Here is an old puzzle: Imagine a heap of sand. Now imagine taking one grain of sand off the top. It’s still a heap, right? Now keep going. At each removal of a grain the heap remains a heap until you get to one grain. One grain isn’t a heap so something changed. It’s just not clear when it changed. That’s vague. Here’s another puzzle I wrote about the other day (I got it from 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…
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Preventative Medicine for Gamblers: The Powerball Paradox
The lottery paradox is as follows: Say I buy one Powerball ticket and there are 10 million tickets sold. Furthermore, let’s imagine that we know that one of the tickets is the winning ticket (of course, this is not be true of the Powerball since it is possible that none of the tickets is the winning ticket – that’s what gets us the rollover). The chance of my ticket being the winning ticket is one in ten million – poor odds by anyone’s estimation. It appears rational to think that one should believe a statement to be true if and only if one is sufficiently confident in the statement being…
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A Defence of Belief in the Trinity
Many objections leveled at the Christian are related to whether or not particular Christian doctrines are coherent. One such doctrine is the doctrine of the Trinity. How can a Christian maintain her belief in a statement asserting that there is one divine being who is three divine beings at the same time? Formulations of the doctrine in creeds, doctrinal statements and systematic theologies attempt to smooth out apparent contradictions while remaining consistent with scripture. James Anderson argues that any treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity faces a dilemma – to remain orthodox and face paradox or to banish paradox and embrace the heterodox. Anderson concludes that “no writer from…