Simple answer? Because I am a conservative. What some may be surprised to hear is that during the primaries I was anti-Trump. I called him a bucket of volcanic vices, narcissistic, a clown, and God’s Trumpet of Destruction. But because Hilary was so bad, I was a reluctant Trump supporter. Unlike some conservatives, I could never be a never Trumper. Voting is about voting what more closely aligns with your values, not with what mirrors your values. Selecting a doctor for his skill does not mean you endorse his adultery. Voting for Trump does not mean you endorse all that he has done or said. Wh ..read more

It is not often that I will share my own undergraduate work but this one was appropriate. This is an event poster I designed in 2013 in the Swiss Design Style. In the 20th century Swiss designers became famous for their style of design. Sometimes called the International Typographic style, it was renowned for its asymmetric layouts, precision, simplicity and objectivity. This movement was primarily in the field of graphic design but was not contained to that field. In the past centuries the art disciplines were not as specialized as they are today and it was not that uncommon for a sculptor t ..read more

Here at Walking Christian we have already produced a fair amount of content that deals with Tom Jump in one way or another. But after a recent facebook post I had some tangential thoughts that I wanted to put down. So at the risk of being accused of either being obsessed with the man or beating a dead horse, let’s take a look at a fallacy Tom Jump commits but doesn’t seem capable of seeing.  If you do not hang around the YouTube apologetics scene you may have missed the frustrating antics of Mr. Tom Jump. Tom Jump (TJump on YouTube) is a self appointed internet philosopher who thinks he ..read more

Graham Oppy recently published a paper in Religious Studies entitled, “On stage one of Feser’s ‘Aristotelian proof’ (see here)” which seeks to refute Feser’s defense of the First Way. Now I do not presume to have the intellectual expertise of either of them, but I would nevertheless like to write my initials thoughts and compare notes with Feser’s future response. What follows is my brief defense of the First Way. Existential Inertia Oppy’s central claim is this: Potentials to remain unchanged do not require distinct actualizers; all they require is the absence of any preventers of the a ..read more

I have a love / hate relationship with philosophy. By philosophy, I am not directly talking about the discipline itself (which is to seek wisdom) but how it is often applied by modern philosophers in particular. On the one hand, philosophy teaches us intellectual humility, but on the other hand, it produces doubt and confusion over ideas that are common sense or self-evidently true. Sometimes it can lead to a kind of radical skepticism, or if not that then at least a great uncertainty over what is true. As Descartes put it, “[t]here is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not bee ..read more

Was it necessary for God to create the universe? Put another way, does God have free will? Edwards, it turns out, affirmed that creation is a necessary output of the divine nature. What would necessitate the divine nature to create a contingent world? For Edwards, it is not the world itself that necessitates God because nothing non-existent can necessarily cause God to do anything, but rather, it is God’s natural desire to glorify Himself (or diffuse His goodness) that necessitates creation. So Edwards wants to maintain that (1) God does not need the universe but that (2) He nevertheless must ..read more

Today’s article is the second in our study of demonology. In our previous article we asked the question “Where did the demons come from?” There I explained how the Bible describes not one great rebellion that created the demons but multiple rebellions and the result of these clashes is beings who are hostile towards God. Now we are going to be taking a step back and asking a more fundamental question, what is a demon? What I mean by that question is not who are demons, that was the subject of the last article, and my answer was demons are beings turned against God through sin. Today our q ..read more

Imagine the most atrocious evil possible. Perhaps you’ll think of something like this: a young girl gets raped, sexually trafficked, ends up starving, and then is tortured for the rest of her life. Even worse, suppose all humans were immediately born into hell and eternally suffered every imaginable evil possible for no good reason. We may think this is truly abominable, but I will argue that the this is not in fact the worst possible evil that can be conceived. Why is this important? Because atheists will often use some terrible evil and ask how an all-powerful and all good being could allow ..read more

Some argue that God created the universe necessarily, but here I will make the argument that God must have created the universe freely. By freely, I mean that God had ability to do otherwise. To make this argument, I will be assuming that the universe is self-evidently contingent as the Five Ways of Aquinas or Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument demonstrate. The Bible itself seems to affirm that creation is a free act of God: “And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.” (Acts 17:25). Aquinas develops th ..read more

For those who are aspiring to be a philosopher but have zero experience, it is absolutely crucial to start well. I often hear from people who took a philosophy class that they ended up being more confused than before. This is in part because they’re introduced to conflicting ideas but they’re not shown how to think about these ideas. Ideas are dangerous things; capable of destroying or creating societies. I’ll be honest, I do prefer the classical philosophers over the modern philosophers – which my list will reflect – but I think you can still benefit from it despite this bias b ..read more