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44The Divine Belief Theory of Truth: Might It Work?In Miroslaw Szatkowski (ed.), God, Truth, and other Enigmas, De Gruyter. pp. 141-152. 2015.
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271David Lewis’s Counterfactual Arrow of TimeNoûs 37 (4). 2003.David Lewis (1979) has argued that according to his possible worlds analysis of counterfactuals, “backtracking” counterfactuals of the form “If event A were to happen at tA, then event B would happen at tB” where tB precedes tA, are usually false if B does not actually happen at tB. On the other..
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9As Mark Murphy has recently shown, standard justifications of universal divine authority are insufficient. [1] By “divine authority” I shall mean the doctrine that obedience is morally owed to God by all. God would not give us a command that we did not have a reason to act in accordance with, Murphy argues, but it does not follow that we would be obliged, much less morally obliged, to have the fact of God’s having commanded the action be among our practical reasons for the action. We might, for …Read more
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37I argue that the answer is affirmative, pace Oppy.
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26Plantinga starts by outlining an apparent conflict between certain claims of methodologically naturalist science and Christian faith. The conflict is not a logical contradiction, at least not once we are dealing with the more cautious “minus” versions of the doctrines, but some weaker relation such as the rational impossibility of believing both. 2. Scepticism about Simonian science..
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301Infinitesimals are too small for countably infinite fair lotteriesSynthese 191 (6): 1051-1057. 2014.We show that infinitesimal probabilities are much too small for modeling the individual outcome of a countably infinite fair lottery
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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..
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170Omniscience, Weak PSR, and MethodPhilo 6 (1): 33-48. 2003.Adhering to the traditional concept of omniscience lands Gale in the incoherence Grim’s Cantorian arguments reveal in talk of “all propositions.” By constructing variants and extensions of Grim’s arguments, I explain why various ways out of the incoherence are unacceptable, why theists would do better to adopt a certain revisionary concept of omniscience, and why the Cantorian troubles are so deep as to be troubles as well for Gale’s Weak PSR. I conclude with some brief reflections on method, su…Read more
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153An Open Infinite Future is ImpossibleFaith and Philosophy 33 (4): 461-464. 2016.According to the Open Futurist there are no true undetermined contingent propositions about the future. I shall argue on probabilistic grounds that there are some statements about infinite futures that Open Futurism cannot handle. The Open Futurist’s best bet is to reject an infinite future, but a Christian philosopher cannot take that bet, and hence should reject Open Futurism.
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97Ultimate ExplanationsContemporary Pragmatism 2 (2): 35-48. 2005.Nicholas Rescher accepts the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In his Nature and Understanding, he gives two candidates for an ultimate explanation: a virtuously circular explanations of facts by laws and laws by facts, and an explanation of the world in terms of optimalism. I argue that the first of these depends on the second, and that the second could be improved by switching to a weaker optimalism or to a theistic explanation
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187From restricted to full omniscience: ALEXANDER R. PRUSSReligious Studies 47 (2): 257-264. 2011.Some, notably Peter van Inwagen, in order to avoid problems with free will and omniscience, replace the condition that an omniscient being knows all true propositions with a version of the apparently weaker condition that an omniscient being knows all knowable true propositions. I shall show that the apparently weaker condition, when conjoined with uncontroversial claims and the logical closure of an omniscient being's knowledge, still yields the claim that an omniscient being knows all true pro…Read more
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115One Body: Responses to CriticsRoczniki Filozoficzne 63 (3): 155-175. 2015.In this article I respond to a number of powerful criticisms of my book One Body.
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326A Counterexample to Plantinga’s Free Will DefenseFaith and Philosophy 29 (4): 400-415. 2012.Plantinga’s Free Will Defense is an argument that, possibly, God cannot actualize a world containing significant creaturely free will and no wrongdoings. I will argue that if standard Molinism is true, there is a pair of worlds w1 and w2 each of which contains a significantly free creature who never chooses wrongly, and that are such that, necessarily, at least one of these worlds is a world that God can actualize.
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959The Hume-Edwards principle and the cosmological argumentInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43 (3): 149-165. 1998.
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11          Despite the fact that the strength of argument is clearly on the pro-life side—nobody except a handful of academics would question the grave wrongness of abortion were pregnancy never inconvenient—somehow ordinary intelligent people, like our students, often remain unconvinced. There are many reasons for this, of course. For instance, a number of students have had their children aborted while many know others who have had abortions, and one does not want to condemn onesel…Read more
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20Let S be the set of all entities that exist (or have existed). Define the relation <= on S by saying that x<=y if and only y is a cause of x. By verbal fiat we will define x to be a cause of x for all x in S (if we do not accept this definition, our assumptions will be slightly different; however, it is clear that the existence of x is necessary and sufficient for the existence of x, and that the existence of x is never strictly temporally posterior to that of x, so calling x a cause of itself i…Read more
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63The Badness of Being Certain of a Falsehood is at Least 1/(Log 4 − 1) Times Greater than the Value of Being Certain of a TruthLogos and Episteme 3 (2): 229-238. 2012.Surprisingly precise results are provided on how much more one should disvalue being wrong than one values being right.
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83SpinozaÂ’s God is a being with infinite attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence. Does this mean that God has infinitely many attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence, or does God simply have attributes, each of which is infinite and expresses infinite essence? SpinozaÂ’s argumentation in Letter 9 and the Scholium to Prop. I.10 clearly indicates that it is not just each individual attribute that is infinite, but there are in some sense infinitely many of them. This would seem …Read more