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Purtill on Fatalism and Truth
Richard Purtill's recent contribution to the fatalism debate does not, I think, succeed in the author's intent of proving that the omnitemporality of truth implies fatalism, nor that the past is unchangeable in a non-trivial sense, nor that the consequ...
The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities
On July 22, 1985, the New Jersey Supreme Court suggested that county clerk Nicholas Caputo institute new procedures for determining the places of candidates' names on county election ballots, since out of the last 41 drawings conducted by Caputo Democratic...
Jesus' Resurrection
"Man," writes Loren Eisley, "is the Cosmic Orphan." He is the only creature in the universe who asks, Why? Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions. "Who am I?" he asks. "Why am I here? Where am I going?" Ever since the...
Divine Timelessness and Necessary Existence
Formulation of Leftow's Argument Unfortunately, Leftow's paragraph-length statement of this proof is a summary of reasoning scattered throughout the book which is only vaguely referenced by Leftow. I was unable to find any straightforward argument tha...
"Lest Anyone Should Fall": A Middle Knowledge Perspective on Perseverance and Apostolic Warnings
Adherents of the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints typically maintain that, once a person is truly regenerate, not merely will he not fall away, but that he literally cannot fall away from grace and be lost. Usually this conclusion is thought to follo...
Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?: A Rejoinder
In his interesting article "Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?" Wes Morriston explores several "little discussed aspects" of the ancient kalam cosmological argument. [1] The argument may be simply formulated: 1. Everything that be...
The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus
There are probably few events in the gospels for which the historical evidence is more compelling than for the resurrection of Jesus. Historical-critical studies during the second half of this century, increasingly freed from the lingering Deistical presupposi...
Timelessness and Creation
One of the principal themes in Brian Leftow's extensive case for divine timelessness is that a temporal God cannot be the Creator of time and the universe. Therefore, since such an attenuated concept of deity is unacceptable, we should conceive of God as t...
In Defense of the <em>Kalam</em> Cosmological Argument
Introduction Graham Oppy maintains that, despite my replies, the critiques of the kalam cosmological argument offered by A. Grünbaum, P. Davies, and S. Hawking succeed in showing that kalam arguments are not “rationally compelling pieces of natural...
The Disciples' Inspection of the Empty Tomb
NOTE: This article requires that you have the Koine Italics truetype font Koine.ttf installed on your computer. You can download it here. The brief story of the disciples' inspection of the empty tomb (Lk 24,12.24; Jn 20,1-10) has been touted as "...