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2The Vocation of a Natural TheologianIn K. J. Clark (ed.), Philosophers Who Believe, Clark, Kelly James (Ed), Intervarsity Pr. 1994.I outlined my academic career, and my reasons for writing the books which I did --to analyze the meaning and bring out the justification of the central claims of the Christian religion. For the first ten years of my academic career I wrote on the philosophy of science. Having developed a view about what confirms what, I applied it first to the claim that there is a God, in my trilogy on "The Philosophy of Theism"; and then to the specific claims of Christianity.
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46God as the Simplest Explanation of the UniverseRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 68 3-24. 2011.I have argued over many years that theism provides a probably true explanation of the existence and most general features of the universe. A major reason for this, I have claimed, is that it is simpler than other explanations. The present paper seeks to amplify and defend this latter claim in the light of some recent challenges.
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69Necessary a Posteriori TruthAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 28 (2). 1991.Two sentences express the same proposition if they are synonymous; they express the same statement if they attribute the same properties to the same objects at the same time (however objects and times are picked out). Neither propositions nor statements are necessary a posteriori. Suggested examples of the necessary a posteriori, such as "Hesperus is Phosphorus", or "water is H2O", only appear to be such because of a confusion between proposition and statement.
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Book notices-the evolution of the soulHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 20 (1): 127. 1998.
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73The Modal Argument is Not CircularFaith and Philosophy 15 (3): 371-372. 1998.Hasker’s claim that my modal argument for substance dualism is epistemically circular is implausible. Someone can accept Premise 2 (which, Hasker claims, is the premise which generates the circularity) without ever understanding the conclusion, or without accepting Premise 3.
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128Reason and the Christian religion: essays in honour of Richard Swinburne (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1994.Richard Swinburne is one of the most distinguished philosophers of religion of our day. In this volume, many notable British and American philosophers unite to honor him and to discuss various topics to which he has contributed significantly. These include general topics in the philosophy of religion such as revelation, and faith and reason, and the specifically Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and atonement. In the spirit of the movement which Swinburne spearheaded, the essa…Read more
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20Language and TimePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (2): 486-489. 1996.Part I of Language and Time is a defence of the tensed theory of time, the view that assertions about events happening now or being past or future are irreducible to tenseless assertions about the dates at which events happen or about their occurrence before or after other events. It claims that tensed sentences are not translatable by tenseless sentences, nor do they have the same truth conditions as tenseless sentences. They are reducible in neither of these senses either to tenseless date sen…Read more
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"Alvin Plantinga," edited by James E. Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (3): 511. 1987.
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87Tensed FactsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 27 (2). 1990.I defend the A Theory of Time that there are tensed (and other indexical) facts, e.g., about what has happened, as well as tenseless facts, e.g., about what happened in the nineteenth century. I reject arguments of McTaggart and Grunbaum, but concentrate on Mellor’s argument that tenseless truth-conditions can be given for the truth of every tensed sentence. My rebuttal of this argument depends on a distinction between the ’proposition’ and the ’statement’ expressed by a sentence. Statements hav…Read more
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208Epistemic justificationOxford University Press. 2001.Richard Swinburne offers an original treatment of a question at the heart of epistemology: what makes a belief rational, or justified in holding? He maps the rival accounts of philosophers on epistemic justification ("internalist" and "externalist"), arguing that they are really accounts of different concepts. He distinguishes between synchronic justification (justification at a time) and diachronic justification (synchronic justification resulting from adequate investigation)--both internalist …Read more
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7Selections from Personal identity : the dualist theoryIn John P. Lizza (ed.), Defining the beginning and end of life: readings on personal identity and bioethics, Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009.
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1The Dark TideOxford University Press UK. 1993.The author investigates what it means, and whether it is coherent, to say that there is a God, concluding that, despite philosophical objections, the claims which religious believers make about God are generally coherent. Sometimes the words by which this is expressed are used in a stretched sense, but theologians acknowledge the fact.
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8Por qué Hume y Kant se equivocaron al rechazar la teología naturalEstudios Filosóficos 61 (177): 209-225. 2012.
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88Discussion. Reply to grünbaumBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (3): 481-485. 2000.
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98William Lane Craig God, time and eternity. The coherence of theism II: Eternity. (Dordrecht: Kluwer academic publishers, 2001). Pp. XI+321. £74.00 (hbk). ISBN 1402000111 (review)Religious Studies 38 (3): 363-369. 2002.
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51Simplicity As Evidence of TruthMarquette University Press. 1997.Content Description #"Under the auspices of the Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau."#Includes bibliographical references.
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8¿Hay Un Dios?Ediciones Sígueme. 2012.Argues that there is a God. Spanish short version of The Existence of God.
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316The Beginning of the Universe and of TimeCanadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (2). 1996.Given four modest verificationist theses, tying the meaning of talk about instants and periods to the events which (physically) could occur during, before or after them, the only content to the claim the Universe had a beginning (applicable equally to chaotic or orderly universes) is in terms of it being preceded by empty time. It follows that time cannot have a beginning. The Universe, however, could have a beginning--even if it has lasted for an infinite time.
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2What Difference does God make to Morality?In R. K. Garcia & N. I. King (eds.), Is Goodness Without God Good Enough?, Rowman & Littlefield. 2008.
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78Response to my commentatorsReligious Studies 38 (3): 301-315. 2002.This is my response to the critical commentaries by Hasker, McNaughton and Schellenberg on my tetralogy on Christian doctrine. I dispute the moral principles invoked by McNaughton and Schellenberg in criticism of my theodicy and theory of atonement. I claim, contrary to Hasker, that I have taken proper account of the ‘existential dimension' of Christianity. I agree that whether it is rational to pursue the Christian way depends not only on how probable it is that the Christian creed is true and …Read more
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118Gwiazda on the Bayesian Argument for GodPhilosophia 39 (2): 393-396. 2011.Jeremy Gwiazda made two criticisms of my formulation in terms of Bayes’s theorem of my probabilistic argument for the existence of God. The first criticism depends on his assumption that I claim that the intrinsic probabilities of all propositions depend almost entirely on their simplicity; however, my claim is that that holds only insofar as those propositions are explanatory hypotheses. The second criticism depends on a claim that the intrinsic probabilities of exclusive and exhaustive explana…Read more