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1486Eternity and Vision in BoethiusEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 1 (1). 2009.Boethius and Augustine of Hippo are two of the fountainheads from which the long tradition of regarding God’s existence as timelessly eternal has flowed, a tradition which has influenced not only Christianity, but Judaism and Islam, too. But though the two have divine eternality in common, I shall argue that in other respects, in certain crucial respects, they differ significantly over how they articulate that notion
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485How Are We to Think of God’s Freedom?European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (3): 49--65. 2015.The paper discusses two conceptions of divine freedom. The first, Hugh McCann’s, proposes that God is a timelessly eternal act, whose agency is not deliberative and who, in that act, creates himself and the contents of his will. God is such an act. Following discussion of this view, its costs and benefits, a more traditional account of God’s freedom, in which he possesses vestigial alternativity, the freedom to choose an alternative should there have been a sufficient reason to do so.
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154John Calvin, the sensus divinitatis, and the noetic effects of sinInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43 (2): 87-107. 1998.
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147God, compatibilism, and the authorship of sinReligious Studies 46 (1): 115-124. 2010.Peter Byrne has presented arguments against the effectiveness of two 'defensive strategies' deployed in my books Eternal God and The Providence of God respectively. These strategies were originally presented to support the cogency of 'theological compatibilism' by arguing against the claims that it is inconsistent with human responsibility, and that it entails that God is the author of sin. In this present article the author offers a number of clarifications to his original thesis and argues tha…Read more
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135Book Reviews : God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands and Human Autonomy, by John E. Hare. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001. x + 122 pp. hb. £9.99. ISBN 0-8028-3903-7 (review)Studies in Christian Ethics 16 (1): 92-94. 2003.
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86Augustine’s griefsFaith and Philosophy 20 (4): 448-459. 2003.The paper begins by describing two episodes of personal grief recounted by Augustine in the Confessions, that at the death of an unnamed friend and thatat the death of his mother, Monica. It is argued that Augustine intended to show that the earlier fried, and an early phase of his grief for his mother, were sinful. However, contrary to arecent account of Augustine's grief, it is argued (by an examination of the later phase of his grief for his mother) that Augustine does not hold that it is wro…Read more
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73Faith with reasonOxford University Press. 2000.Paul Helm investigates what religious faith is and what makes it reasonable.
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65Time and time again: Two volumes by William Lane Craig William Lane Craig the tensed theory of time: A critical examination. Synthese library volume 293. (Dordrecht: Kluwer academic publishers, 2000). Pp. V+287. £78.00 (hbk). ISBN 0792366344. William Lane Craig the tenseless theory of time: A critical examination. Synthese library volume 294. (Dordrecht: Kluwer academic publishers, 2000). Pp. V+256. £65.00 (hbk). ISBN 0792366352 (review)Religious Studies 38 (4): 489-498. 2002.The two books make a notable contribution in drawing together many of the philosophical problems about time, and the associated literature. The expositions are also valuable for their interdisciplinary strengths, especially in the history and philosophy of science and (to a lesser extent) in theology, and for the clarity and thoroughness of Craig's approach. However, the two books do not present, as might at first appear, a side by side exposition of the respective strengths and weaknesses of th…Read more
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54God and spacelessnessIn Steven M. Cahn & David Shatz (eds.), Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 211-. 1982.In recent years the doctrine that God exists in a timeless eternity has achieved something of the status of philosophical heterodoxy, if not of downright heresy. The arguments against the idea of God's timeless eternity come from two sources. The first of these is Professor Kneale's paper ‘Time and Eternity in Theology’ in which, alluding to the famous definition of eternity by Boethius as ‘the complete possession of eternal life at once’ Professor Kneale confesses ‘I can attach no meaning to th…Read more
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51Speaking and revealingReligious Studies 37 (3): 249-258. 2001.I argue on three distinct grounds that the contrast between speaking and revealing is nothing like so sharp as Wolterstorff maintains in Divine Discourse. Speaking may be revealing: in speaking a person may reveal much about himself. Putative divine speaking can only be made intelligible given a background of what I refer to as INIS revelation, and in revealing, or more exactly, in having revealed, God may still speak.
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49Divine Foreknowledge and FactsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (2). 1974.In “Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom” [6] Anthony Kenny returns to a ‘very old difficulty’ stated by Aquinas at Summa Theologiae Ia, 14, 3, 3. Kenny rejects the Thomistic strategy of treating God as an atemporal knower, Who grasps all events of history simultaneously in a timeless present. He takes this notion to be neither Biblical nor coherent. He hopes instead to reconcile a temporal God's literal foreknowledge with free action among men. I shall follow Kenny in treating the concept of …Read more
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48Faith and understandingWm. B. Eerdmans. 1997.In Part One Paul Helm provides a general discussion of these themes, seeking both to contextualize the debate and to engage with contemporary philosophical discussion of the relation between faith, reason and understanding. Part Two contains five case studies that illustrate the work of seminal figures in the tradition. They include treatments of Augustine on time and creation, Anselm on the ontological argument and the necessity of the atonement, Jonathan Edwards on the nature of personal ident…Read more
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48From Existence to God: A Contemporary Philosophical ArgumentPhilosophical Books 34 (1): 59-60. 1993.
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45The indispensability of belief to religionReligious Studies 37 (1): 75-86. 2001.The article examines a central methodological tenet of Grace Jantzen's Becoming Divine. In this book she turns her back on what she calls Anglo-American philosophy of religion in favour of what she calls a continental approach. I argue that for her, belief is as indispensable in religion and in the philosophy of religion as it is for the Anglo-American philosophy of religion which she rejects. Further, the only argument that she offers for her position is a genetic argument for the origins of re…Read more
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42Eternal God: A Study of God Without TimeOxford University Press. 1988.Paul Helm presents a new, expanded edition of his much praised 1988 book Eternal God, which defends the view that God exists in timeless eternity. Helm argues that divine timelessness is grounded in the idea of God as creator, and that this alone makes possible a proper account of divine omniscience.
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41Belief PoliciesCambridge University Press. 1994.How do we form and modify our beliefs about the world? It is widely accepted that what we believe is determined by evidence, and is therefore not directly under our control; but according to what criteria is the credibility of the evidence established? Professor Helm argues that no theory of knowledge is complete without standards for accepting and rejecting evidence as belief-worthy. These standards, or belief-policies, are not themselves determined by evidence, but determine what counts as cre…Read more
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40Thomas P. Flint divine providence. (Ithaca and London: Cornell university press, 1998). Pp. XI+258. £35.00 hbkReligious Studies 35 (1): 99-111. 1999.
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37Faith and reason (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1999.Faith and Reason displays in historical perspective some of the rich dialogue between religion and philosophy over two millennia, beginning with Greek reflections about God and the gods and ending with twentieth-century debate about faith in a world which tends to reserve its reverence for science. Paul Helm uses as a case study the question of whether the world is eternal or whether it was created out of nothing, following this theme from Plato through medieval thought to modern scientific spec…Read more
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35Pantheism: A non-theistic concept of deity By Michael P. Levine London and New York Routledge, 1994, xii+388 pp., £45.00 (review)Philosophy 70 (271): 129-. 1995.
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35John Calvin's IdeasOxford University Press. 2004.Paul Helm looks at how Calvin worked at the interface of theology and philosophy and in particular how he employed medieval ideas to do so. Connections are made between his ideas and contemporary philosophical theology, and there is a careful examination of the appeal that current `Reformed' epistemologists make to Calvin.