Big Bang Cosmology
Pre-Relativistic Cosmology In Aristotelian physics, prime matter, of which all physical substances are composed, is, like God Himself, eternal and uncreated. It underlies the eternal process of gener...
Read MoreThe Existence of God
Articles on natural theology, featuring defenses of the cosmological, teleological, and axiological arguments and responses to critics of those arguments.
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Alvin Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism
Plantinga’s book is a semi-popular treatment of the conflicts, real or perceived, between science and religion, broadly construed. Because these...
Read MoreTaking Tense Seriously in Differentiating Past and Future: A Response to Wes Morriston
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 More Download PDFReflections on "Uncaused Beginnings"
Graham 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 More Download PDFTimothy O’Connor on Contingency: A Review essay on Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008)
In 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 bo...
Read More Download PDFVilenkin's Cosmic Vision: A Review Essay of Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes, by Alex Vilenkin.
Vilenkin'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 univer...
Read More Download PDFArguing Successfully about God: A Review Essay of Graham Oppy’s Arguing about Gods
Graham 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 a...
Read More Download PDFTheistic Critiques Of Atheism
An 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 More Download PDFReview of Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity, by Graham Oppy. Philosophia Christi 10 (2008): 201-08.
A review of Graham Oppy's impressive survey of concepts of infinity, including its implications for kalam arguments for the finitude of the past....
Read More Download PDFJ. Howard Sobel on the Kalam Cosmological Argument
J. 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 More Download PDF"Sobel’s Acid Bath for Theism." Review Article: Logic and Theism: Arguments for and against Beliefs in God, by Jordan Howard Sobel.
A 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 pr...
Read More Download PDFThe Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities
A 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 E...
Read More Download PDFMust the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?: A Rejoinder
Wes 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 More Download PDFIn Defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument
Graham 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 More Download PDFCreation, Providence, and Miracle
In 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 More Download PDFThe Ultimate Question of Origins: God and the Beginning of the Universe
The 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 More Download PDFCreation and Conservation Once More
God 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 More Download PDFA Swift and Simple Refutation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument?
John 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 More Download PDFProf. Grünbaum on Creation
Adolf 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 More Download PDFThe Caused Beginning of the Universe: A Response to Quentin Smith
Quentin 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 More Download PDFIntroduction: The Resurrection of Theism
This 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 More Download PDFCreation and Big Bang Cosmology
Recent 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 More Download PDFA Response to Grünbaum on Creation and Big Bang Cosmology
In 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 More Download PDFThe Origin and Creation of the Universe: A Response to Adolf Grünbaum
Adolf 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 More Download PDFGod and the Initial Cosmological Singularity: A Reply to Quentin Smith
Q. 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 More Download PDFGraham Oppy on the Kalam Cosmological Argument
Graham 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 More Download PDFThe Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe
The 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 More Download PDFBarrow and Tipler on the Anthropic Principle vs. Divine Design
Barrow 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 More Download PDFProfessor Mackie and the Kalam Cosmological Argument
Against 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 More Download PDFWallace Matson and the Crude Cosmological Argument
Wallace 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 More Download PDFThe Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality
Theism 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 More Download PDFThe Teleological Argument and the Anthropic Principle
The 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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