Bill Nye is Not the Philosophy Guy

Reliable sources have informed me that for the millennial generation Bill Nye is a figure of great importance, due to his widely-watched program from the 1990’s called “Bill Nye the Science Guy.” Evidently, he taught a large swath of American youth the fundamentals of experimental science and became for them a sort of paragon of reason. Well, I’ll take their word for it. But judging from a recent video in which Bill Nye discussed the relation between science and philosophy, I can... Read More

Why the Resurrection Was Not a Conspiracy

When confronted with the early Christians’ testimony about the Resurrection of Jesus, it is natural to question whether it’s credible. A healthy skepticism demands we test the claims of such an event. One way to do so is by offering alternative explanations, and one such explanation is the conspiracy theory. This theory purports to explain Christ’s empty tomb and postmortem appearances by claiming the early Christians stole the body and made up the Resurrection story. I don’t fault... Read More

The “3:10 to Yuma” Proof of God

“Yeah, that's why I don't mess around with doing anything good, Dan. You do one good deed for somebody...I imagine it's habit-forming. Something decent. See that grateful look in their eyes, imagine it makes you feel like Christ Hisself.” – Ben Wade “Virtue is not an act, but a disposition (a habit).” –Aristotle   Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft famously describes the “Bach argument for the existence of God,” wherein God’s existence is clearly posited by a) the... Read More

What Do You Think of the Fine-Tuning Argument for God?

NOTE: We recently kicked off a new series of posts on popular arguments for God. Each post lays out the argument and is followed by open-ended discussion. The goal is not to offer a thorough defense or refutation of the argument in the original post, but to unpack it together, as a community, in the comment boxes. So far we've covered Alvin Plantinga's modal ontological argument for God, the Kalam cosmological argument, and the moral argument for God. Today, we'll look at the argument... Read More

“Risen” and the Reality of the Resurrection

When I saw the coming attractions for the new film Risen—which deals with a Roman tribune searching for the body of Jesus after reports of the resurrection—I thought that it would leave the audience in suspense, intrigued but unsure whether these reports were justified or not. I was surprised and delighted to discover that the movie is, in fact, robustly Christian and substantially faithful to the Biblical account of what transpired after the death of Jesus. My favorite scene shows... Read More

Doubting Jesus: A Catholic Biblical Scholar Responds to Skeptical Questions

A couple weeks ago, we launched an #AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Dr. Brant Pitre, who is one of today's premier Catholic biblical scholars. His latest book, The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Random House, 2016) seeks to debunk skeptical attitudes toward the Gospels put forward today by scholars such as Bart Ehrman. Hundred of questions poured in and Brant answered as many as he could, sometimes grouping them together where the topics overlapped. Today... Read More

Is It Reasonable to Believe in Miracles?

Should I believe in miracles? This question doesn’t pertain to whether I should believe in this miracle or that miracle. It has to do with whether I’m rationally justified in believing in miracles as such. David Hume's Wisdom for the Wise The eightenth-century Scottish skeptic philosopher David Hume argued the wise man should not believe in miracles. The basis for his assertion was what might be called the “repeatability principle”—evidence for what occurs over and over (the... Read More

Where is God? The Problem of Divine Hiddenness

If God exists, where is he? Moreover if God is all-loving and all-powerful why hasn’t he shown himself to the world? He’s all loving: why would he leave any room for doubt? He’s all-powerful: why not reveal himself in the most spectacular of ways that would make unbelief impossible? I’ll start by admitting that the argument from the hiddenness of God is a reasonable objection; and I’ll also admit that there are days when I wonder to myself in exasperation, “God where are... Read More

Why the First Verified Detection of Gravitational Waves is HUGE News

Now that LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravity-wave Observatory) scientists have published their research in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, the media is abuzz with the news of gravitational waves. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this announcement. To begin with, gravitational waves were (until now) the only major prediction of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that still lacked observational evidence. Because LIGO’s measurements align precisely with... Read More

Atheism, Prot-Enlight, and the Schizophrenic Republic

Last week, I wrote about the longstanding Catholic drive to reinterpret the philosophy of Plato as realist. In actuality, Aristotle’s philosophy perfected Plato’s by connecting the material to the formal world—two separated domains which, in Plato, remain wholly alien to one another. Accordingly, it is quite a “stretcher,” I suggested, when Catholics talk about Plato as a realist. Any philosophy which divorces the material and the formal qualifies as anti-realism, because matter’s... Read More

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