In his reply to my latest post, Edward Feser took me to task for focusing exclusively on the teleological argument instead of his favorite argument: the cosmological argument (which includes St. Thomas Aquinas’ first, second and third ways). Today, I’ve decided to remedy that defect. In 2013, Professor Feser gave a talk titled, “An Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God”. The talk, which is just over an hour long, is well worth viewing, and Feser rebuts popular objections to the argument towards the end, at 50:40. However, I would strongly urge readers to peruse Feser’s post, So you think you understand the cosmological argument? (July 16, 2011) before watching the video. For those who don’t like watching videos, I’ve Read More ›

Professor Kenneth Miller, the acclaimed author of Finding Darwin’s God, was recently interviewed by Swedish magician and skeptic Samuel Varg for a three-part series on faith, science and magic. Here’s the 33-minute interview, which Varg posted on Youtube: Who is Samuel Varg? Two weeks ago, Matt Young of Panda’s Thumb put up a post about the interview, in which Varg described his background as follows: You want my background? OK. I’m a Swedish guy, and I’m 31 years old. When I was around 17, I became involved in creationism and bought that whole concept of this black-and-white worldview with evolution as a big lie. Around 20 I started to look into the actual debate and wanted to know “the enemy,” Read More ›

Some oppose a design conception of the cosmos only because they consider bizarre a “Designer” of the cosmos. This way they show to have an anthropomorphic, wrong idea of the Designer. So I think it is useful to dedicate a post to counter the error of anthropomorphism. Specifically anthropomorphism is the error of attributing to God the human form and properties. On the contrary, the supreme Being not only transcends any human, even transcends any specific particular “being”, even transcends any “form” whatsoever. There is no reason why one should conceive the universal Intelligence, symbolically called “Designer”, from which the cosmos fully gets its existence and design, as something limited by a form, human or whatever. To my knowledge, in Read More ›

In a series of recent posts, RDFish has made several penetrating criticisms of the Intelligent Design project, which can be summarized as follows: (i) the ID project does not currently possess an operational definition of “intelligence” which is genuinely informative and at the same time, suitable for use in scientific research; (ii) the explanatory filter used by the Intelligent Design community assumes that intelligence is something distinct from law and/or chance – in other words, it commits itself in advance to a belief in contra-casual libertarian free will (the view that when intelligent agents make a decision, they are always capable of acting otherwise), a view which is appealing to “common sense,” but which is highly controversial on both scientific Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne has recently written a post titled, Atheism of the gaps, in which he urges skeptics to “make believers read about unbelief” before listening to their arguments, and “make atheism-of-the-gaps arguments.” In the first section of his post, Professor Coyne throws down the gauntlet: If people can fault us for not reading Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, Tertullian and (ugh) Alvin Plantinga and David Bentley Hart, well, then, we can do the same to them. If they haven’t read extensively in the honorable intellectual tradition of nonbelief, then they have no credibility as believers. Frankly, Salon should publish a piece that says this. And what does he suggest that believers read? Tell believers that we won’t pay any attention to Read More ›

Multiverse speculations routinely take a beating on Uncommon Descent for various reasons – the lack of falsifiability, the entirely speculative nature, the near complete lack of scientific evidence. All, in my view, quite good reasons to reject it all.

But I think ID proponents are missing the boat by reacting to multiverse speculations so negatively. So, I’m going to offer up several reasons why I think it’s a good idea, from an ID perspective, to accept and take part in multiverse speculations.

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Recently I posted a reply on Uncommon Descent, to a post by Dr. James F. McGrath, an Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University, criticizing Intelligent Design. Dr. McGrath and I then continued to exchange views over on his post. I hope he will not mind if I reprint our online correspondence on this post at Uncommon Descent, where readers can view it at their leisure. I would also like to personally thank Dr. McGrath for his courtesy, professionalism and kindness, in taking so much of his time to respond to my queries. First, a little bit of background information. In his original post, Dr. McGrath had posed the following dilemma to Intelligent Design proponents: Either God can create a Read More ›

Dr. James F. McGrath is an Associate Professor of Religion and Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis. In a post titled, Responding to Intelligent Design, Dr. McGrath poses the following dilemma to Intelligent Design proponents: Either God can create a universe that can organize itself, in which case the claim of ID fails; or God cannot create such a universe, in which case the proponent of ID ought to be asked to explain why they view God as limited in this way. Or, as he puts it in an alternative formulation, Can God make a universe capable of self-organization? If so, then there is no way to make the case that complexity Read More ›

The New Republic has just published Professor Jerry Coyne’s critical review of David Bentley Hart’s latest work, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, despite the fact that Coyne openly admits to not having read Hart’s book, although he says he intends to. For a literary magazine like The New Republic, I have to say that this marks a new low. Let me declare up-front that I haven’t read Hart’s book, either. I am, however, familiar with much of Hart’s thinking, because I’ve made the effort to understand him on his own terms. Jerry Coyne’s review, titled, The ‘Best Arguments for God’s Existence’ Are Actually Terrible, rests on a complete misunderstanding of what Hart is saying in his book, and Read More ›

Everyone seems to be writing about zombies lately: Edward Feser (Zombies: A Shopper’s Guide, December 19, 2013), David Gelerntner (The Closing of the Scientific Mind, Commentary, 1/1/2014), Barry Arrington (see here and here), Elizabeth Liddle (see here and here) and Denyse O’Leary. In today’s post, I’m going to throw my hat into the ring. A few preliminary definitions What is a zombie, anyway? First of all, what is a zombie? I’m not talking about the animated corpse that some Haitians believe in, or the creature from the movies. What I’m talking about is what’s known as a philosophical zombie. Professor Edward Feser concisely defines the term as follows: A “zombie,” in the philosophical sense of the term, is a creature Read More ›

Over at The Skeptical Zone, Dr. Elizabeth Liddle has written an interesting essay, titled, Proof: Why naturalist science can be no threat to faith in God, in which she argues that even if scientists were to discover that the appearance of complex life was inevitable, with or without an interventionist God, that discovery should not dent people’s religious faith in the slightest degree: “finding out that life is perfectly possible in the absence of an interventionist God tells absolutely nothing at all about whether God exists.” Dr. Liddle’s essay is cleverly argued and thought-provoking; however, I believe it is marred by several serious flaws. Framing the question properly In the opening paragraph of her essay, Dr. Liddle frames the question Read More ›

A slide presentation by Professor Robert Greg Cavin and Dr. Carlos A. Colombetti on the subject of miracles, which was used by Professor Cavin in a debate with Christian apologist Mike Licona on the Resurrection earlier this year, raises points of vital importance for Intelligent Design proponents. As readers will be well aware, Intelligent Design theory says nothing about the identity or modus operandi of the Designer of life and/or the cosmos. Nevertheless, Cavin and Colombetti’s presentation is philosophically interesting, chiefly because the authors put forward three arguments to support their claim that Divine intervention in the history of the cosmos is astronomically unlikely: (i) a religious argument that supernatural intervention is antecedently unlikely, which appeals to the Via Negativa Read More ›

The scientific enterprise stands or falls on the legitimacy of making inductive inferences, from cases of which we have experience to cases of which we have no experience. The aim of this post will be to show that there can be no scientific knowledge if there is no God, and that there is no way of justifying inductive inference on a systematic basis, in the absence of God. The UK-based Science Council has defined science as “the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.” Scientific knowledge is therefore systematic rather than particular: it isn’t just about this or that fact, but about classes of facts. My senses Read More ›

In my previous post on John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay, One of us, I exposed the numerous factual errors in its depiction of how people’s attitudes to animals have changed over the course of time. My expose stopped at the end of the Middle Ages; today, I’ll be talking about Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza and the physiologist Haller (who influenced Voltaire’s thinking on animals). A short summary of Sullivan’s errors Sullivan is a great admirer of the humanistic scholar Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who argued eloquently for the existence of rationality in animals, in his “Apology for Raymond Sebond”. Sullivan’s essay contains villains too: one of these is the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who described animals as “natural automata”, which Sullivan Read More ›

In his latest post, Hart Whacks the ID Movement, Barry Arrington summarizes Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s theological objections to Intelligent Design, and invites readers to respond. The aim of this post of mine is to correct a misunderstanding of Intelligent Design on Dr. Hart’s part, and to show that far from contradicting classical theology, ID complements it in a very useful way. Let’s begin with a definition. In its broadest sense, the theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain empirically observable features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and that this intelligent cause can be shown to be the best explanation by applying the scientific method in order to rule Read More ›