God and Infinite Choices

William Rowe, in Can God be Free? (2004), gives us three propositions
A) There necessarily exists an essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially perfectly good being who has created a world.
B) If an omniscient being creates a world when there is a better world that it could have created, then it is possible that there exists a [...]

Freedom and Obedience

Brian McDaniel, the blogger at Ora et Labora, has been spearheading an effort to put together an electronic petition of 4000 “signatures” in support of the decision by the Board of Trustees of the University of San Diego (a Catholic university) to rescind its offer of a senior, chaired position to radical heterodox theologian Rosemary [...]

Are Non-Catholics Blind?

Alvin Plantinga has argued that Christian beliefs such as the existence of God, incarnation, etc. can be warranted in a properly basic way. Those who do not believe in the existence of God have some kind of impairment in their cognitive faculties which is a result of original sin. In other words, there is something [...]

Criticizing the Church

Every Catholic, every human person, was affected by the scandal made here in by priests and bishops. The ugliness and evil we saw committed by people who were supposed to be holy, supposed to be an example for the world, are intolerable. Those who thirsted for justice criticized, rightly, the Church. There is, then, an [...]

The Flynn Effect

At Mike’s suggestion I adapt, below, a post that has already been published at my other blog, An Examined Life. The overall substance of the post is the same, but I have made a few minor alterations to reflect the change in venue.

Just what is transubstantiation, anyway?

Fr. Al Kimel recently wrote a post that got me thinking about transubstantiation again. Its title is a question: Is Transubstantiation Bodily Enough? The long discussion sparked by that post over at De Cure Animarum stimulated anew my thinking about this topic. As with such questions as “Were you a zygote?“, which Scott addressed in [...]

Me and My Zygote

Bill Vallicella of Maverick Philosopher has asked for assessments of an argument by Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard to the effect that zygotes are not substantially the same as the successor entitites that they (apparently) develop into. Bill summarizes the argument as follows:
1. The unicellular zygote is predestined to undergo fission.
2. Whatever undergoes fission ceases [...]

Welcome, and happy Feast of St. Augustine!

This blog is in the making as group blog for Catholic philosophers. Several of my friends, erstwhile colleagues, and would-be colleagues have already agreed to come on board and contribute. You can read about them on the About page. But as the idea for this blog originated with me, the chief responsibility for administering it [...]