Month Two as a Henry Fellow

I’m enjoying my time at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School working on the doctrine of creation. My primary focus this past month has been a paper on neo-Aristotelian accounts of divine creative activity. I hope to defend a particular version at some point, but for now, I’m interested in what neo-Aristotelian models of divine creation, if any, are viable (that is, consistent with contemporary science, pre-philosophical intuition, and traditional theology). I’ve been reading on the nature of substance, causal powers, teleology, substantial forms, and the like. I’ve also begun to dive into the literature on grounding and fundamentality. I highly recommend to you my friend Ross Inman’s book Substance and the Fundamentality of the Familiar as a super helpful and clear guide to the literature on the mereology and metaphysical priority—thanks Ross! I’ve also done a fair bit of reading on the cosmological argument. I’m intrigued by Rob Koon’s new Kalam cosmological argument and his discussion of the Grim Reaper paradox. Interesting stuff!

This month, I hope to finalize a draft of my “Neo-Aristotelian accounts of divine creative activity” paper, a draft of a chapter on the origin of the universe for a popular level book (tentatively titled Eleven Stones), and to start research on the metaphysics of participation. I’ll begin the participation study with a detailed read of Plato’s Parmenides. I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis’s claim through the mouth of the Professor in The Last Battle: (paraphrased): “It’s all in Plato…” In addition, I’ll begin my study of the origin of life debate. Throughout the year, I plan on exploring the origin of the universe, life, species, and humans so that I can answer some of my own questions on the topics and see if I can land on a rationally preferred model of divine creative activity.

My fun read from last month: Doug Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Here are some of the books I hope to read this month. Regarding the four books on top of this stack, those are my textbooks for a class I’ll be teaching this month for Summit Ministries and their semester program. I look forward to updating you on my progress next month!

P.S. For those interested in my work on Cultural Apologetics, I’ll be doing two lectures for The Colson Center this month for their short course on Secularism. I’ll be talking about how we arrived at this cultural moment (October 1) and what we might do about it (October 22). See here for more details!