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765The Shape of Causal Reality: A Naturalistic Adaptation of O’Connor’s Cosmological ArgumentPhilosophia Christi 12 (2): 281-288. 2010.This paper is a companion to an article that I published in *Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion*. The OSPR discusses the third chapter of Tim O'Connor's *Theism and Ultimate Explanation. This paper discusses a range of other issues that are not picked up in the OSPR discussion.
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260Ontological argumentsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2014.Latest version of my SEP entry on ontological arguments, which first appeared in 1996. General discussion of ontological arguments. Includes a brief historical overview, a taxonomy of different kinds of ontological arguments, a brief survey of objections to the different kinds of ontological arguments identified in the taxonomy, and more extended discussions of Anselm's ontological argument (Proslogion 2), Godel's ontological argument, and Plantinga's ontological argument.
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328The Two Envelope 'Paradox'Analysis 54 (1). 1994.This paper discusses the finite version of the two envelope paradox. (That is, we treat the paradox against the background assumption that there is only a finite amount of money in the world.)
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3783Rowe's evidential arguments from evilIn Justin P. Mcbrayer (ed.), A Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley. pp. 49-66. 2013.This chapter discusses the two most prominent recent evidential arguments from evil, due, respectively, to William Rowe and Paul Draper. I argue that neither of these evidential arguments from evil is successful, i.e. such that it ought to persuade anyone who believes in God to give up that belief. In my view, theists can rationally maintain that each of these evidential arguments from evil contains at least one false premise.
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781Epistemological Foundations for Koons' Cosmological Argument?European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 (1). 2010.Some people -- including the present author -- have proposed and defended alternative restricted causal principles that block Robert Koons’s ’new’ cosmological argument without undermining the intuition that causation is very close to ubiquitous. In "Epistemological Foundations for the Cosmological Argument", Koons argues that any restricted causal principles that are insufficient for the purposes of his cosmological argument cause epistemological collapse into general scepticism. In this paper …Read more
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1775The Devilish Complexities of Divine SimplicityPhilo 6 (1): 10-22. 2003.In On the Nature and Existence of God, Richard Gale follows majority opinion in giving very short shrift to the doctrine of divine simplicity: in his view, there is no coherent expressible doctrine of divine simplicity. Rising to the implicit challenge, I argue that---contrary to what is widely believed---there is a coherently expressible doctrine of divine simplicity, though it is rather different from the views that are typically expressed by defenders of this doctrine. At the very least, I th…Read more
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732More Than a Flesh WoundArs Disputandi 2 214-224. 2002.In ‘The Kalam Cosmological Argument Neither Bloodied nor Bowed’ , David Oderberg provides four main criticisms of the line of argument which I developed in ‘Time, Successive Addition, and Kalam Cosmological Arguments’ . I argue here that none of these lines of criticism succeeds. Further I re-emphasise the point that those who maintain that the temporal series of past events is formed by ‘successive addition’ are indeed thereby committed to a highly contentious strict finitist metaphysics.
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417Pruss, motivational centrality, and probabilities attached to possibility premises in modal ontological argumentsEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (2): 65-85. 2012.This paper is a critique of a paper by Alex Pruss. I argue that Pruss's attempt to motivate acceptance of the key possiblity premise in modal ontological arguments fails.
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495This paper investigates the question whether we could have reason to believe that time is two-dimensional. I connect discussion of this question to discussion of the question whether we could have reason to believe that there has been a global time freeze.
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164This paper discusses some views defended by Brian Leftow in his book *Time and Eternity*. There is a revised version of this paper that is incorporated into my later book *Describing Gods: An Investigation of Divine Attributes* (CUP, 2014).
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343Lowe on "The Ontological Argument"In Chad Meister, J. P. Moreland & K. Sweus (eds.), Debating Christian Theism, Oxford University Press. pp. 72-84. 2013.This paper is a discussion of an ontological argument defended by E. J. Lowe in the *Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion* (edited by C. Meister and P. Copan, at pp.332-40). The volume to which this paper belongs contains an article by Lowe which defends a different ontological argument from the one that I discuss.
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255Universal bayesian inference?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (4): 662-663. 2001.We criticise Shepard's notions of “invariance” and “universality,” and the incorporation of Shepard's work on inference into the general framework of his paper. We then criticise Tenenbaum and Griffiths' account of Shepard (1987b), including the attributed likelihood function, and the assumption of “weak sampling.” Finally, we endorse Barlow's suggestion that minimum message length (MML) theory has useful things to say about the Bayesian inference problems discussed by Shepard and Tenenbaum and …Read more
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396On the lack of true philosophic spirit in AquinasPhilosophy 76 (4): 615-624. 2001.Mark Nelson claims that Russell's remarks—in his History of Western Philosophy—about Aquinas are ‘breathtakingly supercilious and unfair’ and ‘sniffy’. I argue that Nelson completely misrepresents Russell's criticisms of Aquinas. In particular, I argue that the silly epistemological doctrine which Nelson attributes to Russell plays no role at all in the criticism which Russell actually makes of Aquinas. Since—as Nelson himself concedes—there is no other reason to think that Russell commits himse…Read more
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1074Craig, Mackie, and the Kalam Cosmological ArgumentReligious Studies 27 (2). 1991.In ‘Professor Mackie and the Kalam Cosmological Argument’ , 367–75), Professor William Lane Craig undertakes to demonstrate that J. L. Mackie's analysis of the kalam cosmological argument in The Miracle of Theism is ‘superficial’, and that Mackie ‘has failed to provide any compelling or even intuitively appealing objection against the argument’ . I disagree with Craig's judgement; for it seems to me that the considerations which Mackie advances do serve to refute the kalam cosmological argument.…Read more
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636Inverse Operations with Transfinite Numbers and the Kalam Cosmological ArgumentInternational Philosophical Quarterly 35 (2): 219-221. 1995.William Lane Craig has argued that there cannot be actual infinities because inverse operations are not well-defined for infinities. I point out that, in fact, there are mathematical systems in which inverse operations for infinities are well-defined. In particular, the theory introduced in John Conway's *On Numbers and Games* yields a well-defined field that includes all of Cantor's transfinite numbers.
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883Kalām cosmological arguments: Reply to professor CraigSophia 34 (2): 15-29. 1995.This paper is a reply to Professor William Lane Craig's “Graham Oppy On The kalām Cosmological Argument” Sophia 32.1, 1993, pp. 1–11. Further references to the literature are contained therein.
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43A note about a Quinean argument against direct referencePhilosophia 24 (1-2): 157-170. 1994.In this paper, I argue -- against Steven Wagner -- that Nathan Salmon's semantic theory is not refuted by a suitable variant of Quine's slingshot (Word and Object, 148-9).
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778Review of Reason for the Hope Within (review)Chapter 1: "Reason for Hope " by Michael J. Murray Chapter 2: "Theistic Arguments" by William C. Davis Chapter 3: "A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine- Tuning Design Argument" by Robin Collins Chapter 4: "God, Evil and Suffering" by Daniel Howard Snyder Chapter 5: "Arguments for Atheism" by John O'Leary Hawthorne Chapter 6: "Faith and Reason" by Caleb Miller Chapter 7: "Religious Pluralism" by Timothy O'Connor Chapter 8: "Eastern Religions" by Robin Collins Chapter 9: "Divin…Read more
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593Higher-order ontological argumentsPhilosophy Compass 3 (5): 1066-1078. 2008.This paper discusses recent work on higher-order ontological arguments, including work on arguments due to Gödel, Maydole and Pruss. After setting out a range of these arguments, the paper seeks to highlight the principal difficulties that these kinds of arguments confront. One important aim of the paper is to cast light on Gödel's ontological argument by way of an examination of a range of related higher-order arguments.
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1649Ultimate naturalistic casual explanationsIn Ty Goldschmidt (ed.), Why is the something rather than nothing?, Routledge. pp. 46-63. 2013.This paper discusses attempts to explain why there are more than zero instances of the causal relation. In particular, it argues for the conclusion that theism is no better placed than naturalism to provide an "ultimate causal explanation".
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819O'Connor's Cosmological ArgumentOxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion: Vol. 3 3 (1): 166. 2011.This chapter is a critical discussion of the third chapter of Tim O'Connor's *Theism and Ultimate Explanation*. In this chapter, O'Connor advances the 'existence stage' of his cosmological argument from contingency. I argue that naturalists have good reason to think that on each of the live hypotheses -- infinite regress, brute contingency, brute necessity -- naturalism is preferable to theism.
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1211Arguing About The Kalam Cosmological ArgumentPhilo 5 (1): 34-61. 2002.This paper begins with a fairly careful and detailed discussion of the conditions under which someone who presents an argument ought to be prepared to concede that the argument is unsuccessful. The conclusions reached in this discussion are then applied to William Lane Craig’s defense of what he calls “the kalam cosmological argument.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chief contention of the paper is that Craig ought to be prepared to concede that “the kalam cosmological argument” is not a successful…Read more
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317Review : 'New Essays on the A Priori' ed. by P. Boghossian & C Peacocke (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (3): 384-6. 2002.Review of *New Essays on the A Priori*, an excellent collection edited by Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke. Contributors include: Tyler Burge; Quassim Cassam; Philip Kitcher; Penelope Maddy; Hartry Field; Paul Horwich; Peter Railton; Stephen Yablo; Bob Hale; Crispin Wright; Frank Jackson; Stewart Shapiro; Michael Friedman; Martin Davies; Bill Brewer; and Thomas Nagel.
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602Faulty Reasoning About Default Principles in Cosmological ArgumentsFaith and Philosophy 21 (2): 242-249. 2004.Robert Koons claims that my previous critique of his “new” cosmological argument is vitiated by confusion about the nature of defeasible argumentation.In response, I claim that Koons misrepresents—and perhaps misunderstands—the nature of my objections to his “new” cosmological argument. The main claims which I defend are: (1) that the move from a non-defeasible to a defeasible causal principle makes absolutely no difference to the success of the cosmological argument in which it is contained; an…Read more
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680Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (4): 576-577. 2001.Review of Craig And Mroeland: *Naturalism: A Critical Analysis*
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410The ontological argument from Descartes to Hegel (review) (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (2). 2010.Kevin Harrelson's book commences with the following words: This book provides a philosophical analysis of the several debates concerning the "ontological argument" from the middle of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. My aim in writing it was twofold. First, I wished to provide a detailed and comprehensive account of the history of these debates, which I perceived to be lacking in the scholarly literature. Second, I wanted also to pursue a more philosophically interestin…Read more
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448Nagel on religion, politics and humanity (review)Analysis 70 (3): 562-567. 2010.Review of Nagel's book, focusing on the chapters that are specifically concerned with religion.
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1492Pantheism, Quantification and MereologyThe Monist 80 (2): 320-336. 1997.I provide a classification of varieties of pantheism. I argue that there are two different kinds of commitments that pantheists have. On the one hand, there is an ontological commitment to the existence of a sum of all things. On the other hand, there is an ideological commitment: either collectively or distributively, the sum of all things is divine.
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338Developmental theism: From pure will to unbounded love – by Peter Forrest (review)Dialectica 62 (4): 549-553. 2008.Review of Peter Forrest's "Development Theism".
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771Science, Religion, and InfinityIn J. B. Stump & Alan G. Padgett (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, Wiley. pp. 430-440. 2012.This chapter contains sections titled: * Brief History * How We Talk * Science and Infinity * Religion and Infinity * Concluding Remarks * Notes * References * Further Reading
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Religion |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |