I submit the following questions/requests/general comments for the consideration of all journal editors out there.

Firstly, consider why you are asking people to send two (or even three) printed copies of an article that you might not even accept. You’re running an international journal, and you’re asking people to mail bundles of maybe 30 pages. Sending these packages internationally is not cheap!

Secondly, academic organisations are supposed to be enlightened, and to care about waste/efficiency, the environmental impact of transport, and staying at the cutting edge of civilisation. Sending huge wads of paper to you via aeroplane really isn’t helping that image. You have a website, so I’m assuming that you have email.

Thirdly, it’s probably more encouraging for people who might contribute something really great if you don’t require them to learn a whole new software package from scratch just so that they can send you an article. We like your journal, but is it really that important? LaTeX is not just another version of Microsoft Word or Open Office. It may as well be written in the click language of the Bushmen of the Kalahari for a person who hasn’t used it before. Plus, it’s an enormous download. Why not just accept Rich Text Format with some simple rules about presentation?

Fourthly, I know this is a bit of a personal bugbear that you might not care about, but can’t you all get together and just agree on a method of citing sources? How about one that’s not only briefer to write, but easy to read as well? This is especially true if you think your journal is so awesome that you turn down most submissions. Otherwise you’re asking people to write a unique version of their paper just for the sake of your journal. Again, I like your journal, but are you that important? Really? Maybe you are, but give us a break! The only book that should ever be called (1984) was written by George Orwell.

Lastly, and yeah I’m just being bitter now, remember: It’s not your article, it’s somebody else’s. Maybe if you wrote on the subject that the article is about, you’d decide to add a lengthy excursus on a related subject that you think is the most interesting subject in the world. When you get the chance to write that article, go for it. Satisfy that fascination of yours. Just understand that that’s not the subject that I want to write about in this article OK? Making my pursuit of your interest a prerequisite of you accepting this paper is probably a wasted effort. Live out your own passion – don’t do it through me.

Hi all!

Some time ago now I announced that I would be speaking at a conference at the University of Oxford in late August if I could raise the funds. That announcement is HERE.

As you can see via the thermometer over on the right hand side, we’re getting there. A big chunk of the funds that have come in have been generous donations from readers of this blog. Thank you so much. Without this support, this speaking event just could not happen. The time has come where I really need to get the plane ticket before prices get a lot higher. However, a part of what is showing as received in that thermometer (just over $1000 of it, in fact) has been promised but not received yet. It’s a portion that I will receive by reimbursement some time after I’ve spent the money. This means that while I’m getting there, I’m not quite there yet.

So, if you’ve been aware of this speaking engagement but been undecided on whether or not you wanted to offer any support, now would be a fantastic time! I hope to be able to get the tickets within the next week. While the actual cost of the ticket isn’t set in stone yet (I’m having a quote put together now), it will be somewhere between $3250 and $3600. As this needs to happen whether I get any further support or not, I’ll do what it takes to get the ticket as soon as the quote is complete (i.e. I’ll use temporary credit, just because this is worth it). If this were World War I (which, let’s face it, it’s not), now is the time to go over the top. One last push and we’ll be there.

For those who have shown generosity to me in this endeavour, again, thank you so much. Your support means a lot.

Matthew Flannagan and Raymond Bradley are to publicly debate the question: “Is God the Source of Morality?”

Venue: University of Auckland, in “The Centennial” 260 – 098 OGGB (the bottom level of the Business School) on 12 Grafton Rd, Auckland City.

Date/time: Monday 2 August from 7-9pm

The subject of the debate will be whether or not we can sensibly regard God as the source of moral truth. Raymond Bradley certainly doesn’t think so, and in the past I’ve comment on his arguments in that the Christian view of ethics results in a hopeless contradiction. As I said at the time, I think his objections were fundamentally flawed, so I’ll be interested to see what shape his argument takes in this exchange.

For those who can’t be at the debate, the footage will find its way online for all to see.

In the “nuts and bolts” series, I explain and discuss some of the fundamental ideas in philosophy (and theology sometimes) that are taken for granted within the discipline, but which might not be very well known to ordinary human beings. This time the subject is nominalism.

Do tables exist? Do all red apples (assuming that apples exist) have something called “redness” in common? These might strike most people as pretty weird questions, but questions like these are at the heart of the distinction between realism and nominalism. They’re both ways of addressing the problem of universals. We classify things all the time; as circular, as yellow, as an elephant, as a mountain, as a snail, as wooden, as evil, and so on. Nominalism and realism are alternative ways of thinking about what we’re actually doing when we classify things this way. I’m going to be zooming in on nominalism here, but I’ll be simplifying heavily in the spirit of only attempting to provide the nuts and bolts, without going into a whole lot of depth.
Interested? Read the rest.

For almost the last 24 hours, my site has been inaccessible.

I apologise for this. The fault was caused by the dishonest, misleading, underhanded, unfair, greedy and arguably illegal actions of my domain name service provider, Clever Internet. I will not bore you with the details, but I have been busy for most of my waking time since the problem began, trying to get it resolved. Given how incredibly easy these comments are to substantiate as true, I run absolutely no risk publishing them here.

We now return you to our scheduled broadcast.

From the 17th to the 23rd of November 2010 the annual conference of the Evangelical Philosophical Society will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, in the USA. This year my good friend and fellow blogger Matt Flannagan will be attending and speaking on “God and the Genocide of the Canaanites.” Here’s the blurb on his talk from the EPS website:

How could a just and loving God command Joshua to genocide the Canaanites as is apparently taught in the Old Testament? Is God really a moral monster as Christianity’s critics use these passages to claim? Matthew will re-examine these passages in light of the context they were written in showing that the skeptics’ case against God relies on a questionable reading of the Old Testament.

It’ll be a great opportunity for Matt, who, in addition to presenting the above paper will also be taking part in a panel discussion on “navigating Old Testament ethics.”

Matt is in a very similar position that I’m in with my trip to Oxford (see my link on the right hand side of the page). Most people who attend academic conferences are affiliated in some way with a university department, and as a result they have access to funding via that department. Not so for those who are yet to land that elusive first position. Do head on over to M and M and read about the trip. I often hear Christians in New Zealand tell me how great it would be to have Christian scholars at the top of their field working from New Zealand. Well, this is an opportunity to help get people into those positions. I know that any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

I’m putting together an article on this subject at the moment, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on Divine Command Ethics and the epistemological objection (that’s what I’ve decided to call the objection).

Divine command ethics is a cluster of views on ethics, and they all have in common a very close connection between the will of God and moral facts. According to some varieties, the property of moral rightness is just the same thing as the property of being willed by God or commanded by God (Robert Adams is perhaps the best known proponent of the latter view). According to other varieties, God’s willing that we do or do not do something is what causes that thing to be morally right or wrong for us to do (Philip Quinn, in my view the author of the definitive defence of divine command ethics, was perhaps the best known proponent of this view). There exist other varieties, but I take these two to be the most common.

The epistemological objection, as you might expect, has to do with our ability to gain knowledge (epistemology is the study of knowledge, what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is gained, the difference between knowledge and pseudo knowledge, how beliefs are justified and so on). In short, the objection is: If morality really came from God, then people who don’t believe in God couldn’t know right from wrong. But surely they do know right from wrong! So morality can’t really come from God.
Interested? Read the rest.

Some observations from Matt Flannagan over at M and M reminded me of the existence of the atheist campaign to evangelise the world through billboards. In honour of that campaign, I suggest launching another, much more important campaign:

Any lifeguard who tells me this is sure to put my mind at ease.

J. L. Mackie was famous for defending two claims. Firstly, God doesn’t exist (a claim defended in his book, The Miracle of Theism). Secondly, there are no moral facts (a position called moral nihilism or an error theory of morality, defended in his book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong). According to Christian thinkers over the centuries, these two claims have been thought of as closely related, and the second claim is really a consequence of the first. If God does not exist, then moral facts do not exist either. Interestingly enough, this was Mackie’s position as well.
Interested? Read the rest.

The 4^th of July is American Independence Day, on which Americans celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence (the Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand is also interesting, but that’s for another time). It’s one of those days when revisionary political liberals sharpen their pencils and write letters to the editor to try to offset the natural effect that facts have on people. In other words, they attempt to convince people of things that aren’t so. When it comes to the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the major thing that secular liberals might want to do is to distract people from what the declaration says – especially all that stuff about God – and to remind people of the supposed fact that in a truly free nation, religion stays out of the public square. Reading the Declaration of Independence pushes any such thought well into the background:

Consider the opening words of the Declaration:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The basis of human equality, along with the basis of human rights, is explicitly theological God bestows equal status and dignity upon human beings. From Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy, these sentences have held a place of privilege in many political figures since the time they were written.

Some secular liberals, however, are honest. Yeah I know, try to subdue your shock. Within the literature on political philosophy and the issue of religion in the public square, I’ve found that – unlike the opinion pages of the local newspaper – there’s a tendency to actually deal with reality. Take Martha Nussbaum for example. She doesn’t try to re-write history. She accepts the facts of what the Declaration of Independence says, but she’s a secular liberal, so she does the honest thing: She denounces the declaration. In fact, since she realises that a thoroughgoing secular outlook has no way of defending the claim, made in the declaration, that all people are really equal, she declares that this too, along with the reference to God, makes the declaration unacceptable in a secular liberal democracy. I don’t like her ideas, but I love her honesty.¹