I have been thinking about the philosophy of religion lately and I noticed that I don’t really have my posts on this organized. So here are some of the things I have written on this topic. I am pretty much a layman in this area and have not published any of this stuff except as blog posts. I might put things differently here and there but overall I think these still hold up!

• Outline of the Case for Agnosticism
  • The kind of Agnosticism I defend claims that there is equally compelling evidence for and against Theism
• The Argument for Simulation via Traditional A Posteriori Arguments for God’s Existence
  • Traditional Theistic arguments better support the Simulation Hypothesis than traditional Theism
• The Argument from Photosynthesis
  • It is possible that an animal use photosynthesis instead of eating, so why aren’t humans photosynthetic? This provides a powerful objection to the argument from design and adds a new twist to the problem of evil
• The Design Argument for the Simulation Hypothesis
  • This was my first attempt to argue that traditional Theistic arguments better support the conclusion that we live in a simulation

The Problem of Evil

• Freedom and Evil
  • Back in 2006 a student in a class where discussed the problem of evil asked me if I would participate in a debate they organized with John Rankin on the question “If God exists, then why is there evil?’ the linked post was my opening remarks and re-reading it I can see I was blissful unaware of Plantinga’s work…I was also still a graduate student. I have never seen what the flaw in this argument is supposed to be.
• Transworld Depravity and the New Logical Problem of Evil
  • final thoughts on Plantinga’s Free Will defense
• A Short Argument that there is no God
  • my attempt to side-step the Plantinga-style free will defense against the logical problem of evil
• Transworld Saints
  • Plantinga’s defense seems to assume that God doesn’t have power to create creaturely essences that always freely choose the good (but why couldn’t He choose to actualize the essences whose ‘counter-factuals of freedom’ had no moral evil: transworld saints)

Omniscience

• God Vs. The Delayed Choice Quantum Computer
  • I argue that if God is omniscient then there must be an aspect of physical reality that He doesn’t know. This post has generated a lot of controversy and accusations that I don’t understand quantum mechanics but the more I do understand it the more this argument seems to hold up!
• What God Doesn’t Know
  • I try to generate a Liar’s Paradox type sentence about God’s knowledge (right before I found out someone else did this already)
• The Logical Problem of Omniscience
  • Can God know what He will do and still be free?

Morality

• The Immorality of God
  • God cannot have morally significant free will without failing to be the source of morality
• Reason and the Nature of Obligation
  • an exploration of the question about obligation and motivating reasons in Modern Philosophy. This is where I discovered the distinction between justifying reasons and motivating reasons that helped shape the ideas in my dissertation (on metaethics)
• Why Must We Worship God?
  • Is it rational for a perfect being to care whether I worship Them or not? I argue that it is not
• Invoking God doesn’t save Descartes from Skepticism
  • Using Job as a comparison I argue that Descartes doesn’t have a good reason to think that Gos isn’t a deceiver

Self-Selecting for Rationality

• Can we have been self-selecting for rationality this whole time?