Category: God
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On Light
Today I preach on a text from Joseph Joubert: Light. It is a fire that does not burn. (Notebooks, 21) Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low…
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An Evolved Animal With a Higher Origin? Some Theological Speculation
I just remembered this old post from the Powerblogs site, a post relevant to present concerns. Written February 2008. ……………. I raised the question whether divine revelation is miraculous. I answered tentatively that it is not. Though revelation may be accompanied by miraculous events such as the burning bush of Exodus 3:2, I floated the suggestion that…
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Does God Give His Existence Meaning?
Chad McIntosh writes, Your post We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning touches on a puzzle that I’ve been wrestling with for several years now. I’d greatly appreciate your thoughts on the following. Like you, I think meaning is bestowed, or endowed, by agents. However, I may hold a stronger view, which…
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God, Socrates, and the Thin Theory
I maintain that there are modes of being. To be precise, I maintain that it is intelligible that there be modes of being. This puts me at odds with those, like van Inwagen, who consider the idea unintelligible and rooted in an elementary mistake: . . . the thick conception of being is founded on…
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A Theism-Materialism Combo?
If the reality of spirit and the reality of free will cannot be encountered in ourselves, in the depths of our subjectivity, why should we think that they can be encountered outside ourselves — in God, for example? I don't understand those who attempt to combine theism with materialism about the human mind. I don't…
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Can Theistic Arguments Deliver More Than Plausibility?
James N. Anderson writes, . . . a good theistic argument doesn’t have to be irrefutable, but surely we should expect the conclusions of our arguments to rise above the level of mere plausibility. If indeed the heavens declare the glory of God (Ps. 19:1), and God’s existence can be “clearly perceived” from the creation…
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Is Every Concrete Being Contingent?
A reader experiences intellectual discomfort at the idea of a being that is both concrete and necessary. He maintains that included in the very concept concrete being is that every such being is concrete. To put it another way, his claim is that it is an analytic or conceptual truth that every concrete being is contingent. But…
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The Divine Job Description
For Spencer who, though he no longer believes that the Mormon God concept is instantiated, yet believes that as a concept it remains a worthy contender in the arena of God concepts. What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God? I count four sorts of job, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and soteriological,…
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On the Mormon Concept of God
I should thank (or perhaps blame) Spencer Case for sidetracking me into the thickets of Mormon metaphysics. But I have no cause to complain seeing as how my motto is "Study everything, join nothing." Earlier I made a preliminary response to some of Spencer's concerns about the "facelessness" of the full Anselmian conception of deity. Here…
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Dennett, Anthropomorphism, and the ‘Deformation’ of the God Concept
One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone…
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Can God Break a Law of Nature?
This is the fourth in a series of posts on Plantinga's new book. They are collected under the rubric Science and Religion. In the third chapter of Where the Conflict Really Lies, Plantinga addresses questions about divine action and divine intervention in the workings of nature. A miracle is such an intervention. But aren't miracles logically…
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Creatio ex Deo and Pantheism
The following post draws mainly upon Robert Oakes, "Does Traditional Theism Entail Pantheism?" American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1983), pp. 105-112. Reprinted in Tom Morris, ed. The Concept of God (Oxford U. Press, 1987). The question arises: Does my construal of creatio ex nihilo in terms of creatio ex Deo commit me…
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Dolezal on Divine Simplicity: Does He Make a Mysterian Move?
Dr. James Dolezal kindly sent me a copy of his very recent book, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness (Pickwick, 2011). Herewith, some quick notes and commentary based on a partial reading. 1. God is an absolute, or rather the absolute. That is a non-negotiable starting point for both of us. …
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Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo? Am I a Panentheist?
In an e-mail Michael Sudduth asked me what I thought of panentheism. I suspect my position, as developed in A Paradigm Theory of Existence and various articles, points in a panentheistic direction. For when I think about the relation of the One and the Many, I think of the Many as 'in' the One in a manner…