Author: Huenemann

Read a review of the collection here. Stump is a very well-known philosopher of religion. One passage from the review may suggest why some of you out there interested in philosophy of religion should want to read her work:

One of the deeply attractive features of Stump’s work is the sheer humanity that shines through in both its verbal and oral forms. One cannot read her work, or listen to one of her presentations, or watch her respond as an interlocutor, without knowing that one has encountered a really profound soul. There is a spiritual depth and discernment in all she does that is attractive, serene, and totally authentic. This is entirely fitting in that there is something missing if reflection on the divine remains merely analytic and abstract; the discourse deployed should at some point reflect the grandeur of the subject matter. This is not to say that excellent work cannot be done by unbelievers; nor is it to wish out of existence the highly technical work that philosophers will naturally do in their writing. It is rather to be on the lookout for work that improves on excellence and takes the discourse to a whole new level. Stump’s work just naturally improves on excellence. One can therefore commend the work of Stump as a paradigm case of the kind of philosophical work that should be read and pondered by theologians. Hence I readily suggest to theological students that they should make the time and effort to become acquainted with her work on, say, the problem of evil.

Survey a variety of answers here (from the Templeton foundation), ranging from “Unlikely” to “I hope so”. Here’s an excerpt from Elie Wiesel:

But I know this: the questions that confront us today do have a response; and this response engages us. If the present world has a purpose or fate, it must be the same for all. And each human being, with his own background and culture, owes it to him or herself to affirm his or her own humanity with respect to that of his or her peer. The purpose of the world cannot be to propose or impose a choice between joy for some and distress for others. This is a false and unjust choice. If, in order to be happy, it is necessary for the other not to be, the world in which we live would look more like a prison than an orchard.

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

Read more here.

Those of you signed up for PHIL 3100 can get a head start by viewing this:

Here is a book review of Michael Ruse’s Science and Spirituality, which he argues that the core of Christianity is consistent with contemporary scientific conclusions. The reviewer’s interesting conclusion:

My own suspicion is that it is not so easy to divide the spheres of faith and reason. It takes considerable faith, for example, to believe that the very same laws of nature apply throughout reality and that those laws are remotely accessible to the human mind (a problem Ruse insists that “the Victorians” would not have noticed — forgetting that Charles Darwin did, as Alvin Plantinga has pointed out). It also takes faith, and considerable devotion, to believe that reality is worth knowing, and that it’s therefore worth struggling to discover a coherent, unified theory of everything (which we certainly don’t have now). Without those dogmas, “science” only names a compendium of sometimes useful techniques and partial hypotheses which we have no reason to expect to be coherent or of any more general interest than stamp collecting. The question must then be: what sort of universe must we think this is if those dogmas are to be believable? And the answer, perhaps, is that Christian theism provides a more plausible metaphysics than currently fashionable materialism. Science and Religion, by Ruse’s account, are not at war, only because they have different fields and methods. But perhaps they are not at war because Science depends upon Religion, and rebellion will lead in the end to its disintegration.