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43It has become something of a leitmotif among evangelical apologetes to argue that morality can have no objective foundation if there is no God. Using a strategy that appeals to many people's strong intuitions that there are objective rights and wrongs, they claim seek to convict atheists of being intellectually committed to moral relativism, subjectivism, or nihilism. Those are, of course, ethical positions that have been advocated by some atheists. But others share the intuition that there are …Read more
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179Alvin Plantinga's warranted Christian beliefNoûs 37 (2). 2003.This critical study of the third book of Plantinga's trilogy on proper-function epistemology begins by denying that classical foundationalism proposes a deontic conception of justification. Nor is it subject to Gettier counterexamples, as, I show, Plantinga's fallibilism is and must be. Plantinga's central thesis is that there's no way of attacking the rationality of central Christian beliefs without attacking their truth. That, I argue, is not so on several grounds, e.g., because one can demand…Read more
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34Opacity in the AttitudesCanadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (4). 1978.Philosophical logic has its problem-children; and among these the Principle of Substitutivity of codesignating expressions — the linguistic spawn of Leibniz's law—has achieved a place of prominence. It has become increasingly apparent that a certain style of linguistic analysis, which seeks to impose formal regimentation ruled by the constraints of classical quantification theory, does not yield results with the kind of uniformity and elegance one should hope for from a satisfyi.ng theory. The r…Read more
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9Does religious experience justify religious beliefIn Michael L. Peterson & Raymond J. VanArragon (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, Blackwell. 2004.
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60Theoretical simplicity and defeasibilityPhilosophy of Science 45 (2): 273-288. 1978.Theoretical simplicity is difficult to characterize, and evidently can depend upon a number of distinct factors. One such desirable characteristic is that the laws of a theory have relatively few "counterinstances" whose accommodation requires the invocation of a ceteris paribus condition and ancillary explanation. It is argued that, when one theory is reduced to another, such that the laws of the second govern the behavior of the parts of the entities in the domain of the first, there is a char…Read more
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28Divine Intervention: Metaphysical and Epistemological PuzzlesRoutledge. 2009.This study is a new look at the question of how God can act upon the world, and whether the world can affect God, examining contemporary work on the metaphysics of causation and laws of nature, and current work in the theory of knowledge and mysticism. It has been traditional to address such questions by appealing to God’s omnipotence and omniscience, but this book claims that this is useless unless it can be shown how these two powers "work." Instead of treating the familiar problems associated…Read more
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74Scientific Explanations of Mystical Experiences: II. The Challenge to TheismReligious Studies 32 (3): 297-313. 1996.In Part I of this paper, I argued that the mystical experiences of Teresa of Avila are well explained by the anthropological theory of I. M. Lewis. In Part II, I discuss how the causal gap between the social circumstances identified by Lewis and individual phenomenology can be filled in. I then show that Lewis's theory, thus supplemented, is a genuine competitor to the theistic understanding of mystical experience, and that it is much more strongly confirmed by the available evidence than the la…Read more
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19"Causation: A Realist Approach" by Michael Tooley (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (3): 605. 1990.
Iowa City, Iowa, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Religion |