProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 25-27. 2007.
-
10Philosophy and LanguageProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 84 213-222. 2010.I shall discuss the problem of the definition of lying and the formulation of the duty of truthtelling. I shall argue that the morality of assertion is a special case of the morality of endorsement, and that a criterion of adequacy for an account of lying is that it handles certain cases of dishonest endorsement as well. Standardviews of lying fail to do so. I shall offer an account of the duty of honest endorsement in terms of the intention to avoid falsehood. But, in the end, we may simplyhave…Read more
-
91A response to Almeida and JudischInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 53 (2): 65-72. 2003.Our new cosmological argument for the existence of God weakens the usual Principle of Sufficient Reason premise that every contingent true proposition has an explanation to a weaker principle (WPSR) that every such proposition could have an explanation. Almeida and Judisch have criticized the premises of our argument for leading to a contradiction. We show that their argument fails, but along the way we are led to clarify the nature of the conclusion of our argument. Moreover, we discuss an argu…Read more
-
167The accomplishment of plans: a new version of the principle of double effectPhilosophical Studies 165 (1): 49-69. 2013.The classical principle of double effect offers permissibility conditions for actions foreseen to lead to evil outcomes. I shall argue that certain kinds of closeness cases, as well as general heuristic considerations about the order of explanation, lead us to replace the intensional concept of intention with the extensional concept of accomplishment in double effect
-
18I argue that standard functionalism leads to absurd conclusions as to the number of minds that would exist in the universe if persons were duplicated
-
141Null probability, dominance and rotationAnalysis 73 (4): 682-685. 2013.New arguments against Bayesian regularity and an otherwise plausible domination principle are offered on the basis of rotational symmetry. The arguments against Bayesian regularity work in very general settings
-
125A new free-will defenceReligious Studies 39 (2): 211-223. 2003.This paper argues that if creatures are to have significant free will, then God's essential omni-benevolence and essential omnipotence cannot logically preclude Him from creating a world containing a moral evil. The paper maintains that this traditional conclusion does not need to rest on reliance on subjunctive conditionals of free will. It can be grounded in several independent ways based on premises that many will accept.