Articles on natural theology, featuring defenses of the cosmological, teleological, and axiological arguments and responses to critics of those arguments.
Review of Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.
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Wes Morriston argues that even if we take an endless series of events to be merely potentially, rather than actually, infinite, still no distinction between a beginningless and an endless series of ev...
Read MoreGraham Oppy’s interesting analysis of the “causal shape” of reality conflates causal ordering with temporal ordering of causes and assigns the wrong causal shape to reality as concei...
Read MoreIn the first part of Theism and Ultimate Explanation Timothy O’Connor provides a compact survey of the metaphysics and epistemology of modality, defending modal realism and a priorism. In the b...
Read MoreVilenkin's recent book is a wonderful popular introduction to contemporary cosmology. It contains provocative discussions of both the beginning of the universe and of the fine-tuning of the universe f...
Read MoreGraham Oppy's Arguing about Gods is a wide-ranging and penetrating critique of the arguments of natural theology. Essential to Oppy's project of showing that there are no successful theistic arguments...
Read MoreAn account of the resurgence of philosophical theism in our time, including a brief survey of prominent anti-theistic arguments such as the presumption of atheism, the incoherence of theism, and the p...
Read MoreA review of Graham Oppy's impressive survey of concepts of infinity, including its implications for kalam arguments for the finitude of the past....
Read MoreJ. Howard Sobel devotes seventy pages of his wide-ranging analysis of theistic arguments to a critique of the cosmological argument. Although the focus of that critique falls on the Leibnizian argumen...
Read MoreA review with brief responses to some of the main arguments in Sobel's wide-ranging critique of theism, including his treatment of the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments, the proble...
Read MoreA review of William Dembski's book, The Design Inference, which provides the philosophical under-pinning for the upstart Intelligent Design movement. It is shown how Dembski's Generic Chance Eliminati...
Read MoreWes Morriston maintains that a negative answer to the question, "Did the First Cause exist in time prior to creation?" forces the defender of the kalam cosmological argument to analyze the concept of ...
Read MoreGraham Oppy's attempt to show that the critiques of the kalam cosmological argument offered by Grünbaum, Davies, and Hawking are successful is predicated upon a misunderstanding of the nature...
Read MoreIn treating divine action in the world, we must distinguish between creation, providence, and miracle. Creation has typically been taken to involve God's originating the world (creatio originans) ...
Read MoreThe absolute origin of the universe, of all matter and energy, even of physical space and time themselves, in the Big Bang singularity contradicts the perennial naturalistic assumption that the univer...
Read MoreGod is conceived in the Western theistic tradition to be both the Creator and Conservor of the universe. These two roles were typically classed as different aspects of creation, originating creation a...
Read MoreJohn Taylor complains that the kalam cosmological argument gives the appearance of being a swift and simple demonstration of the existence of a Creator of the universe, whereas in fact a convincing ar...
Read MoreAdolf Grünbaum claims that the question of creation is a pseudo-problem because it is incoherent to seek an external, prior cause of the Big Bang, which marks the beginning of time. This claim is...
Read MoreQuentin Smith has recently argued that (I) the universe began to exist and (II) its beginning was uncaused. In support of (II), he argues that (i) there is no reason to think that the beginning was ca...
Read MoreThis article is Dr. Craig's Introduction to volume three of the Truth Journal on "New Arguments for the Existence of God." It charts the resurgence in our day of Philosophy of Religions and intera...
Read MoreRecent discussions have raised the issue of the metaphysical implications of standard Big Bang cosmology. Grünbaum's argument that the causal principle cannot be applied to the origin of the ...
Read MoreIn response to my article "Creation and Big Bang Cosmology" Adolf Grünbaum argues against God's being a simultaneous cause of the Big Bang and against the inference that the Big Bang had a ca...
Read MoreAdolf Grünbaum argues that the creation, as distinct from the origin, of the universe is a pseudo-problem. Grünbaum, however, seriously misconstrues the traditional argument for creation and...
Read MoreQ. Smith contends (i) an atheistic interpretation of the Big Bang is better justified than a theistic interpretation because the latter is inconsistent with the standard Big Bang model and (ii) his at...
Read MoreGraham Oppy has attempted to re-support J. L. Mackie's objections to the kalam cosmological argument, to which I responded in my article "Professor Mackie and the Kalam Cosmological Argument." Opp...
Read MoreThe kalam cosmological argument, by showing that the universe began to exist, demonstrates that the world is not a necessary being and, therefore, not self-explanatory with respect to its existence. T...
Read MoreBarrow and Tipler's attempt to stave off the inference to divine design by appealing to the Weak Anthropic Principle is demonstrably logically fallacious unless one conjoins to it the metaphysical...
Read MoreAgainst the second premiss of the kalam cosmological argument, that the universe began to exist, J. L. Mackie objects that the arguments for it either assume an infinitely distant beginning point or f...
Read MoreWallace Matson objects to the second premiss of the "crude" cosmological argument, that the universe began to exist, by pointing out that the natural number series shows the logical possibility of an ...
Read MoreTheism and naturalism are contrasted with respect to furnishing an adequate foundation for the moral life. It is shown that on a theistic worldview an adequate foundation exists for the affirmation of...
Read MoreThe discovery during our generation of the so-called anthropic coincidences in the initial conditions of the universe has breathed new life into the teleological argument. Use of the Anthropic Princip...
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