Who Were the Sea Peoples?

After Aquinas formulated his " Quinque Viae ," students would often spend weeks studying each "way," as an introduction to these ideas. Today, students spend five seconds having some professor guffaw, "Ha, if everything has a cause, what caused God?!" (Showing the professor himself has no idea what the second way claims .) But to take this argument seriously, to spend the time necessary to grasp it, would start to produce doubts : maybe Aquinas was on to something! And we don't want that.

I have heard that Ken B. and rob are going for a hike in the mountains. I decide to put a stop to their stream of repetitive comments once and for all: I sneak up onto a path above them, and, as they pass, I cause an avalanche to descend upon them, killing them. Now, avalanches happen without anyone intending them. And my defense attorney will surely bring that point up at my trial: yes, it is interesting to know that there are other possibilities than "Gene killed them" at play. 1) But what would be nonsense for him to argue would be, "Ah, Gene didn't kill them! It was an avalanche that killed them!" Because everyone involved agrees there was an avalanche. The question is, "What started the avalanche?" Of course there was some physical cause of their death; what we want to know to reach a verdict was "Did someone intend that cause?" ________________________ In the Bible, when God is trying to persuade the Pharaoh to "let...

The greatest philosopher of all Plato, knew this quite well, which is why he gave us so many myths: Atlantis, the ship of state, the cave and the light, the republic itself, the ring of invisibility -- you did know Gollum was right out of Plato, didn't you? -- the spherical beings who split into "soul mates," the myth of the afterlife at the end of Phaedo, and more. J.R.R. Tolkien, who is not usually recognized as a brilliant theologian, was one, I think, so brilliant that he can only set down his insights as myths... which is just why he is not recognized as a brilliant theologian. And my "presentism," as some have called my noting that the past and future only exist in a subsidiary fashion to the present, must ultimately be explained mythologically as well, which is why, when pushed about what I am really trying to say, I respond, "Go read the 'Music of the Ainur .'" (And for those of you who have "no time" for that -- it is on...

It might seem that the doctrine of divine omniscience means that God knows the future. Many have so interpreted it. I think that is wrong. God can only know what can be known. But the future is just a name we use for what has not yet happened and it does not, in fact, exist. What does not exist cannot be known. God is surprised every moment, just like we are.

Yes, the title is a pleonasm. But this one is particularly bad: "Oh, so you believe in God. So which God do you believe in? The Jewish one, or the Muslim one, or the Christian one, or the Hindu?" All of these religions describe a single source of all being, and ascribe to that source things like divine simplicity, eternal existence, divine conservation, and so on. They also all contain the idea that this ultimate source of being exceeds our powers of description. Then, when these traditions do try to go any further, and they wind up with somewhat different images of God, the atheist making the above argument claims, "Ha! I got you: different Gods!" This fellow ought also to think the following are true: If Ptolemy says the sun goes around the earth, and Copernicus says the earth goes around the sun, then they must be talking about different suns. If an ancient writer described a whale as a fish, he must be talking about a different animal than a mod...