Who would you describe as a major benefactor of humanity? charles Darwin or albert Einstein? Louis pasteur or alexander Fleming? William Shakespeare or Wolfgang amadeus Mozart? i made my choice when i lay on an operating table and watched, on a screen over my head, the surgical procedure taking place. i felt no pain; the lower half of my body was desensitized by spinal anaesthesia. after the op...

On the face of it, a psychologist is an odd choice for representative science; as psychologists, our scientific credentials are oft-disparaged, sometimes even by ourselves, only half-jokingly. But it turns out that work with which this particular cadre theologians has found meet to engage fits mostly within my disciplinary remit. Truly, in at least way, not grandparents’ science-and-religion, f...

In this brief reply to Walls’ challenging critique, I try to do two things: first, clarify the most fundamental point on which I think Walls and I disagree, and second, argue that, as surprising as it may first appear, Walls’ free will theodicy of hell requires that God interfere with human freedom in inappropriate ways. For a number of years now I have considered Jerry Walls to be one of my be...

Re-thinking Origen serves as the final instalment of a distinctive theological project. It follows two previous issues Modern Theology, Gregory Nyssa and Dionysius Areopagite, to complete trilogy.11 = Volume 18, Issue 4 (Oct 2002); Areopagite 24, 2008). The unity trilogy lies in its intellectual affinity twentieth-century project patristic ressourcement which involves thinking not only about ea...

This is the fourth article in a four-article series that examines Buddhist responses to the Western philosophical problem of whether free will is compatible with “determinism,” the scientific doctrine of universal lawful causation. The first article focused on “early period” scholarship from the 1970’s, which was primarily compatibilist, that is, of the view that the Buddhist conception of caus...

Only a few writers have attempted to construct a comprehensive philosophy of social science, and of these Weber is the most relevant to the present. The structure of his conception places him in a close relationship to Donald Davidson. The basic reasoning of Davidson on action explanation, anomalous monism, and the impossibility of a ‘serious science’ of psychology is paralleled in Weber. There...