Two of My Favorite Contemporary Philosophers
Over at Scriptorium, you will find a couple of posts worth reading by two of my favorite comtemporary philosophers, J. P. Moreland and John Mark Reynolds.
Reynolds discusses a contemporary issue, personal vs. non-personal causation, from a Greek Classical perspective in this post, Before Socrates: the Tension between Personal and Impersonal Causes. In this excerpt, he argues that Christianity brought about a resolution of the tension present in the works of the philosophers of Greek antiquity:
The coming of Christ was, therefore, good news for science and philosophy.
The Christian church would eventually fill the gap between the two extremes of Greek thought. Christian theology, with a God outside of nature, would allow for both natural and personal cosmic cause. Some things could be recognized as divine action, the creation of life for example. Other things, such as the cycle of seasons, could be given natural explanations in the context of an overarching divine purpose. Only Plato and Aristotle would come close to grasping this elegant solution. As we shall see, neither fully grasped it and only with the coming of Christianity were the necessary philosophical distinctions to be made. Christianity allowed for the final birth of a truly modern science.
Moreland has a post on Human Persons and Equal Rights. In it, he discusses how that only the Judeo-Christian view of humans as being made in the image of God can adequately ground human rights. Naturalism (and belly-buttons, among other things) cannot. Here’s the beginning lines:
It is a cherished belief of most people that human beings simply as such have equal value and rights and that they have significantly greater value than animals. However, this claim is difficult if not impossible to justify given a naturalist worldview. For many naturalists, the best, perhaps only, way to justify the belief that all humans have equal and unique value simply as such is in light of the metaphysical grounding of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the image of God. Such a view depicts humans as substances (a particular thing like a dog that is a simple, indivisible unity of parts and attributes at a time, that remains the same through change, and that has a nature (being a human, being a carbon atom, being a dog) that provides an answer to the question “What kind of thing is this particular object?”)…