Stewart Goetz is an American philosopher and writer.
Goetz obtained a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. [1] He a professor in Philosophy and Religion at Ursinus College. [1] He has defended substance dualism. [2] [3] Goetz is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center on Culture and Civil Society at the Independent Institute. [4] He has debated physicalist Andrew Melnyk on consciousness and free will at Internet Infidels. [5]
The problem of evil is the philosophical question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God. There are currently differing definitions of these concepts. The best known presentation of the problem is attributed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus. It was popularized by David Hume.
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.
Richard Granville Swinburne is an English philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years, Swinburne has been a proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason. He has been influential in reviving substance dualism as an option in philosophy of mind.
The existence of God is a subject of debate in the philosophy of religion and theology. A wide variety of arguments for and against the existence of God can be categorized as logical, empirical, metaphysical, subjective or scientific. In philosophical terms, the question of the existence of God involves the disciplines of epistemology and ontology and the theory of value.
Kantianism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher born in Königsberg, Prussia. The term Kantianism or Kantian is sometimes also used to describe contemporary positions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics.
The standard problem of evil found in monotheistic religions does not apply to almost all traditions of Hinduism because it does not posit an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator.
James Porter Moreland, better known as J. P. Moreland, is an American philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California.
Physical causal closure is a metaphysical theory about the nature of causation in the physical realm with significant ramifications in the study of metaphysics and the mind. In a strongly stated version, physical causal closure says that "all physical states have pure physical causes" — Jaegwon Kim, or that "physical effects have only physical causes" — Agustin Vincente, p. 150.
Metaphysical naturalism is a philosophical worldview which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences. Methodological naturalism is a philosophical basis for science, for which metaphysical naturalism provides only one possible ontological foundation. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, metaphysical naturalism rejects the supernatural concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.
R. William Hasker is an American philosopher and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Huntington University. For many years, he was editor of the prestigious journal Faith and Philosophy. He has published many journal articles and books dealing with issues such as the mind–body problem, theodicy, and divine omniscience.
Paul Robert Draper is an American philosopher, most known for his work in the philosophy of religion. His work on the evidential argument from evil for atheism has been widely influential. He is currently a professor at Purdue University. He is co-editor of topics in the philosophy of religion for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The argument from reason is a transcendental argument against metaphysical naturalism and for the existence of God. The best-known defender of the argument is C. S. Lewis. Lewis first defended the argument at length in his 1947 book, Miracles: A Preliminary Study. In the second edition of Miracles (1960), Lewis substantially revised and expanded the argument.
Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense is a logical argument developed by the American analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga and published in its final version in his 1977 book God, Freedom, and Evil. Plantinga's argument is a defense against the logical problem of evil as formulated by the philosopher J. L. Mackie beginning in 1955. Mackie's formulation of the logical problem of evil argued that three attributes ascribed to God are logically incompatible with the existence of evil.
Dean W. Zimmerman is an American professor of philosophy at Rutgers University specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of religion.
Charles Stephen Evans is an American philosopher and expert on Søren Kierkegaard.
Scott Robert Sehon is an American philosopher and the Joseph E. Merrill Professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College. His primary work is in the fields of philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, the free will debate, and socialism. He is the author of Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency and Explanation in which he takes a controversial, non-causalist view of action explanation, Free Will and Action Explanation: a Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account, and Socialism: A Logical Introduction.
Charles Taliaferro is an American philosopher specializing in theology and philosophy of religion.
Theistic finitism, also known as finitistic theism or finite godism, is the belief in a deity that is limited. It has been proposed by some philosophers and theologians to solve the problem of evil. Most finitists accept the absolute goodness of God but reject omnipotence.
Nicholas Everitt is an English philosopher and atheist writer who specializes in epistemology and philosophy of religion.
Frank Brown Dilley was an American philosopher who served for many years as Chair of the Philosophy Department at University of Delaware.