Several years ago I read Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything. It’s an entertaining read if you like the popular science genre. Bryson’s book got me wondering about the problem of dead-end species for intelligent design theories. The problem is that dead-end species serve no apparent purpose and so don’t fit well with ID views. If Bryson is right this problem is rather severe. Here’s a quote:

It is a curious fact that on Earth species death is, in the most literal sense, a way of life. No one knows how many species of organisms have existed since life began. Thirty billion is a commonly cited figure, but the number has been put as high as 4,000 billion. Whatever the actual total, 99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us. (p. 342)

What should an ID theorist say about dead-end species?

Charles Taliaferro gives John Clayton's, Religions, Reasons and Gods: Essays in Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion, a warm review in todays release from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Among the new material in the text are Clayton's 1992 Stanton Lectures at Cambridge University. Of course at $100 you'll likely just want to check it out from the library.

 

Mind and Will, the first section of Paul Draper's ebook God or Blind Nature? Philosophers Debate the Evidence, has gone online at the Secular Web. This section features a debate between Andrew Melnyk, Stewart Goetz, and Charles Taliaferro, revolving around the issues of physicalism, dualism, freewill and determinism. In "A Case for Physicalism about the Human Mind" Melnyk argues that our minds are physical and that our wills are caused. In turn Goetz and Taliaferro present "An Argument from Consciousness and Free Will" which argues that our minds are immaterial and that some of our mental actions are uncaused. Each essay is followed by objections and replies. One of the great features of this format is that there is the opportunity for readers to post their own questions to the debate participants. Since I know you can ask some great questions, I encourage Prosblogion readers to take the time to get involved.

Let me add that Paul Draper is to be congratulated for lining up first rate contributors for a public access publication. Future installments will include Draper and Alvin Plantinga on Evil and Evolution; Quentin Smith and Robin Collins on Science and the Cosmos; and John Schellenberg and Jeffrey Jordan on Faith and Uncertainty. I'll try to post updates as the work progresses.

Mike Almeida passed on an interesting student question that I thought Prosblogion readers might be able to answer better than I could.

" . . . . What I'm really interested in is rankings, comparisons, and specialties among departments of theology.  Is there a comprehensive list available in regards to schools of theology?  If not, are there any resources which would be of help?  I'm open to any suggestions.  Much gratitude"

In short, where is the Theology Gourmet Report? 

A friend of mine asks the following:

Do you know of any good philosophical treatments of biblical ethics, specifically discussions of God's justice as illustrated in Old Testament stories like the flood, the book of Job, the plagues on Egypt, etc. and with respect to the death and resurrection of Christ in the NT? What I'm looking for is criticisms/defenses/analyses of the justice of God's actions. None of the intro philosophy of religion books I've gone over really get into these issues, save for a passing remark in one that didn't even cite any literature.

Any suggestions?

Update: To clarify, my friend is looking for a book-length treatment, preferably one with a decent bibliography. Is there anything like this?

I've posted a bunch of arguments for the existence of God.  What's the point of such arguments?  Well, one point is obvious: to convince some or all of those who do not believe, and to strengthen the conviction of those who do.  There is a perception that the production of arguments for the existence of God fails at this, and hence the production is useless.  I think this accusation neglects the way both the will and the intellect need to be swayed to produce conviction in practice, but that is nto the point I want to make here.  Rather, I want to say that there is also another, more theological and completely non-apologetic, value in giving arguments for the existence of God. 

If Christian theism is right, God is everywhere, creation is a self-revelation of his (St Ephraem of Syria talks of the three books of Scripture: the Old Testament, the New Testament and Creation), and he is behind everything that is good.  Arguments for the existence of God typically attempt to exhibit a way in which some aspect of reality depends on God, and thus they can increase our theological understanding of God's involvement with creation.  This is true of just about every major type of theistic arguments.

Cosmological arguments pick out some obvious non-value-laden feature of the world, like motion or the existence of contingent beings, and argue that God's creativity is behind that.  Teleological arguments attempt to show that various value-laden features like order or life come from God.  Arguments from miracles and mystical experience try to show the way that God continues to be involved in the lives of believers.

Various miscellaneous arguments, like the argument from morality, the argument from the nature of possibility, Leibniz's argument from the existence of necessary truths [PDF] or Leftow's recent argument about the nature of predication attempt to show that pervasive phenomena that we generally take for granted all depend in some way on God.

Some ontological arguments are a very interesting example of this, as they can often be seen as an attempt to show the way various conceptual structures of ours actually depend on God.  Take Descartes' argument that the concept of the infinite is prior to the concept of the finite and that the concept of the infinite requires the existence of God.  This argument, if correct, would show that God, or at least the concept of God, is behind all our concepts of finite things, or at least of finite things qua finite.  It would be a conceptual analogue of the cosmological argument.  Most other ontological arguments can be seen as attempts to show that we could not think about God if there were no God.

What is particularly interesting here is that the arguments do not need to be successful in the full sense of being such that they would convince every reasonable person in order to fulfill the theological role of showing the way God is intimately involved with everything.  Of course the arguments need to be sound: the premises must be true and the conclusion must follow from them.  But to fulfill this theological role they need not convince the atheists or agnostic.  It suffices that the theist see that they are sound and why they are sound. 

 

Edward Feser, at Right Reason, links to a 1980 article in Time magazine discussing the revival of philosophy of religion.

"It discusses the resurgence of interest in the classical arguments for God's existence that was just then getting underway, and in particular the work of Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, James Ross, Mortimer Adler, and others.....  It is amazing how embarrassingly lightweight the "New Atheism" of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens is compared to the work of these thinkers....    It is also embarrassingly lightweight compared to the work of Mackie, a serious and formidable philosopher for whom all theists ought to have respect."

I thought some of you might enjoy this stroll down memory lane.

I just got a note from the Stanford Encyclopedia that this entry is now available, so I thought I'd let everybody here know about it.  You can find it here.

Here's another argument for the existence of God:

1. Logically necessarily, if an action is wrong, this is at least in part wrong because it wrongs a person.
2. Locally necessarily, it is wrong to totally gratuitously painfully harm an animal.
3. If God does not exist, it is locally possible to totally gratuitously painfully harm an animal without wronging a person.  (This is a material conditional.)
4. Therefore, God exists.

The argument will be valid, but I need to explain two technical terms: "locally necessary/possible" and "totally gratuitously".

[Cross-posted at Parableman]

Trent Dougherty linked to an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Michael Ruse called Creationism. The SEP is usually very good, and I have to say that Ruse is much more reasonable on these issues than many in the anti-ID movement. He understands the positions he's criticizing a little more accurately and usually represents them a little more fairly. Any philosopher knows a lot more philosophy than Richard Dawkins, but Ruse stands out as someone willing to discuss the philosophical issues as philosophy, while many in the debate are dismissing them as other things (usually as religion or as bad science).

But this piece reveals that in some ways he does display a number of symptoms that I find throughout the anti-ID movement. Trent calls the article deplorable, and I do wonder how this got published in the SEP. It's not as bad as anything you'd find in Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins, but it's actually worse in some ways than the Wikipedia entries on these issues, which I don't have a very high opinion of.

Devin Carpenter asks in a comment why Trent finds the piece deplorable, and I decided to type up my reasons, which quickly got long enough that I didn't want to leave it as a comment. So here are some of why I consider this to be a fairly bad Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry. This is only after a quick skim and then once through with a closer read, so I may have misunderstood him in some places (although a couple times I think he may be at fault if I did). But I'd be very surprised to have gotten him that wrong on all these issues. Some of these are more minor and may well just be pet peeves of mine, but I think a number are much more serious. I'm listing them in the order they occurred to me as I was reading through the article more carefully.

This is probably old news to many, but I've been bouncing back and forth between editorial deadlines and a busy race season, so just in case...

I got my most recent issue of Books and Culture--the Christianity Today empire's sensitive arm--and on the back is an advertisement for Alister McGrath's new book _The Dawkins Delusion?_.  The cover features this quote by Michael Ruse:

"The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why."

OUCH!  I wanted to shout "Physicalist heal thyself!" in light of Ruse's deplorable ruse of an SEP article on "creationism". 

The Amazon.com reviews of the McGrath book--which sounds like a focused version of his earlier book The Twilight of Atheism--are quite mixed--and pretty typical in terms of average Amazon.com rants posing as reviews.  I'd *love* it if someone would review either of these books.  I'd like to know if it's safe to recommend them. 

In other book news, in the July edition of Philosophical Books (Volume 48, Issue 3), my main man Ed Wierenga and Brian Leftow (see my Prosblogion interview with him here) comment on Bill Rowe's book Can God be Free?  This issue is here, but access will depend on your institution. 

I didn't think it philosophical enough to post here, but I did want to mention that on my blog X-Catholics I've posted a story concerning the "return of the Latin Mass" which might be of interest to some Prosblogion readers.