Jerry Coyne is unhappy with a Eddy Nahmias’ defense of free will, published on the NYT opinionator blog. Here’s Nahmias: Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling [...]
Category Archives: Alvin Plantinga
Arguments for the existence of God are dead
Posted by Chris Hallquist on October 16, 2011
9 comments
There’s a thread going on at The Secular Outpost that started with JJ Lowder defending William Lane Craig against charges of incompetence and dishonesty. I comment as soon as I saw the post, in part because I think Craig’s dishonesty needs to be more widely recognized, but also because I’m genuinely curious as to what [...]
Is studying philosophy beneficial?
Posted by Chris Hallquist on July 22, 2011
38 comments
From xkcd: Guy: “I used to think correlation implied causation. Then I took a statistics class. Now I don’t. Girl: Sounds like the class helped. Guy: Well, maybe. The guy’s worry in this comic sounds silly, but it’s actually a fairly good depiction of how I feel whenever someone asks/tells me, “You have a lot [...]
More on Luke’s endorsement of William Lane Craig
Posted by Chris Hallquist on May 25, 2011
5 comments
I’ve said that I don’t think William Lane Craig deserves the praise that Luke Muehlhauser has heaped on him. But in my previous post on the subject, I said have less than I could have about why I’m not impressed with Craig. In particular, I didn’t respond to the many specific points Luke has made [...]
Why Plantinga didn’t solve the problem of evil: the short version
Posted by Chris Hallquist on March 17, 2011
6 comments
Here, I’ll try to give a quick-and-dirty version of my points about Plantinga’s work on the problem evil from this post. There are two basic issues: why it’s reasonable to doubt Plantinga accomplished what he is officially supposed to have accomplished, and why what he officially accomplished isn’t all that interesting. Plantinga’s basic thought is [...]