David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

“If it weren’t for God, I wouldn’t be here–I’d be out doing something wrong.” –The guy who’s always reading a Bible at Bucks
If this is really true, I guess it’s a good thing that this guy has faith, but this still makes me pretty nervous.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably use a computer for at least a couple hours a day. As a computer science and philosophy student, I spend a lot of time writing programs and even more time writing papers. I must spend at least three hours a day in front of a computer screen, and [...]

Theistic arguments from Big Bang cosmology abound, including William Lane Craig’s Kalam argument and L. Stafford Betty and Bruce Cordell’s anthropic teleological argument. Quentin Smith gives an argument which he hopes will fill the lacuna left by non-theistic interpretations of Big Bang cosmology. Smith explains the inherently unpredictable nature of the Big Bang singularity—the lawless [...]

John Hick responds to the problem of evil by offering an interpretation of God’s plan for humanity in which natural evils are person-building obstacles, and moral evils are moralizing vicissitudes, in a developmental process aimed at moral perfection. Hick argues that only by arriving at a state of moral perfection from an initial state of [...]

In “The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology,” Alvin Plantinga argues that belief in God need not be justified by the proofs and arguments of natural theology in order to be held rationally by believers. In order to show this, he develops an epistemological position in which some beliefs are properly basic, or rightly held with [...]

L. Stafford Betty and Bruce Cordell argue that for the Universe to have evolved to its present state as the result of randomly-determined initial conditions is so improbable, that it is relatively likely that these conditions were determined by an intelligent designer. To the contrary, I argue that since the Big Bang was atemporal, our [...]

Can we conceive of a being so great that to disbelieve its existence only leads to absurdity? St. Anselm thinks that we understand “something greater than which nothing can be thought,” and he argues that our understanding of this being is such that we contradict ourselves upon thinking that such a being does not exist. [...]

Confessions documents an extremely impressionable man’s tenacious search for a consistent and comforting worldview. Augustine transitions from quantitative hedonism, to Manichaeism, to Aristotelianism, to Neoplatonism, and, as far as we know, ultimately to Catholicism, with the intermittent hiatus in Astrology, Aestheticism, and more hedonism. He is motivated successively by the vicissitudes of youth, by the [...]

Thomas Aquinas delivers a proof for the existence of God in which he first shows that there is something that necessarily exists, and then goes on to show that among the things that necessarily exist there must be something that derives its own necessity, and this “all men speak of as God.” The main objection [...]