seigneur wrote:

Ouros wrote:

For what I've saw of him, Jeffery Jay Lowder is good. Still, he's not a professional philosopher if I remember well.

Lowder's best work is collected here https://infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/ It represents what I'd call a formalistic approach, if you are into that kind of stuff.

Secular Outpost is a blog that Lowder and Bradley Bowen started. The main blogger these days is Bradley Bowen who has responded to very many current theistic arguments in a serial manner in excruciating detail. This includes one of Feser's Proofs fairly recently. Right now Bowen is busy with an argument from Kreeft, and in the past with Plantinga, Craig, etc.

Keith Parsons, whom Feser debated in writing, moderated by Lowder (a good debate, worth checking out), is also a co-blogger at Secular Outpost.

Lowder's and Bowen's method is propositional logic. They go about things rationally, defining each concept at every step. Ordinarily their rebuttals involve either declaring a premise in the opponent's argument vague or introducing an irrelevant distinction at some point. They use "science says" arguments rather moderately.

The best about them is their attitude. They are openly anti-New Atheist. When engaging with theism, they firmly believe they are dealing with serious, though flawed, arguments and with serious, at least historically formidable, opposition.

And I personally would recommend some readings in the good old genre of naturalizing the Bible narrative, such as Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus or Thomas Mann's The Tables of the Law. Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, based on Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, and Monty Python's Life of Brian also fall in the same category. The genre emerged after a strand of liberal theology arose in Germany and France that tended to look at the Bible more in terms of art criticism rather than theology.

In my opinion, that's the best that atheism has to offer. It's also very dangerous. If you can survive that, you are truly a man of faith.

 
Bowen? Hmm. He starts his article with this:

“Based on a quick glance through this book, it seems to me that Feser does a much more reasonable job of making a case for God than either Norman Geisler (in When Skeptics Ask) or Peter Kreeft (in Handbook of Christian Apologetics).  In my view, based on careful reading of Geisler’s case and Kreeft’s case, each of their cases is a SPOC (Steaming Pile Of Crap).  Feser’s case for God has the distinct advantage of NOT being a SPOC.”

Considering the fact that, out of an enormous body of work, he’s chosen, for example, Geisler’s book When Skeptics Ask, which is meant to be more like a general reference for theists debating skeptics than a thorough argument (he does that elsewhere in depth), and declares it a pile of crap (and it’s debatable if he even gave them a fair reading on their own terms)... somehow I don’t know if there’s much I should be afraid of his reasoning abilities. : - )

Last edited by Dry and Uninspired (2/23/2018 6:55 am)