Last week someone forwarded me an interesting article I thought I'd share. The article was an interview from the most recent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review titled "Losing Faith: How Scholarship Affects Scholars".In the piece, editor Hershel Shanks interviews familiar figures such as Bart Ehrman on how their scholarship has affected their faith and particularly the loss of faith. The interview isn't particularly philosophical—none of those interviewed is a professional philosopher—though James Strange does give it the old college try. However, I thought some readers would find the interview interesting because it mirrors something that seems to sometimes take place in philosophical circles. Even in my own limited experience I've met a number of people who entered our discipline as theists and left as atheists. In several of these cases graduate studies in philosophy only narrowly beat out a stint in seminary, and for some few it followed on seminary. In fact my first philosophy professor falls into the later category.

I have a favor to ask.  I have a review of Bill Rowe's most recent book that I co-authored with one of my students that recently came out in Philosophia Christi.  The student is applying for a scholarship, and needs the bibliographic information on our review for her resume.  Unfortunately, neither I nor USD subscribe to the journal; nor is it available online.  Would one of you with access to the journal be so kind as to email me with the information (volume, pages, etc...)?  This may be pushing it, but a xerox copy of the review would also be nice.  Phil Christi is supposed to be sending me a gratis copy of the journal with our review, but I don't want to hold things up waiting.  Thanks.

UPDATE:  I now have what I needed.  Thanks to all of you that helped me out.

Congrats to our own Tim Pawl for being awarded The Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame's Graduate Fellowship awarded to a graduate student in philosophy who is working on a dissertation in the philosophy of religion

Tim joins the ranks of such Prosblogion notables as Kevin Timpe (2003-2004 recipient).

Trivia: Yet another SLU grad--Jason Eberl--recieved it the previous year. My friend and sometime swim-budy Marcin Iwanicki (University of Lublin, Poland, now ND) got it the year before that. Erik J. Wielenberg of DePauw, who's got a *great* book forthcoming on C.S. Lewis, Hume, and Russell, received it in the late 90's.

Charles Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern, will be the recipient of this years $1.5 million Templeton Prize.

"The divorce of natural science and religion has been damaging to both," Taylor, 75, said in accepting the award Wednesday in New York. "But it is equally true that the culture of the humanities and social sciences has often been surprisingly blind and deaf to the spiritual."

In his speech, Taylor took aim at Nobel laureate cosmologist Steven Weinberg, who once said: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

"On one level, it is astonishing that anyone who lived through a good part of the 20th Century could say something like this," Taylor said.

"We urgently need new insight into the human propensity for violence ... [that] must take full account of the human striving for meaning and spiritual direction, of which the appeals to violence are a perversion," he said. "But we don't even begin to see where we have to look as long as we accept the complacent myth that people like us--enlightened secularists, or believers--are not part of the problem.

"We will pay a high price if we allow this kind of muddled thinking to prevail."

You can read more in the Chicago Tribune.

William Hasker reviews Peter van Inwagen's The Problem of Evil
Oxford University Press, 2006, 197pp. ISBN 0199245606.

"Peter van Inwagen's The Problem of Evil is a fairly short book, but only about half of it is devoted to his answer to the problem of evil. In the first chapter he discusses various senses of the term, "problem of evil"; not surprisingly, the problem of evil he will be addressing is the problem of answering the argument from evil, the argument, or rather arguments, against the existence of God based on the facts about evil. The second chapter is devoted to the idea of God; it turns out that van Inwagen accepts the views that in some circles are coming to be known as "open theism," though he does not himself use that term. The extremely interesting third chapter is devoted to philosophical failure; in it he contends that all philosophical arguments that aim to establish substantive philosophical theses are failures. (More on this later.) Chapters four through seven present his answers to various versions of the argument from evil. The eighth and final chapter is devoted to the "problem of divine hiddenness," which he insists is distinct from the problem of evil although it parallels that problem and receives a parallel response."

Read the whole review from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Keith DeRose has some brief comments on Marilyn Adams' new book Christ and Horrors: the Coherence of Christology.

I don't know any more about it than what's in Keith's expectations and the quick summary he posts, but the title alone is intriguing enough to catch my interest. I imagine the subtitle is a tribute to Richard Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism, but it sounds as if this is much more than the kind of thing he was doing there.

I recently attended a debate here in Liverpool featuring William Lane Craig, and when someone posed the question to him of the validity of other religions, he acknowledged that the three Abrahamic faiths were coherent because they had a transcendent God as a central doctrine, whereas other religions such as Shinto, Taoism, and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism do not. Craig did not of course say that his list was exhaustive, but it is common for "Western" philosophers of religion to equate Advaita Vedanta with Hinduism considered qua religion. I wish to briefly examine why this is and explain why this assumption is mistaken.

Sympathetic atheism is characterized by three commitments: (i) the concept of God is coherent, (ii) there’s no God because there’s gratuitous evil, and (iii) were there a God the world might not be all that different than it actually is. Condition (iii) expresses the sympathetic atheist’s thought that the evidential theist is not horribly mistaken, for it’s understandable that the evidential theist thinks the world is divinely created. According to the sympathetic atheist the evidential theist is mistaken but not dreadfully so. I think sympathetic atheism is incoherent. I’ll put the argument and details below the fold.

This post is really about a question regarding confirmation theory but the main question arises in a way that may interest some folks here. I’ve been spending a few hours each evening learning some math I’ve always wanted to know (pretty exciting, huh?) and I’ve been very impressed by certain mathematical structures. For instance, projective geometry is beautiful. A fundamental principle of projective geometry is the principle of duality, which says, basically, that interchanging point and line throughout any theorem of projective geometry results in another theorem. For instance, the dual of Pascal’s theorem is Brianchon’s theorem. I found this principle of duality surprising and impressive. At least some mathematicians are likewise impressed. The author of the book I’m currently reading notes that mathematicians working in projective geometry are mainly attracted by its aesthetic qualities. It struck me that someone might view the beauty of projective geometry as some evidence for theism. I don’t think a person who thought this would be terribly mistaken but then again I find it hard to accommodate this intuition in standard confirmation theory. The beauty of projective geometry is that it has a certain structure. Presumably, though, that structure exists in every world. So it’s not the case that theism predicts this structure anymore than any other theory (assuming that universal possibilism is false). So, how should one try to accommodate this intuition—if at all? The general issue is how to account for confirmation by necessary truths.