My small idea of getting Dr William Lane Craig to have a debate at Auckland University ended up being an event that far exceeded my expectations. Despite the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (NZARH) booking a larger lecture theatre at the last minute we still had to open up three additional lecture theatres […]
Entries Tagged as 'Philosophers'
The Battle of the Bills: A Review of the Craig – Cooke Debate
June 18th, 2008 8 Comments
Tags: Apologetics · Atheism · Bill Cooke · Debates · Faith and Reason · NZARH · Philosophy of Religion · Rationalists · William Alston · William Lane Craig
Bill Craig’s Visit
May 30th, 2008 4 Comments
I need to apologize to my readers for blogging infrequently at present. I am extremely busy, with marking papers, setting exams, part time jobs, getting another paper published, and generally running a family of 6. I would like to share one project I have been working on over the last few months. Regular readers will […]
Tags: Bill Cooke · Debates · Events · William Lane Craig
Well Done Glenn
May 17th, 2008 2 Comments
I write this post to offer my sincerest congratulations to my good friend Glenn People’s (who runs an excellent blog here). Today Glenn Graduated from the University of Otago with a PhD in Philosophy for his research thesis entitled Religion in the Public Square. Glenn’s thesis was an examination and critique of the thesis, propounded […]
Tags: Glenn Peoples · Graduation · Religion in Public Life
Patrick Nowell Smith on Divine Commands
April 15th, 2008 2 Comments
In a widely-anthologised essay Morality: Religious and Secular. Patrick Nowell Smith offers a influential criticism of “religious morality” It is clear from his definition of religious morality that it is Voluntarism ( or a Divine Command Theory of Ethics) he has in mind. Smith states that the religious moralist has “assumed that just as the […]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Ethics · God and Morality · Patrick Nowell Smith · Philosophy of Religion
Abortion and Brain Death: A Response to Farrar
March 19th, 2008 26 Comments
David Farrar of Kiwiblog weighs in on the abortion debate. I have met David a couple of times and worked with him on several issues and I have a lot of time for him but on this issue we disagree. Given how widely read Farrar’s blog is, and seeing the ethics of killing a fetus […]
Tags: Abortion · Brain Death · David Farrar · Ethics · Feticide
The Body Snatchers and the Problem of Pluralism
December 14th, 2007 1 Comment
As I was driving around Auckland this morning talkback was rife with people discussing the recent body snatchers case; an estranged father, against the wishes of both the deceased and her next of kin stole his daughters body and buried it in a family plot. Of course I remember the furor over the previous case, […]
Tags: John Rawls · Philosophy of Religion · Pluralism · Race Relations · Religion in Public Life
Mayra Veronica and the Troops in Iraq: Where the Islamists Have a Point
December 12th, 2007 2 Comments
I am a fan of Bill Vallicella’s blog. A few days ago I found a post of his which is worth reproducing [link to post now broken Jan 2011]. He led with a picture of a scantily clad and busty Mayra Veronica and wrote: Don’t expect any more ‘eye candy’ on this site, but now […]
Tags: Bill Vallicella · Islam · Mayra Veronica · Religion in Public Life
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
