Keith Parsons's Blog, page 74

What God Cannot Do - Part 3

In Chapter 6 of Our Idea of God (1991), Thomas Morris provides a brief but helpful explanation of different types of necessity in relation to divine attributes.Morris explains three different types or levels of necessity. Let's use claims about the divine attribute of omnipotence as examples of the three types of necessity. I think this might help with further discussion about the paradox of the

Miracles and Antecedent Probabilities

Victor Reppert responded succinctly but thoughtfully to my posting on ECREE (the principle that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"): There is a sense in which I agree with the ECREE thesis, it is just that I don't believe that there is any objective way of proving that one set of antecedent probabilities is rational and another is not. So what is "extraordinary" is just

What God Cannot Do - Part 2

There are two types of actions that God cannot do (see The Coherence of Theism, p.164): T1. Actions that are logically impossible for any being to perform.T2. Actions that are logically possible for some beings to perform, but logically impossible for God to perform.No being, including God, could produce or discover a four-sided triangle. No being, including God, could produce or find a married

New Chick Tract

Just to start your New Year off with a dose of homophobia...

Americans not more religious than Europeans?

There is some recent research that adds to the long-known fact that Americans inflate their religious participations in surveys. It appears that in terms of frequency of attending services, Americans are not such an outlier compared to other post-industrial nations after all. Shankar Vedantam suggests that this indicates that Americans are actually not significantly more religious than Europeans.

What God Cannot Do - Part 1

For the past couple of months I have been reading philosophers of religion, esp. Richard Swinburne, about divine attributes. According to most theists, omnipotence is a divine attribute, a property of God. There are some interesting problems and puzzles concerning omnipotence, a key problem being the paradox of the stone. Here is a summary of the problem by Swinburne:The paradox arises when we

Evolution and its Rivals

Synthese has a special issue on "Evolution and its Rivals," including papers by a number of people, particularly philosophers, involved in criticism of intelligent design creationism. I haven't had a chance to read them all yet, what with just having finished a semester—I turned in final grades today. But I thought I should post, because access to the issue is free to the public until December 31

Extraordinary Claims and Extraordinary Evidence

Note: This will be my last post until after the holidays. I look forward to responding to comments in a couple of weeks.An online site called CARM—Christian Apologetics and Research Ministries—has posted an article titled "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence." http://carm.org/apologetics/evidence-... Victor Reppert's