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J.P. Moreland is one of my heroes. I was a graduate student in engineering, with a background in physics, when I became a Christian and Moreland's "Scaling the Secular City" was a foundational work for me during that time. It convinced me that evangelicals don't check their brains at the door of the church. That and "Christianity and the Nature of Science" are both on my bookshelf, but I think the latter is out of print.

All these years and I didn't know he looked so much like Cal Thomas.

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I wouldn't consider Scaling the Secular City to be intellectually rigorous. His cosomological argument treats infinity as a mathematical impossibility, something Leibniz and Newton showed to be false when they developed the calculus. There are much better ways of presenting the cosmological argument that don't rely on the premise that the universe had a beginning, and even if he wants to start there all he needs to do is point out that most scientists believe the universe had a beginning. Proving it philosophically with faulty reasoning isn't a good idea. William Lane Craig has a whole book based on this mistake.

He also presents all the classic arguments from Descartes for substance dualism both in that book and in Immortality that all beg the question against materialists, who simply won't grant their premises, e.g. that you can really imagine a possible scenario that your mind and your brain are separated or that you can divide your brain without therefore dividing your mind. He then acts as if dualism's truth is support for Christianity and as if someone can't really be a Christian without being a dualist. The first claim is ok if he considers it only a tiny piece of a much larger argument, but he seems to act as if it's stronger than that, as if dualism refutes the rest of naturalism besides its materialism. The second claim is just divisive. A friend of mine knew someone who went to Talbott and lasted a year, leaving totally disillusioned because of the bias against Christians who believe in resurrection without believing in an immaterial soul, as if it's gospel-denying or something.

When I first read Moreland, he awakened my interest in philosophy, and I appreciate his willingness to bring evangelicals to think more carefully and to pursue philosophical work. It had that effect on me. Still, I wouldn't call his popular works intellectually rigorous, and I think some of what Moreland has done has prevented Christians from being intellectually rigorous in their pursuit of philosophy.

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Jeremy, I'm glad to hear that Talbot is not supporting base, antiChrist, heresy which denies the resurrection.

Apparently, from what you say, your friend believes that when you die, you die, and that's it, even if at some later date God creates a copy of you, which is not you, for you are no more.

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Jeremy,

I wouldn't consider Scaling the Secular City to be intellectually rigorous. His cosomological argument treats infinity as a mathematical impossibility, something Leibniz and Newton showed to be false when they developed the calculus.

Actually, what Moreland’s argument (that he borrows from Craig) claims is not that infinity is a mathematical impossibility but that it is an ontological impossibility. Calculus can use actual infinites without them having any kind of correspondence with reality.

There are much better ways of presenting the cosmological argument that don't rely on the premise that the universe had a beginning, and even if he wants to start there all he needs to do is point out that most scientists believe the universe had a beginning.

But then they can always fall back on the multiverse theory as a loophole.

Proving it philosophically with faulty reasoning isn't a good idea. William Lane Craig has a whole book based on this mistake.

Why do you call Craig’s reasoning faulty? The primary basis of his argument is that actual infinite sets cannot exist in reality. That appears to be rather obvious once the terms are understood. Of course I could be unaware of a sufficient refutation of the Kalam argument. Do you know of one?

He also presents all the classic arguments from Descartes for substance dualism both in that book and in Immortality that all beg the question against materialists, who simply won't grant their premises, e.g. that you can really imagine a possible scenario that your mind and your brain are separated or that you can divide your brain without therefore dividing your mind.

While I don’t necessarily agree with his argument I don’t think it is any less “intellectually rigorous” than the materialist silly claim about “emergent properties.”

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Puzzled, go back and read what I said, and pay attention this time. Talbot (or the philosophers there, anyway) opposes those who do believe in bodily resurrection but don't believe in the notion that we have an immaterial component. Since the Bible isn't all that clear on this issue due to not being written with the categories of philosophers who didn't show up until 1500 years later, there's no reason to make this an issue to divide over as they have made it and as you seem to want to do.

Resurrection isn't a copy. It's resurrection, i.e. the very body that died. Read Peter van Inwagen's paper on the possibility of the resurrection for a sense of how this view goes. He in no way endorses the idea that a duplicate of you is you, and he in no way endorses dualism. There's nothing heterodox about his view, but there is something heterodox about saying that his view is heterodox.

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Joe, I never said materialism is a good view. The arguments for materialism are as bad as the arguments for dualism, and there are lots of problems figuring out what to say once you accept it. I don't think they've even come close to ironing those out, and personal identity is a shambles if materialism is true, but that doesn't mean Moreland has shown anything with the dualistic arguments in those books.

The Kalam argument says that an actual infinity is impossible, but the only arguments rely on mathematical and logical problems that calculus has answered, such as Zeno's paradoxes. Besides, we disprove Zeno all the time just by moving. So many of the arguments in Moreland's first chapter rely on things that would make motion impossible.

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Jeremy,

The Kalam argument says that an actual infinity is impossible, but the only arguments rely on mathematical and logical problems that calculus has answered, such as Zeno's paradoxes. Besides, we disprove Zeno all the time just by moving. So many of the arguments in Moreland's first chapter rely on things that would make motion impossible.

I pulled out my copy of “Scaling the Secular City” to find how it defended the argument. I knew that Craig’s version was pretty sound (it was his PhD thesis) and no one has ever dismissed it because it conflicted with the calculus. Moreland gives a brief explanation of set theory and the differences between an actual infinity and a potential infinity. As he points out:

“The idea of a potential infinite is not a set theoretic idea at all, but occurs, among other places, in discussion about infinitesimal calculus. Perhaps you have seen this statement: lim1\n=0 | n --> [infinity]. As mathematician Abraham Fraenkel puts it, this statement ‘asserts nothing about [actual] infinity (as the ominous sign seems to suggest) but is just an abbreviation for the sentence: 1\n can be made to approach zero as closely as desired by sufficiently increasing the positive integer n.’”

For a book aimed at a general audience, I think he does a rather smashing job of explaining and defending Kalam.

I had planned to write about the Kalam argument. Would you be interested in laying out the con to my pro?

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A little cosmo-ontological swordplay in the offing? I hope I get a good seat for that.

I'm lucky to live closely enough to BIOLA to have had the opportunity to hear J.P speak on more than one occasion. Because of his sincere effort to let laymen like myself grasp deeep philosophical issues, I can, upon occasion, decently explain the basics of a Creator as a necessary, uncaused First Cause, in a casual conversation, on the back of a dinner napkin. Sometimes.

Someone needs to dig up a more recent pic of Dr. Moreland. He hasn't had anyhere near that much hair for years. That winged collar suggests the late 80s/early 90s. He must have had to hold still for several seconds in order not to blur the exposure…

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A little cosmo-ontological swordplay in the offing? I hope I get a good seat for that.

I'm lucky to live closely enough to BIOLA to have had the opportunity to hear J.P speak on more than one occasion. Because of his sincere effort to let laymen like myself grasp deeep philosophical issues, I can, upon occasion, decently explain the basics of a Creator as a necessary, uncaused First Cause, in a casual conversation, on the back of a dinner napkin. Sometimes. I appreciate him very much.

Someone needs to dig up a more recent pic of Dr. Moreland. He hasn't had anyhere near that much hair for years. That winged collar suggests the late 80s/early 90s. He must have had to hold still for several seconds in order not to blur the exposure…

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Well, I'll tell you that at least three professors of mine have done exactly what you've said no one has done -- dismissed it on the grounds of calculus. One professor told me this when I tried as an undergrad to use an argument based on the same paradoxes for a different conclusion but based on Moreland's presentation of the Zeno arguments. He said flat-out that the existence of the calculus disproves such use of Zeno's paradoxes to argue against an actual infinity, since calculus makes perfect sense of how to move through an actual infinity of points. Two others, who are now teaching at an institution ranked #1 in the country in philosophy, have said exactly the same thing about Craig's argument, which both were familiar with. One of them is a Christian who appreciates what Craig is doing but considers this to be a glaring mistake.

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I'm not particularly impressed by the Kalam argument, but the calculus response has always seemed rather doubtful to me. As far as I can see, the calculus does nothing to make sense of moving through an actually infinite series of points. If, for instance, you were to try to mimic a limit operation by successive iterations (the only equivalent I can see of actually moving through the points), you would always be separated from the limit by a finite interval. And taken simply as a study of certain types of abstract structures, it only makes sense of movement through infinite actual points in the sense that geometry makes sense of the existence of infinite actual points: the 'actual' here is a mathematical term, not a physical one, and the two are different.

Zeno's paradox isn't refuted by the calculus (for these same reasons); and it isn't, I think, refuted by motion. What Zeno's paradox does is force a dilemma between Option 1 (infinite divisibility of finite intervals into actual, physical points that must be traversed) and Option 2 (movement). Given that Option 2 is the horse to back, the paradox forces the conclusion that physical reality isn't infinitely divisible. Calculus can only allow us to jump through the horns of the dilemma if we have already proven that the infinites used in the calculus apply to physical reality in the right way. So I think the response making a distinction between mathematical and ontological impossibilities is a fairly good one.

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Jeremy,

Well, I'll tell you that at least three professors of mine have done exactly what you've said no one has done -- dismissed it on the grounds of calculus.

I suspect these professors were not from the math department. ; )

One professor told me this when I tried as an undergrad to use an argument based on the same paradoxes for a different conclusion but based on Moreland's presentation of the Zeno arguments. He said flat-out that the existence of the calculus disproves such use of Zeno's paradoxes to argue against an actual infinity, since calculus makes perfect sense of how to move through an actual infinity of points.

You should have stuck to your guns; you were right and he was wrong!

The reason is that (a) calculus deals with potential infinites, not actual ones and that (b) Zeno’s paradox is not an example of an actual infinite.

Two others, who are now teaching at an institution ranked #1 in the country in philosophy, have said exactly the same thing about Craig's argument, which both were familiar with. One of them is a Christian who
appreciates what Craig is doing but considers this to be a glaring mistake.

I won’t argue that there may be a flaw in the argument. But this isn’t it. Let me go back and cover Zeno’s paradox, though, to show what I mean. Here is an explanation for the resolution to Zeno’s paradox that I’ve cribbed together from other sources:

The faulty logic in Zeno's argument is the assumption that the sum of an infinite number of numbers is always infinite. For example, the infinite sum 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + ... is equal to 2. This type of series is known as a geometric series (a series that begins with one and then each successive term is found by multiplying the previous term by some fixed amount (X)). In our example, X is equal to ½ (e.g., 1 x X (1/2) = ½; ½ x X = ¼). Infinite geometric series' are known to converge (sum to a finite number) when the multiplicative factor X is less than one.

Another way to express it is:

sum(n=1 to infinity) 1/2^n =

1/2 + sum(n=2 to infinity) 1/2^n =

1/2 + sum(n=1 to infinity) 1/2^(n+1) =

1/2 + 1/2(sum(n=1 to infinity) 1/2^n.

Both the distance that Achilles travels and the time that elapses before he reaches the tortoise can be expressed as an infinite geometric series with X less than one. So, Achilles traverses an infinite number of "distance intervals" before catching the tortoise, but because the "distance intervals" are decreasing geometrically, the total distance that he traverses before catching the tortoise is not infinite. Similarly, it takes an infinite number of time intervals for Achilles to catch the tortoise, but the sum of these time intervals is a finite amount of time.

The reason this does not apply to Kalam is because, unlike Zeno’s, the series doesn’t converge. We can’t, for example, simply add up an additive set of temporal events (1+2+3+4+...) since there is no upper limit.

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The other issue you need to be aware of is that, unless God is completely atemporal, the argument against an actual infinite past doesn't require just a finite beginning to the universe. It requires a finite beginning to time and thus to God. The timelessness view is correct, I think, and it's the dominant view of philosophers over the history of philosophy, but it's a fairly minority view at the moment.

Why would you expect mathematicians to be better at metaphysics than the best metaphysicians of our day? That's like expecting biologists and physicists to be the best authorities on the philosophical argument we call the design argument. They're the most competent people to evaluate some very particular points, but how you apply those is in the realm of philosophy, not physics, or biology. The same is true here. Mathematicians tell us what the calculus is and how it works. Philosophers then examine what consequences it has. Any mathematician who does that is doing philosophy and had best be aware of the philosophical issues if it's to be done well.

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Jeremy,

The timelessness view is correct, I think, and it's the dominant view of philosophers over the history of philosophy, but it's a fairly minority view at the moment.

Huh, I didn’t know that. Like you, I think the timelessness view is correct. Time, after all, is a dimension and God could certainly exist outside of or in another temporal dimension. It seems so obvious that I had assumed it was the majority view.

Why would you expect mathematicians to be better at metaphysics than the best metaphysicians of our day?

I wasn’t questioning their expertise on the metaphysical aspects of the argument, just the claim that the calculus refutes it.

Mathematicians tell us what the calculus is and how it works. Philosophers then examine what consequences it has. Any mathematician who does that is doing philosophy and had best be aware of the philosophical issues if it's to be done well.

I would agree, contingent on the philosophers having an adequate understanding of the mathematics involved. I think it is like the people who claim that the 2nd law of thermodynamics refutes natural selection. They are misunderstanding how a term (entropy) is defined so it leads them to make false conclusions about what it being claimed. I think the same is true for the idea that the calculus refutes Kalam.

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Joe
"I think it is like the people who claim that the 2nd law of thermodynamics refutes natural selection. They are misunderstanding how a term (entropy) is defined so it leads them to make false conclusions about what it being claimed. I think the same is true for the idea that the calculus refutes Kalam."

Errr. I don't think is a very good example Joe.
The calculus/Kalam thing is more of a category error. Calculus is a mathemical model that can use the concept of infinity. Reality is not a mathematical model where infinity logically cannot exist.
The thermodynamics/evolution thing is more of a misunderstanding that in the increasing of entropy does not stop complex forms, it just makes them more unlikely and more quickly decompose to higher entropy states. So 2nd Law vs Evolution does not refute evolution, it just makes it less probable.

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Joe - what about features on R. C. Sproul, John MacArthur and Rick Warren?

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J.P. Moreland is well known for being abusive and extremely arrogant. I've not only heard of this but have witnessed it first hand. Sure he's ok at compiling material from other people but when it comes to his own work the stench of narcissism is often unbearable. As a general rule I've found him to be a reprehensible individual who spends way to much time mentally massaging himself. However, he does on occasion at least pays lip service to a broader range of virtues than he seems capable of.

This is the real scandal of the evangelical mind.

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Re: JP Moreland
I'm rather surprised at the personal animosity expressed by Mr. Dharma and Mr. Allen. I've come to know JP. Moreland from having him as an instructor in 3 philosophy classes and one lab, and I have not found him to be narcissistic, abusive, or arrogant. He frequently made jokes at his own expense, exhibited great concern for individual students, and readily noted when he was not knowledgeable in a particular field. He does, however, argue for what he believes in and, like many philosophers, he is not particularly amused when someone strongly opposes him in his area of expertise without showing a working knowledge of the issues, or when they resort to ad hominem attacks or intimidation rather than sound reasoning. It appears to me that the statements of Mr. Dharma and Mr. Allen fall into the later category. Rather than offering cogent dissenting arguments on the specifics of JP Moreland's philosophical views, they attack his character. Something, by the way, I never saw JP Moreland do.