Philosophy

This article argues that the common objection to a “God of the gaps” typically fails to distinguish two different gaps that such a God might fill: a) an explanatory gap that appears in the habits of nature themselves, and b) an explanatory gap where God interrupts these habits in extraordinary events.  It is further argued that both gaps are genuine, and that they imply two sets of habits and dispositions that regulate our expectations and hence our assumptions regarding the weight of arguments and burdens of proof. While no conclusive argument for the existence of God or miracles is intended in this article, the methodological points will help to shift the probabilities and the burden of proof in such arguments.

If miracles occur, then they are the work of spiritual agents. Actions of such agents are not made intelligible by laws of nature, but by narratives. Narratives can vary in consistency and comprehensiveness. With this criterion, various religions and their miracle claims can be compared with regard to the implied narratives.
A slightly different and shorter version of this paper has been published as “Miracles, Metaphysics and Salvation History.” In Habitus fidei – Die Überwindung der eigenen Gottlosigkeit: Festschrift für Richard Schenk OP zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Jeremiah Alberg and Daniela Köder, 219–280. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016.

Contrary to David Hume’s objections, this article argues that it is possible to know miracles, if we include further considerations and methods. Both science and historiography can recognize the occurrence of miracles on their own principles, if they are sufficiently and properly articulated.

More than in other religions, miracles play a crucial role in the Judeo-Christian tradition. They serve to authenticate the revelatory claims of the prophets and of Christ himself. This role would be undermined, if other agents could work such miracles as well. Divine authentication is achieved only, if the effect requires divine omnipotence. Finite, paranormal agency, human or angelic, is not sufficient. The difficulty consists in how one can distinguish one agent from the other. This article discusses in a comprehensive way the criteria and taxonomies that can be found in Thomas Aquinas’s texts. Even where Aquinas might not answer every possible question, a contemporary analysis of particular cases or of general criteria must not forget the deeper metaphysical framework that he provides.

This article offers an overview of the history of philosophy organized around the topic of “first philosophy,” namely the topic of Being and its differentiations. With Thomas Aquinas as the guiding thinker, other philosophies emerge in contrast to his thought. But they also remain in continuity, in so far as they still attempt to answer the same perennial questions. After Aquinas had formulated his synthesis, the conceptualization of Being underwent various shifts, sometimes losing sight of the topic of Being entirely, sometimes resurrecting paradigms of ancient philosophy. But underlying most forms one finds certain paradigmatic differentiations of Being into atoms and emptiness, appearance and reality, act and potency, subject and object, or the real and the ideal. These differentiations can be analogical, univocal or dialectic. Of these, the analogical distinction between act and potency remains fundamental for a Thomist approach as it attempts to achieve its own telos of articulating the truth of Being.

Families are entities intermediate between individuals and the state. This article argues that they have rights of their own that are not deducible from either individual rights or the common good embodied in the state. These rights are to a large extent rooted in biology as a value-laden fact of human life.

Newman’s anti-skeptical philosophy in the Grammar of Assent implicitly relies on the normativity of human nature and its epistemic faculties. This fundamental trust in the reliability of the teleology of human nature finds further confirmation in Neman’s understanding of the certitude of human conscience. Without this reliability and certitude, we would not even have any faculties to be skeptical with: “If I do not use myself, I have no other self to use.”

While faith seeks understanding, reason and science themselves rely on implicit assumptions about the intelligibility of the world. This article argues that these assumptions presuppose the existence and the attributes of the creator God of classical theism. Once this is acknowledged, faith and reason – while remaining methodologically separate – will cease to appear as enemies.

While the 17th century witnessed the beginning of modern mathematical science of nature, its protagonists were for the most part staunch theists. In fact, their theism allowed them to explore the intelligibility of nature and motivated their search. And while they largely rejected earlier Aristotelian and scholastic notions such as final and formal causality, in the thought of Leibniz even these notions find a fundamentally important place. This rather different beginning of modern science is still an important alternative to contemporary thought.

In the tradition of Aquinas and Aristotle, language has a tripartite structure. Many of the modern approaches to language can be seen as reductions of this tripartite structure. The talk will explore what is getting lost in these reductions, and how the tripartite structure provides a more adequate model. It will also become clear that the respective reductions have direct implications for the role of language in a theology of revelation.