The great Princeton theologian Charles Hodge writes against the philosophers conception of God’s attribute of Love, concluding that the love of God is not thoroughly dissimilar to a human’s experience of loving another – that is, with feeling and emotion.
In the conclusion to his series on the Problem of Evil, Stuart considers the emotional force of pain, suffering, predation and extinction experienced by the animal kingdom on the presumption of evolution in Christopher Southgate’s theodicy, and possible strategies for an appropriate defense.
Christopher Southgate, author of The Groaning of Creation, denies a cosmic fall on the grounds that pain and predation are instrumental in the Darwinian process for producing values, such as consciousness, rationality and the “range, beauty, complexity, and diversity of creatures the Earth has produced.” He asserts that this was the “only way” that God could have achieved this. Stuart argues that this is incoherent if God is omnipotent, and offer a preferable argument that preserves God’s omnipotence.
In Part Two of this series on the Problem of Evil, Stuart looks at the theodicies of Christopher Southgate and William Dembski that take into account animal suffering in an evolutionary history as a part of the problem of evil, and in doing so develop a framework for his own theodicy.
The task of reconciling the evil in this world with the goodness of God and his creation belongs to a branch of Christian theology called Theodicy. This task has been exacerbated in the past century and half by evolutionary theory that makes us acutely aware of the long-ages past filled with animal suffering. Developing a theodicy is of particular interest to the Christian theologian who seeks to make Christianity credible in the mental environment and requires the analytical tools of the Philosophy of Religion.
Here I look at another reason why Christians can appreciate Harry Potter: the symbolic meaning of Harry’s wand and what it means to be truly human.
Thinking Matters is proud to have one its close associates, Matthew Flannagan, speak at the Evangelical Philosophers Society and the Society of Biblical Literature Conferences in Atlanta, Georgia.
In this short essay I advance my own brief analysis as to why Generic Open Theism is philosophically flawed.
Before any refutation of Openness Theology can take place, it is important to properly understand what it is and its distinctive features. Part one of this essay will distinguish what Alan R. Rhoda calls Generic Open Theism.
A review of some of the Christian themes hidden beneath the covers of nihilism in the movie Watchmen, based on the comic by writer Alan Moore.
God’s relationship to time has become a matter of some controversy in the latter half of the twentieth Century. The Scriptures affirm that God is eternal, being without beginning or end. However the biblical material is under-determined with respect to the precise nature of divine eternity. Here I survey the different counter-perspectives and some of the supporting arguments for each.
Paul Copan looks at the biblical basis for the idea that God created all things out of nothing.
