Notes
Notes
An Invitation to Christian Philosophy
Charles Malik, “The Other Side of Evangelism,” Christianity Today, November 7, 1980, p. 40. For the original address, see Charles Malik, The Two Tasks (Wheaton, IL: Billy Graham Center, 2000).
Address delivered on September 20, 1912, at the opening of the 101st session of Princeton Theological Seminary. Reprinted in J. Gresham Machen, What Is Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951), 162.
Malik, “Other Side of Evangelism,” 40.
Quentin Smith, “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo 4, no. 2 (2001): 3.
Ibid.
Ibid., 4.
John Wesley, “An Address to the Clergy,” delivered February 6, 1756. Reprinted in The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 6:217-31.
David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 293.
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 92; cf. 75, 79, 134, 184-85.
Chapter 1: What Is Philosophy?
Augustine, On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis 1.21, cited in Ernan McMullin, “How Should Cosmology Relate to Theology?,” in The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Arthur R. Peacocke (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 20.
John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 86-87.
C. S. Lewis, “Learning in Wartime,” in The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 50.
William Wilberforce, Real Christianity (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1982; based on the 1829 edition), 1-2.
Chapter 2: Argumentation and Logic
Alvin Plantinga, “On Ockham’s Way Out,” Faith and Philosophy 3 (1986): 256.
Thomas Flint, Divine Providence, Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 236.
We first assume the obviously true premise:
1. P □→ P
Then, using (1), we write out the inference pattern as one premise:
2. [(P □→ P) & □(P → Q)] → (P □→ Q)
Then using conditional proof, we can reason as follows:
3. □(P → Q) (Conditional Premise)
4. (P □→ P) & □(P → Q) (Conj, 1, 3)
5. P □→ Q (MP, 2, 4)
6. □(P → Q) → (P □→ Q) (CP, 3-5)
Chapter 3: Knowledge and Rationality
Edmund L. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (1963): 121-23.
Alvin Goldman, “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 773.
Laurence BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 41.
Chapter 4: The Problem of Skepticism
See Roderick Chisholm, The Problem of the Criterion (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1973); Robert P. Amico, The Problem of the Criterion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993).
C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1947), chaps. 1–4, 13; Richard Taylor, Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 112–19; Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chaps. 11–12.
This is from Darwin’s letter to William Graham Down, dated July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1887), 1:315-16.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, analytical index by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., with text revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978; first ed., 1888), book 1, part 4, section 1, pp. 186-87.
Chapter 5: The Structure of Justification
Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 81-82.
Chapter 6: Theories of Truth and Postmodernism
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 58.
The difference between these first two strategies depends on two different theories of time, the dynamic and the static theories, called A-theory and B-theory, respectively. Discussion of the difference is beyond the scope of this chapter. See, for example, discussion in Gregory E. Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001).
Just what makes counterfactuals of creaturely freedom true is a problem that is attracting much attention in contemporary philosophy and philosophy of religion. Giving a satisfactory answer is important generally in answering the claims of “open theism” that God cannot know future contingent propositions, and in defending a middle-knowledge approach to divine foreknowledge in particular. For extended discussion, see Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: A Molinist Account (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), chap. 5; William Lane Craig, “Middle Knowledge, Truth-Makers, and the ‘Grounding Objection,’” Faith and Philosophy 18 (2001): 337-52.
Chapter 7: Religious Epistemology
Antony Flew, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, “Theology and Falsification,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair McIntyre (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 96.
Antony Flew, “The Presumption of Atheism,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 410.
Michael Scriven, Primary Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 99.
Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172.
Ibid., 173.
Alvin Plantinga, “A Defense of Religious Exclusivism,” in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Louis Pojman, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998), 529.
Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 188-89.
Ibid., 190.
Ibid., 206.
Ibid., 261.
Ibid., 262.
Ibid., 285.
See the extended treatment by James D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit (London: SCM Press, 1975).
Plantinga inconsistently portrays the sensus divinitatis as both operative today and as part of the narrow image of God, which was destroyed, not merely damaged, in the fall (Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 204-5).
Chapter 8: What Is Metaphysics?
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 8.
Plato, Sophist 246a-c, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).
See Reinhardt Grossmann, The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontology (London: Routledge, 1992), 1-45.
Chapter 10: General Ontology: Two Categories—Property and Substance
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 20 (emphasis added).
Chapter 11: The Mind-Body Problem Part IA
Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 68.
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435-50; Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 127-36; Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” in Semantics of Natural Languages, ed. Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), 253-355. For the doubts Jackson has raised about the knowledge argument, see his “What Mary Didn’t Know,” Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 291-95.
David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 103-14; Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 33-34.
John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 32-33; cf. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 417-24.
Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), 21.
For an elaboration of this argument, see J. P. Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God (London: Routledge, 2008).
Nancey Murphy, “Human Nature: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues,” in Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, eds. Whatever Happened to the Soul? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 17; cf. 13, 27, 139-43.
Ibid., 18.
Chapter 12: The Mind-Body Problem Part IB
John Searle, Rediscovering the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3-4.
Roderick Chisholm, “Mind,” in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. Hans Burkhardt and Barry Smith (Munich: Philosophia, 1991), 2:556.
John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 32-33; cf. Searle, “Minds, Brains and Programs,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 417-24.
Searle, Rediscovery of the Mind, 48-49.
Lynne Rudder Baker, Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 4.
Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 211.
Daniel Dennett, review of Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, by Robert J. Richards, Philosophy of Science 56 (1989): 541.
Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 21.
D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 30.
This statement by Peacocke appears in Richard Swinburne, “The Structure of the Soul,” in Persons and Personality, ed. Arthur Peacocke and Grant Gillett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 55.
Howard Robinson, Matter and Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 125.
Chapter 13: The Mind-Body Problem Part IIA: Arguments Regarding and Versions of Substance Dualism
For a treatment of and bibliography for Brentano’s treatment of parts and wholes, see R. M. Chisholm, Brentano and Intrinsic Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); for a treatment of and bibliography for Husserl’s treatment of parts and wholes, see Barry Smith, ed., Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1982); J. P. Moreland, “Naturalism, Nominalism, and Husserlian Moments,” The Modern Schoolman 79 (2002): 199-216.
Two helpful treatments of substances and related entities are Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, Substance: Its Nature and Existence (London: Routledge, 1997); and Christopher M. Brown, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus (London: Continuum, 2005).
Stewart Goetz, “Modal Dualism: A Critique,” in Soul, Body and Survival, ed. Kevin Corcoran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 89.
William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 122-44.
Tim Bayne and David J. Chalmers, “What is the Unity of Consciousness,” in The Unity of Consciousness, ed. Axel Cleeremans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 26-27.
Tim Bayne, The Unity of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 225-29.
Eric LaRock, “From Biological Naturalism to Emergent Substance Dualism,” Philosophia Christi 15 (2013): 97-118.
See Eric LaRock, “Emergent Dualism Is Theoretically Preferable to Reductive Functionalism” (unpublished manuscript, March 31, 2015), 12-15.
Ibid. 15.
Stewart Goetz, “Modal Dualism: A Critique,” in Corcoran, Soul, Body and Survival, 89-104.
Charles Taliaferro, “A Modal Argument for Dualism,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1986): 95-108.
Allan Kellehear, “Census of Non-Western Near-Death Experiences to 2005: Observations and Critical Reflections,” in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, ed. Janice Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009), 135-58; Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010), 149-71.
Three key books containing much of what is laid out above are Holden, Greyson, and James, Handbook of Near-Death Experiences; Long, Evidence of the Afterlife; J. Steve Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2012). A solid, popular treatment of NDEs is P. M. H. Atwater, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Near-Death Experiences (Indianapolis: Alpha, 2000).
Melvin Morse, Closer to the Light: Learning the Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Ballantine, 1990).
Atwater, Complete Idiot’s Guide, 52-53.
Morse, Closer to the Light, 1-17.
Ibid. 19-20.
Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence, 50-51.
Michael Sabom, Light and Death (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 12.
Holden, Greyson, and James, Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, 199-203.
Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences of the Blind (New York: iUniverse, 2008).
Long, Evidence of the Afterlife, 149-71.
For two reasons, quantum indeterminacy is irrelevant here: (1) The best interpretation of quantum indeterminacy may be epistemological and not ontological. (2) If quantum indeterminacy is real, events still have their chances fixed by antecedent conditions, and this is inconsistent with agent causation since on this view nothing fixes the chances of a free action.
Timothy O’Connor has argued that agent causal power could be an emergent property over a physical aggregate. See his Persons and Causes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Subsequently, O’Connor has changed his view and opted for the idea that the agent is an emergent individual. See Timothy O’Connor and Jonathan D. Jacobs, “Emergent Individuals,” Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003): 540-55. For a critique of O’Connor, see J. P. Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God (London: Routledge, 2008), chap. 4.
For more on problems of material composition, see Michael Rea, ed., Material Constitution: A Reader (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Christopher M. Brown, Thomas Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus (London: Continuum, 2005).
The view we are advancing is called mereological essentialism (from the Greek word meros, which means “part”). Mereological essentialism is the idea that an object’s parts are essential to its identity such that it could not sustain its identity to itself if it had alternative parts. Animalists and constitutionalists deny mereological essentialism. For a brief exposition of these views, see Eric Olson, What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chaps. 2–3. In different ways, each view claims that, under certain circumstances, when parts come together to form a whole, as a primitive fact, the whole itself just is the sort of thing that can survive part alteration. In our view, this is just an assertion. The whole just is parts and various relations, and neither the parts nor the relations can sustain identity if alternatives are present. The whole is not a basic object—it is identical to its parts and relations.
Some claim that what unites all of one’s various psychological stages into the life of one single individual is that the latter stages stand in an immanent causal relation to each other. But an immanent causal relation is one that holds between two states in the same thing. Thus, before a causal relation can be considered an immanent one, there must already be the same thing that has the two states. Because the immanent causal relation presupposes sameness of the thing in question, it cannot constitute what it is for the thing to be the same. Further, the immanent causal view confuses what it is that causes an object to endure over time with what it is for the object to remain the same.
Jaegwon Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), chap. 3.
See Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 1274–1671 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2011).
Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 99-114.
J. P. Moreland, “Theories of Individuation: A Reconsideration of Bare Particulars,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1998): 251-63. Dallas Willard was a huge advocate of bare particulars as a crucial part of his ontology.
Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 99-134.
Des Chene, Life’s Form, 71.
Ibid., 96.
Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 558; cf. 549, 560-65.
See Tom Kaiser, “Is DNA the Soul?” (paper delivered at the West Coast Meeting of the Society for Aristotelian and Thomistic Studies, June 14, 2012), www.aristotle-aquinas.org.
See Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Michael Denton, Govindasamy Kumaramanickavel, and Michael Legge, “Cells as Irreducible Wholes: The Failure of Mechanism and the Possibility of an Organicist Revival,” Biology and Philosophy 28 (2013): 31-52.
William Hasker, “The Dialectic of Soul and Body,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 87 (2013): 495-509.
William Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 17-19.
Jonathan Wells, Personal email communication, April 3, 2015.
Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin, Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3-100, esp. 17-25.
Georg Toepfer, “Teleology and Its Constitutive Role for Biology as a Science of Organized Systems in Nature,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012): 113-19; Armando Aranda-Anzaldo, “Assuming in Biology the Reality of Real Virtuality (A Come Back for Entelechy?),” Ludus Vitalis 19 (2011): 333-42.
See Hasker, The Emergent Self.
Tim Bayne, “The Unity of Consciousness and the Split-Brain Syndrome,” Journal of Philosophy 105 (2008): 277-300.
Biblical anthropological terms (heart, soul, spirit, mind) have a wide range of different meanings, and no specific use of a biblical term should be read into every occasion of the term. We are focusing here on a more narrow, specific use of the term spirit.
For more on this, see Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 11-16, 180-96, 200-19.
See Swinburne, Evolution of the Soul, 203-19; J. P. Moreland, ed., The Creation Hypothesis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), chap. 7.
Chapter 14: The Mind-Body Problem Part IIB: The Main Physicalist Alternatives to Substance Dualism
Lynne Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially part 1.
Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goetz, “The Prospect of Christian Materialism,” Christian Scholar’s Review 37 (2008): 317-18.
Baker, Persons and Bodies, 132.
Chapter 15: Free Will and Determinism
Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles: Book One: God, trans. and ed. Anton C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1955).
Chapter 16: Personal Identity and Life After Death
Plutarch, “The Life of Theseus,” in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden, rev. Arthur H. Clough (New York: Random House, 1992), 13.
Cf. Thomas Nagel, “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 147-64, esp. 154-55.
Chapter 17: Scientific Methodology
Peter Alexander et al., Biology: Teacher’s Edition (Morristown, NJ: Silver Burdett, 1986), 4.
Rom Harré, The Philosophies of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 43.
Chapter 18: The Realism-Antirealism Debate
Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1960), 577.
P. W. Bridgman, “The Logic of Modern Physics,” in The World of Physics, ed. Jefferson Hane Weaver (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 3:842.
See Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Laudan, Science and Values: An Essay on the Aims of Science and Their Role in Scientific Debate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Laudan, “A Confutation of Convergent Realism,” Philosophy of Science 48 (1981): 19-49; Laudan, “Explaining the Success of Science: Beyond Epistemic Realism and Relativism,” in Science and Reality, ed. James T. Cushing, C. F. Delaney, and Gary Gutting (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 83-105.
Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); van Fraassen, “To Save the Phenomena,” in Scientific Realism, ed. Jarrett Leplin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 250-59; Paul M. Churchland and Clifford Hooker, eds., Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism, with a Reply from Bas C. van Fraassen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Kuhn, “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?” and “Reflections on My Critics,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1-23 and 231-78, respectively.
Chapter 19: Philosophy and the Integration of Science and Theology
John Kekes, The Nature of Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), 158.
David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 51-52 (section 4.2 in the original).
William Dembski, Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999).
See Howard J. Van Till, Robert E. Snow, John H. Stek, and Davis A. Young, Portraits of Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990); Charles E. Hummel, The Galileo Connection (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986); Paul de Vries, “Naturalism in the Natural Sciences: A Christian Perspective,” Christian Scholar’s Review 15 (1986): 388-96.
Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 125.
Richard E. Dickerson, “The Game of Science: Reflections After Arguing with Some Rather Overwrought People,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 44 (June 1992): 137.
Nicholas Rescher, The Limits of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 22.
Chapter 20: Philosophy of Time and Space
Albert Einstein, “Ernst Mach,” Physikalische Zeitschrift 17 (1916): 101; reprinted in Ernst Mach, Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung, ed. Renate Wahsner and Horst-Heino Borzeszkowski (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1988), 683-89.
John D. Norton, “Philosophy of Space and Time,” in Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, ed. Merrilee Salmon (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992), 179.
Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” and His “System of the World,” trans. Andrew Motte, rev. with an appendix by Florian Cajori (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 1:6.
Ibid., 1:6-7.
Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Library of Living Philosophers 7 (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1949), 13.
Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” trans. Arthur Miller, in Arthur I. Miller, Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981), 394.
Ibid., 396.
According to an operationalist definition, scientific laws and theoretical terms really refer to experimental activities and operations; the phenomenon is viewed as identical to the measurement of that phenomenon.
Newton, Mathematical Principles, 2:545.
Isaac Newton, “On the Gravity and Equilibrium of Fluids [De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum],” in Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 132.
Isaac Newton, “Place, Time, and God,” in J. E. McGuire, “Newton on Place, Time, and God: An Unpublished Source,” British Journal for the History of Science 11 (1978): 123.
J. R. Lucas, A Treatise on Time and Space (London: Methuen, 1973), 143.
Gerald Holton, “On the Origins of the Special Theory of Relativity,” in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 171.
Henri Poincaré, “The Measure of Time,” in The Foundations of Science, trans. G. B. Halstead (1913; repr., Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 228.
Ibid., 228-29.
J. M. Findlay, “Time and Eternity,” Review of Metaphysics 32 (1978–1979): 6-7.
Michael Tooley, Time, Tense, and Causation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 13.
William Friedman, About Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 92.
Ibid., 2.
J. J. C. Smart, “Spacetime and Individuals,” in Logic and Art, ed. Richard Rudner and Israel Scheffler (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), 19-20.
Huw Price, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15.
D. H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 26.
Ibid., 53.
A. N. Prior, “Thank Goodness That’s Over,” Philosophy 34 (1959): 12-17.
A. d’Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought, 2nd rev. ed. (1927; n.p.: Dover, 1950), 138.
Tim Maudlin, Quantum Non-locality and Relativity, Aristotelian Society Series 13 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 241.
Ibid., 242.
Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123.
Steven Weinberg, Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Explications of the General Theory of Relativity (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1972), 251.
Ibid., viii.
J. Ellis McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17 (1908): 457-74.
Chapter 21: Ethics, Morality, and Metaethics
J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), 38.
Chapter 22: Ethical Relativism and Absolutism
Louis Pojman, Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990), 19.
See Douglas Walton, Slippery Slope Arguments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), chap. 1.
For more on this, see Norman L. Geisler, Christian Ethics: Options and Issues (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), chaps. 5–7.
Chapter 23: Normative Ethical Theories: Egoism and Utilitarianism
Joseph Butler, “Fifteen Sermons,” in British Moralists: 1650–1800, ed. D. D. Raphael (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 1:328-29 (originally published in 1726).
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 1-15; Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 144-54.
Chapter 25: The Existence of God I
Alvin Plantinga, “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments” (lecture presented at the 33rd annual philosophy conference, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, October 23–25, 1986). Plantinga’s contribution is now celebrated and advanced in a new collaborative volume: Trent Dougherty and Jerry Walls, eds., Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God’s Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
All of these statements belong to atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss. For references see the dialogue, “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?,” Reasonable Faith, November 21, 2013, www.reasonablefaith.org/media/craig-vs-krauss -sydney-australia.
This should not be taken to mean that the density of the universe takes on a value of א0 but rather that the density of the universe is expressed by a ratio of mass to volume in which the volume is zero; since division by zero is impermissible, the density is said to be infinite in this sense.
Quentin Smith, “The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” in Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology, by William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 120.
Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 124.
Ibid., 178.
Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin, “Did the Universe Have a Beginning?,” arXiv:1204.4658v1, [hep-th], April 20, 2012, 5. For an accessible video, see “Did the Universe Have a Beginning? Alexander Vilenkin,” YouTube video, 39:32, uploaded by firstcauseargument, www.youtube.com/watch?v =NXCQelhKJ7A, where Vilenkin concludes, “There are no models at this time that provide a satisfactory model for a universe without a beginning.”
A. Vilenkin, cited in Lisa Grossman, “Why Physicists Can’t Avoid a Creation Event,” New Scientist, January 11, 2012, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328474-400-why -physicists-cant-avoid-a-creation-event/.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), 136.
This feature of quantum cosmogony, by the way, is very problematic. Emergence can be understood either diachronically or synchronically, but neither seems to make sense in this context. See Vincent Lam and Michael Esfeld, “A Dilemma for the Emergence of Spacetime in Canonical Quantum Gravity,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 44 (2013): 286-93.
Anthony Aguirre and John Kehayias, “Quantum Instability of the Emergent Universe,” arXiv:1306.3232v2, [hep-th], November 19, 2013. They are specifically addressing the Ellis-Maarten model, but their point is generalizable.
Richard Schlegel, “Time and Thermodynamics,” in The Voices of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser (London: Penguin, 1948), 511.
Aron C. Wall, “The Generalized Second Law Implies a Quantum Singularity Theorem,” arXiv:1010.5513v3, [gr-qc], January 2013, 38.
Ibid.
Chapter 26: The Existence of God II
Roger Penrose, “Time-Asymmetry and Quantum Gravity,” in Quantum Gravity 2, ed. C. J. Isham, R. Penrose, and D. W. Sciama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 249.
See Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 1991).
Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 169.
John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 561-65.
John C. Polkinghorne, Serious Talk: Science and Religion in Dialogue (London: SCM Press, 1996), 6.
Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 2005), 762-65.
Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), 262, 268-69.
Paul Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1988), 65.
Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 83.
Ibid., 83-84.
Kai Nielsen, “Why Should I Be Moral?” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 90.
Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended (London: Addison-Wesley, 1982), 275.
Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God” (typescript dated October 1981), 18-19. This paragraph was inadvertently omitted in the published version of the essay, with the result that Mavrodes’s reference to it has no referent. Fortunately, a nearly identical paragraph appears in Alvin Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E. Tomberlin, and Peter van Inwagen, Profiles 5 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 71. Cf. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69.
George Mavrodes, “Jerusalem and Athens Revisited,” in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 205-6.
Chapter 27: The Coherence of Theism I
Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 132.
See the remarks of Alvin Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E. Tomberlin, and Peter van Inwagen, Profiles 5 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 71-73.
See further William Lane Craig, The Tensed Theory of Time: A Critical Examination, Synthese Library 293 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000); Craig, The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination, Synthese Library 294 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000).
Chapter 28: The Coherence of Theism II
For discussion, see William Lane Craig, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: The Coherence of Theism; Omniscience, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 19 (Leiden: Brill, 1991), chap. 4.
See, for example, Alfred J. Freddoso, “Accidental Necessity and Logical Determinism,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 257-78. The implications of this, though startling, are not unique to divine foreknowledge but also follow from retrocausation, time travel, precognition, and the special theory of relativity.
Alvin Plantinga, “Reply to Robert Adams,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E. Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen, Profiles 5 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 378.
Thomas P. Flint and Alfred J. Freddoso, “Maximal Power,” in The Existence and Nature of God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 81-113.
See Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral Skepticism and Justification,” in Moral Knowledge?, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4-5.
Chapter 29: The Problem of Evil
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. with an introduction by Norman Kemp Smith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), part 10, p. 198.
Does not the sinlessness of the blessed in heaven show that the Christian is committed theologically to the feasibility of a world without sin? No, for heaven is only part of a world, so to speak, not a maximal state of affairs, and in any case the will of the blessed may no longer be free to sin once they are beatified.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, From Fear to Faith (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1953), 23-24.
Patrick Johnstone, Operation World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993), 164, 207-8, 214.
Ibid., 25.
But see Stephen Wykstra, “A Skeptical Theist View,” in God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views, ed. Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 99-127.
Daniel Howard-Snyder, introduction to The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), xi.
Alvin Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E. Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen, Profiles 5 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 36.
Chapter 30: Creation, Providence, and Miracle
John Duns Scotus, God and Creatures, trans. E. Alluntis and A. Wolter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 276.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Theological Questions to Scientists,” in The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Arthur R. Peacocke, Oxford International Symposia (Stocksfield, UK: Oriel Press, 1981), 12.
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 442.
See William Lane Craig, “Naturalism and Cosmology,” in Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000), 215-52.
D. A. Carson, Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility: Biblical Perspectives in Tension, New Foundations Theological Library (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), 24-35.
Ibid., 18-22. One should mention also the striking passages that speak of God’s repenting in reaction to a change in human behavior (e.g., Gen 6:6; 1 Sam 15:11, 35).
Richard G. Swinburne, “Miracles,” Philosophical Quarterly 18 (1968): 321-23.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), chap. 10.
See S. L. Zabell, “The Probabilistic Analysis of Testimony,” Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 20 (1988): 327-54; for an outstanding discussion see John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Ernst Troeltsch, “Über historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1913), 2:729-53.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Redemptive Event and History,” in Basic Questions in Theology, trans. G. H. Kehm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), 1:40-50.
Chapter 31: Christian Doctrines I: The Trinity
Horst Georg Pöhlmann, Abriss der Dogmatik, 3rd ed. (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1980), 230.
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 173.
Brian Leftow, “Anti Social Trinitarianism,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 232.
Ibid., 221.
Ibid., 208.
Ibid.
For a systematic theologian’s argument for abandoning eternal generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit, see John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 488-92. Feinberg stands in the tradition of evangelical theologians like J. Oliver Buswell Jr. who have expressed misgivings about this doctrine.
Chapter 32: Christian Doctrines II: The Incarnation
Ewald M. Plass, ed., What Luther Says (St. Louis: Concordia, 1959), 1:174.
D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 82.
A. B. Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ (New York: George H. Doran, n.d.), 46.
Charles Harris, cited in A. M. Stibbs, God Became Man (London: Tyndale Press, 1957), 12.
Chapter 33: Christian Doctrines III: Atonement
L. W. Grensted, A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement, Theological Series 4 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920), provides a readable, if somewhat tendentious, overview.
See the excellent surveys by Leon Morris, The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983); I. Howard Marshall, Aspects of the Atonement: Cross and Resurrection in the Reconciling of God and Humanity (London: Paternoster, 2007); still useful is George Smeaton, The Doctrine of the Atonement, As Taught by the Apostles (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1870); repr. ed.: The Apostles’ Doctrine of the Atonement (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1957).
A point especially, perhaps even excessively, emphasized by Leo Zaibert, Punishment and Retribution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
Alec Walen, “Retributive Justice,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, summer 2014 ed., https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries /justice-retributive.
Joel Feinberg, “The Expressive Function of Punishment,” in Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 95-118.
Mark C. Murphy, “Not Penal Substitution but Vicarious Punishment,” Faith and Philosophy 26 (2009): 255-59.
Because of these ambiguities Zaibert considers Feinberg’s expressivist theory to be actually dangerous for a democratic society because what are clearly punitive measures can be rationalized by the state as mere penalties. “Pragmatically speaking, the most problematic aspect of Feinberg’s view is that it opens up the possibility for the State to inflict painful treatment upon its citizens, a treatment which is ‘much worse than punishment,’ but for which the citizens have fewer defenses than they would if they had been ‘merely’ punished. ‘Even floggings and imposed fastings,’ Feinberg continues, ‘do not constitute punishments, then, where social conventions are such that they do not express public censure’” (Zaibert, Punishment and Retribution, 113). The US Supreme Court, Zaibert notes, has had considerable difficulty in interpreting the eighth amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment because it is unclear what actions count as punishment. One notorious example is the court’s decision in Fleming v. Nestor (1960) that deportation is merely an administrative matter and not punishment, despite the fact that deportation in that (and other cases) seems to be punitive (ibid., 48, 54). “The widespread standard account makes it easy for the state to abuse its punitive power by masquerading punitive measures as if they were not really punitive, labeling certain governmental acts as merely administrative, as if this label would deus ex machina obscure the fact that some such acts are clearly punitive” (ibid., 4).
The fusion of resentment and reprobation (stern disapproval) is what Feinberg calls condemnation.
See further Simon Gathercole, Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), chap. 3.
Feinberg, “Expressive Function of Punishment,” 112.
H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 5.
A. M. Quinton, “On Punishment,” Analysis 14 (1954): 133-42.
Hart, Punishment and Responsibility, 5.
David Lewis, “Do We Believe in Penal Substitution?,” Philosophical Papers 26, no. 3 (1997): 209.
Feinberg, “Expressive Function of Punishment,” 100 (emphasis added). An even stronger attitude or judgment of condemnation may be directed as well toward what the criminal did.
Ironically, this is Murphy’s own formulation, intended to show the incoherence of penal substitution (Murphy, “Not Penal Substitution,” 256).
Martin Luther, Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, trans. Theodore Graebner, Christian Classics Ethereal Library (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1939), 63-64. See the similar, if more cautiously expressed, views of John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.16-17.
Murphy, “Not Penal Substitution,” 259.
See L. H. Leigh, Strict and Vicarious Liability: A Study in Administrative Criminal Law, Modern Legal Studies (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1982). For examples, see David Ormerod, Smith and Hogan’s Criminal Law, 13th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 274, 277.
Indeed, the superior is entirely innocent, having neither an actus reus (wrongful act) nor a mens rea (blameworthy mind), but is declared guilty by imputation.
Zaibert, Punishment and Retribution, 161.
Ibid., 183-85.
Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross, eds., Philosophy of Law, 2nd ed., (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1980), p. 286.
D. A. Carson, “Atonement in Romans 3:21-26,” in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical, and Practical Perspectives, ed. Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James III (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 133.
Michael S. Moore, Placing Blame: A Theory of the Criminal Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 158.
It is characteristic of the Reformation doctrine of salvation that justification and condemnation are precisely forensic terms and that imputation is a legal transaction. See, e.g., Morris, Atonement, chap. 8, “Justification,” esp. 187, 196; John Murray, The Imputation of Adam’s Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959), 84, who insists, “And neither are we to posit any such notion as the transfer from Adam to us of the moral character involved in his trespass” (cf. 86-87).
Moore, Placing Blame, 33, 91, 168, 403-4.
Note, however, that in a criminal case involving vicarious liability, the punishment of the employer satisfies for the employee as well. This looks for all the world like penal substitution.
Lewis, “Penal Substitution,” 207.
Ibid., 209. Lewis mistakenly thinks that Christians are of two minds about penal substitution, since they reject it for human justice but accept it for divine justice.
So-called realist accounts of the union, according to which humanity is one metaphysical entity, are utterly implausible and unavailing, being dependent on a tenseless theory of time (see chap. 20, sec. 3) and implying a view of human personhood incompatible with divine punishment and rewards (see chap. 16, sec. 3.2.1.c; further, William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity [Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001], chap. 5).
R. W. Dale, The Atonement, 9th ed. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1884), liv. Cf. James Denney, The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1907), 177.
I am grateful to Frank Beckwith, Eric Descheemaeker, Alan Gomes, and Steve Porter for stimulating discussions of the issues raised in this chapter.