A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Keith Ward

  • Physicalism, reductionism, and the soul

    This off-the-cuff post on atheism generated some interesting discussion with Gaius about physicalism, reductionism, and humanism, among other things. I don’t know that I can express my views on the matter better than I tried to do in this post from a few years ago discussing Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire. In short, we often abstract Read more

  • Denis Edwards and Keith Ward on miracles

    Miracles present what is probably the toughest challenge for Denis Edwards’ noninterventionist account of divine action. After all, isn’t a miracle by definition an act of God “intervening” in, or overriding, or bypassing the normal chain of events? Edwards considers one traditional view on what a miracle is, namely that of Thomas Aquinas. As we’ve Read more

  • Problems of omnipotence, omniscience, and temporality

    In his book Pascal’s Fire, Keith Ward writes: …ultimate mind is the actual basis of all possible states. It is the only being that must be actual, if anything at all is possible. It is thus uniquely self-existent, not deriving its existence from any other being. Its nature is necessarily what it is–there are no Read more

  • Doubting Dawkins

    An excerpt from Keith Ward’s Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, a response to Richard Dawkins. (In Ward’s defense, he’s been debating Dawkins for years, so this isn’t cheap bandwagon jumping.) The world of philosophy, of resolute thought about the ultimate nature of things, is a very varied one, and there is no one Read more

  • Salvation as re-creation

    A while back I wrote about Keith Ward’s understanding of how God acts in the world, as explained in his book Divine Action. Later in the book he devotes a chapter to the incarnation and offers an interpretation of the atonement. Ward argues that Jesus is properly seen as the enfleshment or embodiment of God’s Read more

  • Ward on God’s action in the world

    I’ve been reading side-by-side Arthur Peacocke’s Theology for a Scientific Age and Keith Ward’s Divine Action. While they construct similar positions, they have some important differences. Peacocke, for instance, argues that God acts on the universe in a “top-down” fashion that sets the parameters of what happens in the world, even while at the same Read more

  • Chew the right thing

    I’m surprised I never came across this before, but philosophers David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have a terrific series of podcasts called Philosophy Bites, which consist of relatively short interviews with philosophers on various topics of interest. The site is here; it’s also available as a free download on iTunes. So far I’ve listened to Read more

  • November/December reading notes

    Also known as the lazy man’s book review, or capsule reflections on books I might not get around to posting on at greater length: Ecology at the Heart of Faith by Denis Edwards and Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology by H. Paul Santmire A Catholic (Edwards) and a Lutheran (Santmire) Read more

  • Mill, liberal perfectionism, and religion

    As a tangential follow-up to this post, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a petty exhaustive discussion of J.S. Mill’s moral and political philosophy here. Specifically, here’s a discussion of the relationship between Mill’s utilitarianism and his liberalism; here’s a comparison between Mill’s liberalism and other variants, such as Rawls’s. The emphasis here on Read more

  • Keith Ward at the National Cathedral

    It was a gorgeous fall day here in DC, and we decided to enjoy it and take an outing to the Washington National Cathedral this morning for their Sunday forum. The guest, as it happens, was British theologian/philosopher Keith Ward, whose work I admire and have written about frequently here at ATR. The format was Read more