René Descartes introduced the modern notion of a “law of nature.” The Medieval Scholastic notion of “natural law” was more of a teleological notion; and in particular with respect to human beings, “natural law” described not how we in fact behave but how we ought to behave—the “unnatural” was, in effect, the deviant. The Cartesian…

Does God break the laws of nature? Having ordained the laws in the first place, God clearly has the ability to do so. And Scripture seems to reveal God breaking such laws in the past, from axe heads that float (2 Kgs 6) to the parting of the Red Sea (Exod 14). Many answers to…

The first instinct of many would be to answer “Yes” to this question. For God to “act in the world,” they suppose, would be for God to “intervene” in the natural course of events. Such divine intervention would be an external supernatural cause that interrupts natural cause-and-effect relations and therefore contravenes the laws that govern…

You may have heard the claim that God cannot answer prayers because that would violate the laws of nature, which determine everything that happens. This view reflects an outdated, but still popular interpretation of the laws of nature. It dates back to the time when people were deeply impressed by the success of Newton’s laws…

“Complex question” is the label that logicians give to a particular kind of fallacy in which the answer to a question is already implicit in the way in which it is framed. The classic example is: “when did you stop beating your wife?” The issue that we are considering here is not quite a complex…

“Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Almost hidden within the Genesis creation account stands this singular sentence about God’s creation of humankind. Revealed is God’s creative act; implied is the dual nature of…

A Review of Joshua Cockayne, Contemporary with Christ: Kierkegaard and Second-Personal Spirituality I was in a Master of Arts program in analytic philosophy of religion when I first discovered Kierkegaard, and it was Kierkegaard who led me “on principle” away from analytic philosophy. Though I have made my home mostly in the continental tradition, I…

Michael Shermer accurately summarizes our argument, and his review of our book is fair if not downright magnanimous. At one point, he even appears to concede that, strictly speaking, we cannot get an “ought from an is”—that science by itself cannot discover moral truths. If this is what he thinks, then Shermer and we seem…

“If there is no God, Murder Isn’t Wrong” So says the religious conservative radio talk show host and author Dennis Prager in a PragerU video viewed by 4.5 million people. I rebutted Prager in a studio debate hosted by Dave Rubin for his Rubin Report show, in which I made the case that rejecting “Divine…

There are two kinds of facts: normative and non-normative. Facts about how things should be, what is or is not properly functioning, what is right or wrong, what is healthy or not, and what is good or bad are normative. Facts about how things are or how they could be or statistically tend to be…

Neo-Aristotelianism is indeed resurgent in contemporary philosophy. The renaissance has been underway for at least fifty years, beginning with a new focus on classical metaphysical themes by Roderick Chisholm, David M. Armstrong, Alvin Plantinga, and Robert M. Adams. In the 1960’s and 70’s, these anglophone philosophers began digging themselves out of the rubble of logical…

My overall aim in this brief response to Paul Gould’s lead essay is to draw the reader’s attention to an area of contemporary moral philosophy—Neo-Aristotelian metaethics—that is ripe for rediscovery in the wake of the ongoing resurgence of Neo-Aristotelianism in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Sketching A Metaphysical Picture Let me begin with a thumbnail…