Civilization is, in large part, indebted to its elders who built a vast mountain of intellectual and practical capital. We all rely on it to some degree. In my studies I am utterly indebted to previous work. And there is a ton of it. Though I have only scratched the surface I am aware of the vast capital of those who went before me. I could barely utter a coherent thought if it wasn’t for the hard work of thinkers who blazed the trail. And none of them did it without start up funds from their teachers. The trouble with capital is that you can quickly run out. Dorthy Sayers…
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Review: Do More Better by Tim Challies
I read very few practical books. I read these kind of books in situations when I really need them. Doing a Ph.D is one of those situations. At this moment in my life I have so many pieces on my plate yet no external motivating factors to get me to do them. For example, I have a stack of books to read within a three month period. I can read them when I like and in whatever order I like. So I pick up one that I am naturally interested in reading and crack on. It turns out that I approach tasks like a scatter gun. I am either trying to…
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Would Determinism Make Love Unreal?
Compatbilists about free will hold that, although everything is determined by God, human beings are free because they are able to operate, uncoerced, according to their desires. Greg Boyd argues that such a view inhibits the possibility of loving relationships particularly when it comes to human relationships with God. He describes the following scenario in order to make his point: Suppose I were able to invent a computer chip that could interact with a human brain in a deterministic fashion, causing the person who carries the chip to do exactly what the chip dictates without the person knowing this. Suppose further that I programmed this chip to produce the perfect…
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A Cell Problem
Consider this weird thought experiment I was reading about in Peter Van Inwagen’s book, Material Beings. Imagine yourself as a freshly fertilized egg. Call it A. The single cell then becomes two cells, A and B. Now imagine that B fails to make it and A goes on to divide making A and C and so on. After grieving the loss of B it is reasonable to assume that A is you. But what if rather than A surviving, B survives instead? It would be equally reasonable to think that B was you. But now suppose that both A and B survive but that they become detached and go on to…
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The Foreknowledge Argument
The foreknowledge argument is supposed to establish the truth of determinism. I think it works in the favor of determinism (of the divine kind not the naturalistic, causal kind). Whether or not one is convinced by the conclusion of the argument is dependent, at least in part, on whether or not one can come up a valid form of the argument. In this post I intend to provide one (but not invent or originate one; only to repeat one from my elders and betters). First, let’s distinguish determinism from fatalism. Fatalism is the view that whatever happens must happen. There is no way things could have been anything other than…
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Some Responses to Greg Boyd’s Argument from Conceptual Content
Here’s a really interesting argument for libertarian free will. I found it in Greg Boyd’s Satan and the Problem of Evil: If humans lack a logically consistent concept of self determining freedom, What provides the analogical ground by which we can talk about God is gracious self determining freedom? A concept devoid of all experiential content is vacuous. If we assume that it is meaningful to claim that nothing outside gods will caused him to create and interact with the world, That he could have done otherwise, And that his decisions are not capricious, Then we must affirm that we experience something like this sort of freedom. In short, Unless…
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Could God Talk to Himself?
Does the private language argument succeed if we apply it to God? Could God have a private language? A private mental entity (PME) is an entity only accessible by the mind that has it. A sensation, like toothache, is a good example (L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations). No one apart from the person with toothache has access to that toothache. But a thought might also count as a PME. A human thought is usually about something public, a tree perhaps, but it might be about something private like a sensation. Thoughts like these are privately owned. My thought that the Christmas tree looks good is my thought; I own it, it is had…
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What’s Theology?
What is theology? Is it the science of God,[34] the study of world religions or the enjoyment of God?[35] Is it practical, theoretical or existential?[36] Is it a systematic study of belief or a study of the development of the bible’s themes?[37] To some extent theology, broadly construed, might mean all those things. David Finkbeiner offers a definition in attempt to cover all the bases: “Theology is the significant reflection on the God of the Bible including his nature, person, works and will and his interaction with the world in general and human beings in particular based on his revelation of himself.”[38] The definition is God-specific, emphasizes the revealed nature of the source material, encompasses…