•  2
    The Root of All Evil?
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Need for Certainty Indifference to the Goods of This World A Cause of Violence The Hope of the World?
  •  2
    Evil and the Meaning of Life
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Evidential Argument from Evil Theodicies A Limited Perspective Horrors The Defeat of Horror Sources of Meaning.
  •  2
    Philosophy and God's Existence, Part II
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Cosmological Argument of Leibniz and Clarke Ontological Arguments and the Concept of a Necessary Being Why Not a Self‐Existent Universe? The Contestable Principle of Sufficient Reason Concluding Remarks.
  •  3
    Religious Consciousness
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Simone Weil: The Philosophical Mystic The Varieties of Religious Experience Mysticism, its Varieties, and its Authority Sam Harris on Spiritual Experience Schleiermacher on the Essence of Religious Experience.
  •  2
    Science, Transcendence, and Meaning
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Religion vs. Superstition Virgin Mary Sightings Schleiermacher and the Transcendence of God Brains in Vats What Science Can and Cannot Say About the Transcendent The God of the Chance Gaps A Meaningful “God” The Meaning of Life Concluding Remarks.
  •  2
    Philosophy and God's Existence, Part I
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Mangling Aquinas The Argument from Design Why the Argument from Design Fails Dawkins' Case Against Theism A Fundamental Difficulty with Dawkins' Atheistic Argument.
  •  2
    Divine Tyranny and the Goodness of God
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Concept of Divine Goodness as a Tool of Criticism The Divine Command Theory – or, How to Strip God's Goodness of Significance The Fundamentalist Attack on Divine Goodness The Problem with Young Earth Creationism Concluding Remarks.
  •  1
    “The God Hypothesis” and the Concept of God
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: New Atheist Definitions of God The Supremely Good God of Traditional Theism Non‐Substantive Definitions of “God” The Ethico‐Religious Hope God: The Ethico‐Religious Hope Fulfilled Continuity from the Ancients: Plutarch and Zoroaster Concluding Remarks.
  •  2
    On Religion and Equivocation
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Meanings of “Religion” Einsteinian Religion and the Feeling of Piety The Art of Equivocation The Eloquent Equivocations of Sam Harris The Truth amidst the Mudslinging.
  • Introduction
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Spirit of Schleiermacher Ideology and Hope Overview.
  • References
    In Is God a Delusion?, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The New Atheist Attack on Faith Fides and Fiducia Catholic Faith The Failure of the Catholic View of Faith A Lutheran Alternative Love and Revelation Reason for Trust? Pragmatic Faith The Ethico‐Religious Hope Revisited The Logic of Faith.
  •  32
    Review of Liba Taub, Ptolemy's universe; The natural philosophical and ethical foundations of Ptolemy's astronomy. Chicago: Open Court 1993. xiv, 188 p.
  •  12
    Review of "Love Divine: A Systematic Account", by Jordan Wessling (review)
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (3): 285-290. 2022.
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  •  34
    Is Annihilation More Severe than Eternal Conscious Torment?
    Southwest Philosophy Review 38 (1): 191-198. 2022.
    In Hell and Divine Goodness, James Spiegel defends the surprising position that of the two dominant non-universalist Christian views on the fate of the damned—the traditionalist view that the damned suffer eternal conscious torment, and the annihilationist view that the damned are put out of existence—the annihilationist view actually posits the more severe fate from the standpoint of a punishment. I argue here that his case for this position rests on two questionable assumptions, and that even …Read more
  •  56
    Recently, Eric Yang and Stephen Davis have defended what they call the separationist view of hell against an objection leveled by Jeremy Gwiazda by invoking the concept of hard-heartedness as an account of why some would eternally choose to remain in hell. Gwiazda’s objection to the separationist view of hell is an instance of a broader strategy of objection invoked by other universalists to argue that God could guarantee universal salvation while respecting libertarian freedom—an objection that…Read more
  •  28
    Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation, written by Igor Primoratz
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (3): 357-360. 2017.
  •  25
    Nature, Place, and Space
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70 (1): 83-101. 1996.
  •  7
    _Is God a Delusion?_ addresses the philosophical underpinnings of the recent proliferation of popular books attacking religious beliefs. Winner of CHOICE 2009 Outstanding Academic Title Award Focuses primarily on charges leveled by recent critics that belief in God is irrational and that its nature ferments violence Balances philosophical rigor and scholarly care with an engaging, accessible style Offers a direct response to the crop of recent anti-religion bestsellers currently generating consi…Read more
  • The Moral Status of Violence Within the Framework of a Christian Love Ethic
    Dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo. 1993.
    Two interrelated questions drive this work. First, what moral status does violence have within the framework of the Christian tradition which gives the command to love one's "neighbor" the status of fundamental moral principle? Second, can an ethics of the sort articulated in this tradition stand on its own as a coherent and complete moral system? ;In exploring these questions, I focus attention on the following forseeable situation, which provides a special problem for the sort of Christian eth…Read more
  •  30
  •  20
    Substance and Modern Science. By Richard J. Connell (review)
    Modern Schoolman 69 (1): 64-66. 1991.
  •  154
    One reason for the persistent appeal of Don Marquis' ‘future like ours’ argument is that it seems to offer a way to approach the debate about the morality of abortion while sidestepping the difficult task of establishing whether the fetus is a person. This essay argues that in order to satisfactorily address both of the chief objections to FLO – the ‘identity objection’ and the ‘contraception objection’ – Marquis must take a controversial stand on what is most essential to being the kind of enti…Read more
  •  66
    The Moral Justification of Violence
    Social Theory and Practice 28 (3): 445-464. 2002.
  • On William A. Wallace, O.P., The Modeling of Nature
    with Benedict Ashley
    The Thomist 61 625-640. 1997.
  •  42
    Rape as an Essentially Contested Concept
    Hypatia 16 (2): 43-66. 2001.
    Because “rape” has such a powerful appraisive meaning, how one defines the term has normative significance. Those who define rape rigidly so as to exclude contemporary feminist understandings are therefore seeking to silence some moral perspectives “by definition.” I argue that understanding rape as an essentially contested concept allows the concept sufficient flexibility to permit open moral discourse, while at the same time preserving a core meaning that can frame the discourse.
  •  43
    Punishment and Community: The Reintegrative Theory of Punishment
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (1). 1996.
    There seems to be nearly universal agreement that society cannot do without some form of criminal punishment. At the same time, it is generally acknowledged that punishment, involving as it does the imposition of hardship and suffering, stands in need of justification. What form such a justification should take, however, is a matter of considerable contention, in part because of basic theoretical disagreements on the nature of moral obligation, and in part because of disagreements concerning the…Read more
  •  44
    Deep ecology and the irrelevance of morality
    Environmental Ethics 18 (4): 411-424. 1996.
    Both Arne Naess and Warwick Fox have argued that deep ecology, in terms of “Selfrealization,” is essentially nonmoral. I argue that the attainment of the ecological Self does not render morality in the richest sense “superfluous,” as Fox suggests. To the contrary, the achievement of the ecological Self is a precondition for being a truly moral person, both from the perspective of a robust Kantian moral frameworkand from the perspective of Aristotelian virtue ethics. The opposition between selfre…Read more
  •  85
    Richard Swinburne’s formulation of the argument from evil is representative of a pervasive way of understanding the challenge evil poses for theistic belief. But there is an error in Swinburne’s formulation : he fails to consider possible deontological constraints on God’s legitimate responses to evil. To demonstrate the error’s significance, I show that some important objections to Swinburne’s theodicy admit of a novel answer once we correct for Swinburne’s Lapse. While more is needed to show t…Read more
  •  3
    Responses
    Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6 (1): 165-187. 2003.