The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion

Direct Divine Acts One might object, however, that a God who acts indirectly but who, with the exception of an initial act of cr ...

are all indirect must believe that a correct ultimate explanation of natural phenomena is impossible without appeal to supernatu ...

But what about direct divine action in the world? If such action is theologically necessary, then must we conclude that a commit ...

In the fourth section of Leibniz's first letter to Samuel Clarke, Leibniz responds to Newton's view that God occasionally acts d ...

nature. They claim that a morally perfect and hence faithful God would not establish laws of nature and then turn around and bre ...

that methodological naturalism, at least in the scientific investigation of that history, is justified (170–71). But God cannot ...

to demarcate science from other human activities or scientific explanation from other sorts of explanation need not involve any ...

applied to the supernatural. For more likely than not, the method described will be characteristic of nomological science, while ...

what could justify treating this system differently other than an assumption that metaphysical naturalism is true—that there is ...

Perhaps the most powerful argument for methodological naturalism based on the goals of science proceeds as follows. One of the c ...

disregarding others. And so we test some hypotheses and not others. This is our only way of coming to any conclusions at all, si ...

Obviously, this argument contains many highly questionable premises and inferences. But assume for the sake of argument that pla ...

scientists to accept metaphysical naturalism, which in turn grounds their acceptance of methodological naturalism, it may be tha ...

For centuries the writ of empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start ...

available in the universe. We then receive verifiable answers to these questions in ten minutes. Would astronomers in these circ ...

have causes, and metaphysical naturalism entails that such causes must be natural ones. To put the point crudely, metaphysical n ...

NOTES 1.The view that Christianity is at least partly responsible for the rise of modern science in Europe was briefly defended ...

or testimony. Often, the probability of some fact given the denial of a theory is equated with its probability, given some speci ...

William R. Stoeger, S. J., and George V. Coyne, S. J., M1–M14. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Johnson, ...

Pennock, Robert T. 1999. Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Plantinga, Alvin ...