How ought we think about God? (Part 1)

What is the best way to align our concept of God to the reality of God? Is there a methodology that we should use? Or, should we just “wing it” and hope for the best? What are the prospects for us arriving at the truth about God anyhow?

Does God play dice with the universe? Or: What Theological Determinists and Open Theists have in common

Does God play dice with the universe? Theological Determinists answer “no”—there is no place for chance in a world created and sustained by God. Open Theists answer “yes”—there is indeterminacy with respect to humans, and maybe even with respect to quantum phenomena.

Molinism is a Bed of ROSES

As a follow up from my last post, I want to highlight an important book defending the theology of Molinism, Salvation and Sovereignty by Kenneth Keathley. Whether you are a Calvinist, Molinist, Arminian, or whatever, I think this book is important for the following reason.

A Primer on Divine Providence

Traditional theism claims that God is sovereign over all action and events in the world. Traditional theism also maintains that humans are meaningfully free—that our actions mean something, they are genuinely ours, so that we can rightfully be praiseworthy or blameworthy because of them. But, the claim that God is sovereign over all actions and events seems to be at odds with the claim that humans are significantly free. Hence, the age old debate: How should we make sense of the reality of divine sovereignty and human freedom?

We Are Not Brutes

Aristotle defined man as “rational animal.” The point of contrast is with irrational animals, or brutes, which, according to the Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus, “make use of appearances” but do not “understand the use of appearances.”[1] Or to put it another way, God has created man with a particular nature, one that includes rational faculties that give us the ability to wonder about the universe and to ask the persistent questions: what is the meaning of life? Why am I here? Does God exist? Is there objective value? And so on.

Talks

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Favorite Books of 2020

January 2, 2021

2020 has been a year of change for my family. We moved in the middle of a pandemic from Texas to Florida. I started a new job as a professor of philosophy and the director of a new program in philosophy at Palm Beach Atlantic University. We left behind two of our children in Texas–both college students at Baylor. Our younger two sons have had to endure an on-again/off-again year at a new school. But there have been many constants, even in the midst of change. Family. Jesus. And the reading of books! And this blog post. (more…)

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Month Six as a Henry Fellow: Human Uniqueness, Origin, and Destiny

February 4, 2020

I’m having a fantastic time as a Henry Fellow at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School this academic year. To date, I’ve written four chapters in my popular level book tentatively called Eleven Stones: Discovering the True Story of the World, the majority of a chapter on “Teleological Arguments” for a textbook, a chapter on “Neo-Aristotelian Accounts of Divine Creation” to be included in a forthcoming book on divine causation, and the first part of a book on Theism and the Nature of Nature. (more…)

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My Favorite Books of 2019

January 2, 2020

Each year around this time I list my top books read over the past year in philosophy, theology, apologetics, fiction, and non-fiction. As much as it pains me, I’ll restrict myself to the top three in each of these categories. As is custom, I will list them with my one sentence description of the book, as written in my book log. As a bonus, this year I also include the favorite reads of Ethel and the kids! Here we go: (more…)

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