In his dialogue, 'Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum', Plutarch of Chaeronea criticizes Epicurus for not believing that the gods are provident over human affairs and for not believing that our souls survive death. However, Plutarch’s arguments are striking in that they do not offer any theoretical justification for believing either of these religious claims to be true; rather, they aim to establish that we are practically justified in adopting them if we follow Epicurus’s rule that the goal of belief (...) is not truth in its own right, but mental tranquility. I argue that this form of argument assumes a novel justificatory theory of religious belief, based in Epicurean thought, that I call ‘strong doxastic hedonism.’. (shrink)

In The Untamed God (2003), Jay Wesley Richards defends what he calls “theological essentialism,” which affirms God’s essential perfections but also recognizes contingent properties in God. This idea places Richards’s view in the vicinity of Charles Hartshorne’s dipolar theism. However, Richards argues that Hartshorne’s modal theory suffers from the defects that it abandons the principle ab esse ad posse, makes nonsense of our counter-factual discourse, and can only be expressed by C. I. Lewis’s S4, although for certain purposes Hartshorne needs (...) the stronger S5. Richards, however, fails to realize that Hartshorne’s theory involves two concepts of necessity—necessity as what is common to every possible world-state and necessity as it pertains to the unalterability of the past. While questions remain about Hartshorne’s theory, Richards’s arguments against it are unsuccessful. Most importantly, Richards uncritically accepts the concept of possible worlds as a basis for his critique, but Hartshorne’s arguments cast doubt on the coherence of this idea. Possible worlds provide anything but a firm foundation on which to make sense of either theological essentialism or Hartshorne’s panentheistic dipolar theism. (shrink)

We argue that the geometry of spacetime is a convention that can be freely chosen by the scientist; no experiment can ever determine this geometry of spacetime, only the behavior of matter in space and time. General relativity is then rewritten in terms of an arbitrary conventional geometry of spacetime in which particle trajectories are determined by forces in that geometry, and the forces determined by fields produced by sources in that geometry. As an example, we consider radial trajectories in (...) the field of a single particle expressed in the spacetime of special relativity. (shrink)

Martin Luther and doing theology in the future. The Netherdutch Reformed Church of Africa prides itself for the fact that she has always appreciated the German-Lutheran tradition. The Reformed Theological College has for 15 years contributed to the appreciation of this tradition. This article wants to encourage the new leadership to keep this legacy alive. The main aspects of Luther’s theology are explained. These aspects are: prayer, meditation, constitation, grace of the Spirit, exegesis, and the use of other sciences in (...) understanding the Bible. Attention is also given to the subject-matter of Theology as well as the notion of humbleness. (shrink)