William Lane Craig tells his story of the process by which he earned his PH.D.s. I found it quite interesting, fun, and encouraging to read, and I thought it would be interesting to readers of this blog. Unfortunately, I couldn't link directly to the story, but it was his answer to the question of the week. You just have to scroll down and go to the place where you see someone asking about his PH.D.s, and click on the "Read Answer" tab. There's a lot of other interesting material in the Q&A archive (and, indeed, in the site generally).
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William Lane Craig wrote the cover story for this month's edition of Christianity Today. It can be found here. He speaks of a renaissance of Christian/theistic philosophy in secular academia, he reviews some of the main arguments for God's existence, and he talks about the relevance of arguments in today's "postmodern culture".
I've read about the need for good PR for philosophy over at Leiter's blog. One thing I'm happy about is that, in Christian circles, there's been an increasing amount of positive PR for philosophy, primarily by way of Christian apologetics. Lee Strobel's books The Case for Faith and The Case for a Creator feature interviews (and philosophical discussions) with professional philosophers such as William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, and Robin Collins. I rarely meet Christians nowadays who have never heard of Strobel's books, and a surprising number of them have actually read and enjoyed the books. Other Christian apologists who are not active, professional philosophers (e.g., Norman Geisler, Ravi Zacharias, Gregory Koukl, etc.) all speak with high regard for the value of philosophy. More recently, Pastor Timothy Keller's very popular book The Reason for God makes use of arguments that draw right out of the professional literature (mostly from Plantinga and Alston). I've found that many Christians walk away from reading/hearing these apologists with a higher appreciation for philosophy. Some enjoyed the arguments so much that they went into a full time study of philosophy. (I believe that many Talbott graduates fit this description.)
So I'm happy that there is this PR for philosophy in Christian circles. We can hope that this will contribute to good PR for philosophy in society generally!
Here's a link to a recent debate between William Lane Craig and Louise Antony on whether or not God is necessary for morality. It was interesting for me since reading Craig's debates and apologetics works helped get me into philosophy, and Antony was one of my professors when I was an undergraduate at The Ohio State University. Both are moral realists and affirm that there are objective moral truths. I didn't find Craig's arguments that God is necessary for morality to be convincing.
However, here's one of his arguments which has some intuitive appeal and that I'd like to explore. He points out that if God does not exist, then there is no ultimate moral accountability. People will not ultimately get what they deserve, whether this be reward for a life well lived or punishment for horrendous evils. This seems to me to be correct. If naturalism is true, then even if there are objective moral truths, people will not ultimately get what they deserve.
But is there any reason to think the following?
1) If there are objective moral truths, then there will be some ultimate moral accountability.
There is no doubt something less satisfying (at least emotionally) with the naturalistic worldview, but I don't know if I can think of any good reasons to believe that (1) is true. And if (1) is false, there is no problem for the naturalist.
Could we defend (1) just by appealing to intuition? Do most humans have a deep intuition that wrongs must be righted and vice versa? But this intuition is weak at best. I would hope for some more argument. Any suggestions?
There is a relatively new blog on philosophy of time here: http://www.philtimesociety.typepad.com/, and it is supported by the Philosophy of Time Society. There haven't been too many substantive philosophical posts, but I thought that readers/contributors of Prosblogion might be interested in joining the blog (and adding some substantive philosophical posts!) In joining the blog, you also automatically become a member of the Philosophy of Time Society and you are supposed to get a copy of Chronos, a philosophy of time journal. (However, a recent e-mail said that all members might not get Chronos, so I'm not sure if that last part is right.)
Hello my name is Matthew and I too read the Leiter Reports. Today Leiter points to the new Secular Philosophy blog that features contributors such as Daniel Dennett and Colin McGinn (aka The Usual Suspects). Leiter uses the announcement to take issue with remarks from a recent McGinn interview in which McGinn remarks that there are fewer and fewer "Christian philosophers". Concurring with remarks that appeared here in the past, Leiter concludes that, "To be sure, religious philosophers are probably still a minority in academic philosophy in the U.S., but my sense is they are less of a minority than 25 years ago."
I'll be adding Secular Philosophy to the blogroll just as soon as I can figure out how to get it working again.
Application information is now available for the Venice Summer School on Science and Religion held in Venice, Italy. This is a three-year program of one-week seminars.
The theme for the 2008 summer school chosen by school coordinators Karl Giberson, Thomas Jay Oord, William Shea, and Donald Yerxa is “God and the Laws of Nature.” The school will meet 27 May through 1 June 2008. Lecturers for the first year include Paul Davies, Owen Gingerich, and John Polkinghorne.
Interested individuals should submit materials when applying for admission. Application materials for the first year’s school are due 12 November 2007.
Further information can be found here.
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.
Michael Cholbi has started a new blog on teaching philosophy entitled In Socrates' Wake. Given Michael's own work, as well as his contributions to the newly greenified PEA Soup, I think that this will be a great blog once it gets going. I'd encourage PBers to visit and contribute.
A new weblog is born, Philosophy Bites which is going to be a site devoted to podcasts (IE MP3 recordings) of interviews with philosophers on a variety of topics. It is run by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton. One of their first interviews is with Stephen Law on the Argument from Evil and can be found here:
Stephen Law on the Argument from Evil
Disclaimer: I haven't had time to listen to the interview myself yet so I cannot say whether it is any good or not.
Joseph Long of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog has reconstruction and response to Sam (Letter to a Christian Nation) Harris’s Reasons for Belief Argument. Long is fairly generous in his response, though he still arrives at the conclusion that Harris is mistaken.
Razib of Gene Expression has a informative response the the piece in Edge titled Why the Gods are Not Winning. In short "to some extent the two authors are offering an inverted narrative from that of the religious triumphalists, cherry-picking data congenial to their arguments and mixing & matching adjectives and superlatives with specific numbers in a way that might beguile the uninitiated."
Papers
- Philippe Schlenker on Anselm’s Argument and Berry’s Paradox
- Peter Lipton on Science and Religion: The Immersion Solution
Jonathan Bennett has added three new translations to his Early Modern Texts website, at least two of them to some degree relevant to philosophy of religion. They are, as Bennett describes them:
1. Jonathan Edwards, The Freedom of the Will - the earliest masterpiece of American philosophy. Except for its last few sections (on the Christian problem of evil) this work is imaginatively worked-out, densely argued, continuously interesting and engaging.2. John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion (Nature, Usefulness of Religion, Theism).
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason up to the end of the Analytic. For the Preface and the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, both A and B versions are included. Otherwise only (B) the second edition is followed....
I plan to work next on one or more of: Spinoza’s Treatise on Theology and Politics, the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke, Hume’s second Enquiry
For those unfamiliar with Bennett's work, he has been producing translations of early modern philosophical texts that are intended to be suitable for undergraduates who would have trouble reading the standard editions of these texts. Older English works are translated into more contemporary English, and non-English works are either translated anew or updated from older translations. Explanatory notes, sometimes interpretive and sometimes providing background information, are inserted into the text in brackets. I've found them to be very useful in teaching students without a strong background in reading early modern philosophy, even if there might be some reasons to be hesitant about using them with students who will go on in philosophy.
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has a new look and some new features. Check it out.
