I like Bill Maher . He takes sides. One of his best recent lines was, "the last time the Republicans had that many black folks on stage they were selling them!" (That was in response to the reportedly large number of black folks carrying the Republican banner at the 2004 RNC.) The historical irony is that the folks who did the bulk of the selling of black folk would have been predecessors of today’s Democrat party. (So, Maher is evidently no (...) history buff.) I still like him though. (shrink)
Religious thought often assumes that the principle of physical causal completeness (PCC) is false. But those who explicitly deny or doubt PCC, including William Alston, W. D. Hart, Tim Crane, Paul Moser and David Yandell, Charles Taliaferro, Keith Yandell, Dallas Willard, William Vallicella, Frank Dilley, and, recently, David Chalmers, have ignored not only the explicit but also the implicit grounds for acceptance of PCC. I review the explicit grounds, and extend the hitherto implicit grounds, which together constitute a greater (...) challenge to contemporary religious philosophy than has been realized. Religious philosophers need to find a better way around PCC than has been found, or, if PCC is unavoidable, religious philosophers need to work toward a worldview that both accepts PCC and defends strong forms of religious experience. (shrink)
The present paper is a response to the criticisms that Mark McLeod-Harrison makes of my book Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. If secular, intuition-driven rationalist philosophy yields a belief that p, and Christian, revelation-driven epistemic methods yield a belief that not-p, what should we do? Following Alston, McLeod-Harrison argues that Christian philosophers need do nothing, and remains confident that their way is the best. I argue that this is a serious epistemic mistake, and that relativism about philosophical propositions (...) is a superior approach. McLeod-Harrison also raises two objections to my account of relativism, the first against my rejection of the skeptical alternative, and the second attempting to show that I am committed to an epistemic theory of truth. I rebut both arguments. (shrink)
