Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Religion

  • A Different View of the Lewis Trilemma: The Trilemma Vindicated?

    Dr. Lukáš Novák e-mails: I am writing to you personally concerning your last post on your blog, "The Lewis Trilemma." I would like to offer you two things: first, a criticism of your criticism of the "trilemma" (you are right with your terminological quibble, but is there any other word to use instead?), and second,…

  • The Lewis ‘Trilemma’

    A commenter on my old blog referred me to this famous passage from C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is…

  • How to Tell Whether a Definition of ‘Religion’ is Adequate

    Apply the Reppert Criteria:  "There are two tests that I use to determine if a definition of religion is adequate. It has to include Buddhism. And it has to exclude the Dallas Cowboys." (See comment thread to this post.)

  • De Trinitate: The Statue/Lump Analogy and the ‘Is’ of Composition

    Thanks to Bill Clinton, it is now widely appreciated that much rides on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. Time was, when only philosophers were aware of this. In our Trinitarian explorations with the help of our Jewish atheist friend Peter we have discussed the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication. We saw that…

  • Is The Doctrine of the Trinity Logically Coherent? (Peter Lupu)

    In this installment, Peter Lupu, atheist, defends the logical coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity.  My critical comments follow in blue. It may be somewhat of an astonishment to those who know me well that I should venture to defend the doctrine of the Trinity. I am not a Christian; I am not religious;…

  • Freud on Illusion, Delusion, Error, and Religion

    I found the discussion in the thread appended to Is There a 'No God' Delusion?  very stimulating and useful.  My man Peter is the 'rock' upon which good discussions are built.  (I shall expatiate later on the sense in which Lupu is also a 'wolf.') The thread got me thinking about what exactly a delusion is.  It…

  • Generic and Specific Problems of Evil

    (A reader requested a post on evil.  I am happy to oblige.  The following has some relevance to the recent soul thread.  So I'll leave the ComBox open in case Peter L. or others care to comment.  As usual, the default setting for cyberpunk tolerance = 0.) Suppose we define a 'generic theist' as one who affirms the…

  • Can Religious Notions be Naturalized?

    I continue to mull over Jim Ryan's naturalization project with respect to salvation. It seems to me that salvation is but one of several religious 'objects' that resist naturalist reduction. God and sin are two others. But if God, sin, and salvation cannot be reduced to anything natural, they can be eliminated. Thus I recommend…

  • Jim Ryan on Salvation

    Yesterday, I posted some thoughts about salvation, and in order to test and refine them, I will confront them with some rather different thoughts of Jim Ryan on the topic. See his Salvation I and Salvation II. Since Ryan is a naturalist, it is quite natural that what he should offer us is salvation naturalized,…

  • Three Concepts of Salvation: Physical, Mystical, Religious

    Salvation is a religious concept, and every religion includes a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Or can you think of a religion that does not? It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term…

  • Imago Dei

    Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . . Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God created man in his image. . . I used to play chess with an old man by…

  • François Fénelon

    François Fénelon the Christian sounds like a Buddhist when he speaks of the annihilation of the soul in God: Nothing would give us more delight than that God should do all his pleasure with us, provided it should always be to magnify and perfect us in our own eyes. But if we are not willing…

  • The Inconceivable

    It is arguable that all religions and salvation-paths point to the Inconceivable and terminate in it if terminus they have. The Nibbana of the Pali Buddhists. The ontologically simple God of Thomas Aquinas. A theory of the Inconceivable would have to show that it is rationally admissible that there be something that cannot be grasped…

  • A Pieperian Argument for Doxastic Voluntarism

    Josef Pieper (1904-1997) is a 20th century German Thomist. I read his Belief and Faith as an undergraduate and am now [December 2007] re-reading it very carefully. It is an excellent counterbalance to a lot of the current analytic stuff on belief and doxastic voluntarism. What follows is my reconstruction of Pieper's argument for doxastic…

  • The Philosopher and the Religionist

    The philosopher and the religionist need each other's virtues. The philosopher needs reverence to temper his analytic probing and humility to mitigate the arrogance of his high-flying inquiry and overconfident reliance on his magnificent yet paltry powers of thought. The religionist needs skepticism to limit his gullibility, logical rigor to discipline his tendency toward blind…