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220Divine Simplicity and Divine FreedomProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 89 45-56. 2015.I explain the doctrine of divine simplicity, and reject what is now the standard way to explicate it in analytic philosophy. I show that divine simplicity imperils the claim that God is free, and argue against a popular proposal for dealing with the problem.
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35Divine Action and EmbodimentProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 71 113-124. 1997.
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222Divine SimplicityFaith and Philosophy 23 (4): 365-380. 2006.Augustine, Aquinas and many other medievals held the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) -that God has no parts of any sort. Augustine took this to imply that for any non-relational attribute F, if God is F, God = Fness. This can seem to create three problems. I set them out. Having done so, I show that Augustine's DDS is set within a view of attributes now unfamiliar to us. When we bring this into the picture, it turns out that two of the problems do not really arise and the third is not reall…Read more
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64Composition and ChristologyFaith and Philosophy 28 (3): 310-322. 2011.One central claim of orthodox Christianity is that in Jesus of Nazareth, God became man. On Chalcedonian orthodoxy, this involves one person, God the Son, having two natures, divine and human. If He does, one person has two properties, deity and humanity. But the Incarnation also involves concrete objects, God the Son (GS), Jesus’s human body (B) and—I will assume—Jesus’s human soul (S). If God becomes human, GS, B and S somehow become one thing. It would be good to have a metaphysical account o…Read more
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11A timeless God incarnateIn Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall & Gerald O'Collins (eds.), The Incarnation, Oxford Up. pp. 273--299. 2002.
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3Anselm's perfect being theologyIn The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, Cambridge University Press. pp. 132--156. 2004.
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24Anselm on the Cost of SalvationMedieval Philosophy & Theology 6 (1): 73-92. 1997.This paper examines Anselm’s reply to this argument in order to shed light on a number of issues in philosophical theology, including the metaphysics of the Incarnation, the relation between perfect being theology and the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement, the senses in which the Christian God might be impassible, and the nature of God’s perfect rationality and wisdom. (edited)
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175Anselmian PresentismFaith and Philosophy 26 (3): 297-319. 2009.I rebut four claims made in a recent article by Katherin Rogers. En route I discuss how a timeless God might perceive all of “tensed” time at once.
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77Aquinas on the InfiniteThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 2 27-38. 1999.Both Copleston and Duhem—I believe—claim that for Thomas Aquinas, there cannot be an infinity of anything. In this essay I argue that Thomas allows that there can be an infinity of some sorts of item and, more, that there actually are infinities of some items.
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67Anselm on the Necessity of the IncarnationReligious Studies 31 (2). 1995.Anselm's "Cur Deus" Homo argues that only by the Incarnation can God save humanity. This seems to sit ill with the claim that God is omnipotent and absolutely free, for this entails that God could save humanity in other ways. I show that features of Anselm's concept of God and treatment of necessity make the claim that the Incarnation is a necessary means of salvation problematic. I then show that for Anselm, all conditions which make the Incarnation necessary for human salvation stem from God's…Read more
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70Anselm on the Beauty of the IncarnationModern Schoolman 72 (2-3). 1995.Among the objections to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation which Anselm takes up in ’Cur Deus Nomo’ is an argument that a wise God would not act so, because it is inefficient. I explicate Anselm’s reply to this. It is (I argue) that the Incarnation is an elegant way to achieve a large set of goods including human salvation, and that God might well be wise to treat a sort of beauty the Incarnation involves as a value more important than efficiency
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261Anselm's neglected argumentPhilosophy 77 (3): 331-347. 2002.Anselm is commonly credited with two a priori arguments for God's existence, the non-modal argument of Proslogion 2 and a modal argument some find in Proslogion 3. But his Reply to Gaunilo contains a third. The argument as Anselm gives it has flaws, but they are not fatal, and its main premise can serve as the basis of a simpler, stronger argument.
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283A Leibnizian cosmological argumentPhilosophical Studies 57 (2). 1989.I explicate and defend leibniz's argument from "eternal truths" to the existence of god. I argue that necessary beings can be caused to exist, Showing how one can apply a counterfactual analysis to such causation, Then argue that if such beings can be caused to exist, They are
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213A Latin TrinityFaith and Philosophy 21 (3): 304-333. 2004.Latin models of the Trinity begin from the existence of one God, and try to explain how one God can be three Persons. I offer an account of this based on an analogy with time-travel. A time-traveler returning to the same point in time repeatedly might have three successive events in his/her life occurring at that one location in public time. So too, God’s life might be such that three distinct parts of His life are always occurring at once, though without any succession between them, and this mi…Read more
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5Aquinas, divine simplicity and divine freedomIn Kevin Timpe & Eleonore Stump (eds.), Metaphysics and God: Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump, Routledge. 2009.
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