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30The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs, written by Hans Van EyghenInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 14 (1): 79-85. 2023.
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83Causation and Universals.The secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume.Causation: A Realist ApproachPhilosophical Quarterly 41 (165): 494-498. 1991.
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114Review: Hans Radder: The World Observed/The World Conceived (review)Mind 117 (466): 505-507. 2008.
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9Sensible AnimismIn Tiddy Smith (ed.), Animism and Philosophy of Religion, Springer Verlag. pp. 179-197. 2022.Animistic religious thought is extremely widespread, and can be found even in religions practiced by “modern” societies. But it is commonly thought to bear the hallmarks of “primitive” thinking processes, which in the anthropological tradition have typically been taken to involve various cognitive errors. Here I am going to argue that this misunderstands and misrepresents the content of such thinking, which is by no means as unsophisticated as it is usually considered to be. I shall be using Rob…Read more
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11Theodicy in a Vale of TearsIn Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley. 2013.Theodicies can be distinguished as “hard-nosed” or “good-hearted.” Typical features of each are given. I reject the former; they set the bar too low for God. Considerable discussion is devoted to Eleonore Stump's recent Wandering in Darkness, which sets the standard for good-hearted theodicies. I then develop the notion of a “perfect creature”, a possible being indistinguishable from God except lacking aseity, and argue that God should have created only perfect creatures. Since He did not, He is…Read more
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130Causation and UniversalsRoutledge. 1990.The world contains objective causal relations and universals, both of which are intimately connected. If these claims are true, they must have far-reaching consequences, breathing new life into the theory of empirical knowledge and reinforcing epistemological realism. Without causes and universals, Professor Fales argues, realism is defeated, and idealism or scepticism wins. Fales begins with a detailed analysis of David Hume's argument that we have no direct experience of necessary connections …Read more
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95Are the Gods Apolitical?Philo. 1999.The attraction between religion and politics is perennial. Sometimes, in its long and checkered history, it has led to an adulterous affair. I want to ask what lies at the heart of this attraction, and whether that can shed any light on the current religious/political scene. But the romance metaphor is at bottom not a good one. I shall argue that, in their originary condition, religion and politics are "closer," both ontologically and in their motivation, than woman and man, closer than siblings…Read more
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119Divine freedom and the choice of a worldInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 35 (2). 1994.
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187Plantinga's case against naturalistic epistemologyPhilosophy of Science 63 (3): 432-451. 1996.In Warrant and Proper Function, Alvin Plantinga claims that metaphysical naturalism, when joined to a naturalized epistemology, is self-undermining. Plantinga argues that naturalists are committed to a neoDarwinian account of our origins, and that the reliability of our cognitive faculties is improbable or unknown relative to that theory. If the theory is true, then we are in no position to know that, whereas theism, if true, underwrites cognitive reliability. I seek to turn the tables on Planti…Read more
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72World without design: The ontological consequences of naturalismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (2): 494-497. 2005.
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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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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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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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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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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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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
Iowa City, Iowa, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Religion |