Problems of omnipotence, omniscience, and temporality

In his book Pascal’s Fire, Keith Ward writes:
…ultimate mind is the actual basis of all possible states. It is the only being that must be actual, if anything at all is possible. It is thus uniquely self-existent, not deriving its existence from any other being. Its nature is necessarily what it is–there are no possible [...]

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The Life You Can Save 2

In part 2 of The Life You Can Save, Singer considers some of the psychological obstacles to giving more, as well as some ways they might be overcome.
Chapter 4 reviews some research that provides a measure of insight into our reluctance to give to strangers living in extreme poverty. For instance, people are less likely [...]

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Faith and economics

A conservative evangelical questions his uncritical embrace of laissez-faire economics.
When you think about it, the marriage between evangelicalism and free market capitalism is downright odd, and, as far as I can tell, largely confined to the U.S. (British evangelicals, for instance, seem quite a bit more left-wing on economics than their American counterparts).
I’m not [...]

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Evolution, creation, and human uniqueness

There’s an account making the rounds of a recent debate between atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett and Christian theist Alvin Plantinga. One of the issues that comes up is the compatibility between Christianity (or theism more generally) and evolution, a perennial topic of interest here at ATR.
Dennett seems to see them as incompatible. Plantinga not [...]

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Is marriage sacred?

In arguments about gay marriage you sometimes hear suggestions that we should have a strictly civil version of marriage (or union) for the public realm that applies to gay and straight people alike, while leaving “sacred” marriage to religious bodies. This may or may not be a good idea, but what I wonder is whether [...]

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Saturday metal – freezing cold pre-Inaugural edition

Some very cool animation in this video from French enviro-metallers Gojira:
All The Tears

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Intolerable

I was doing some online research on website development for a project I’m working on and came across this statement:
It’s an established fact that Internet users today are increasingly impatient and intolerable.
Indeed!

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At the risk of becoming a one-note blog…

I don’t really want to be in the position where I feel like I have to blog about everything that appears in the media on animal rights, especially since the same arguments tend to get repeated over and over again. But since this piece appeared in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, it might be [...]

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A yankee’s lament

I am so not cut out for these DC summers. It’s supposed to be 99 today. In frickin’ June. Seriously.

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Radical faith and creation

As my previous post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into the greatest hits of H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s younger brother and no mean theologian himself).
Right now I’m finishing up his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, which I had read as an undergrad, and I remember it making an impression on me at the time [...]

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