My Appearance on the Partially Examined Life

Outside of Eden meets Classical Philosophy on iTunes:

Mark, Wes and Seth from the Partially Examined Life recently invited me to be a guest on their Partially Examined Life.  The topic was "Arguments for the Existence of God" and it covered a quite technical discussion of the classical proofs of God in Western Philosophy.

This is the summary from the show preview:

Discussing the arguments by Descartes, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Kant, and others, as analyzed in The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God(1983), chapters 1-3, 5-6, 8, and 11.

Is the ontological, cosmological, and/or teleological (argument from design) arguments for God’s existence any good? Mackie, a very sharp analytic philosopher well hooked into recent advances in philosophy of science, says no. He’s chiefly responding to his Oxford colleague, Richard Swinburne, who takes a very rationalist approach to God, taking the concept of God to be wholly simple and intelligible and providing a superior scientific explanation for, e.g. the beginning of the universe than the brute fact of an ultimately uncaused physical universe.

I represented the 'token theist' on the show and so far have received a lot of encouraging feedback about my first public appearance as a blogger.

The show is a good exercise for me in getting back into "Philosophy 101" and if you enjoy good metaphysical discussions around the nature of the universe, how God came to be etc you might enjoy this episode. The book we discuss in the show is J.L. Mackie's "The Miracle of Theism" which new atheist Dan Dennett considers to be the definitive work in dismantling the arguments for believing in the existence of God.  If you think there is such a thing as a proof that God exists, it's worth a listen.

The full episode can be listened to here.

It's probably a good thing Mark didn't tell me that their show gets a gajillion downloads each episode. I might have been more nervous...