Tomorrow at Waterstones bookstore Oxford, with Nick Cohen

One of three events I am doing tomorrow in Oxford. The other two are a talk at 10.00am on Believing Bullshit and a debate 4-5pm with Lord Richard Harries, chaired by David Aaronovitch, both at the Oxford Literary Festival, Christ Church College, Oxford.

Censorship in an Age of Freedom: The Debate
Nick Cohen, Stephen Law

You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
WATERSTONE'S OXFORD
Thursday, 29 March 2012, 7:00PM
TICKETS NOW ON SALE INSTORE £4 or £2 with a Waterstones Loyalty card

Join us in store for an evening of lively and vital debate with Journalist Nick Cohen and Philosopher Stephen Law. It has become the accepted wisdom that we are living in an age of unprecedented freedom, but in world of super-injunctions and media self censorship, where you can risk your life by writing a novel or drawing a cartoon how free are we really?
Further details: 01865 790212

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The Evil God Challenge and the "classical" theist's response

On another blog, FideCogitActio, some theists of a "classical" stripe (that's to say, like Brian Davies, Edward Feser) are criticisng the Evil God Challenge (or I suppose, trying to show how it can be met, or sidestepped). The main post includes this: In book I, chapter 39 , Aquinas argues that “there cannot be evil in God” (in Deo non potest esse malum). Atheists like Law must face the fact that, if the words are to retain any sense, “God” simply cannot be “evil”. As my comments in the thread at Feser’s blog aimed to show, despite how much he mocks “the privation theory of evil,” Law himself cannot escape its logic: his entire argument requires that the world ought to appear less evil if it is to be taken as evidence of a good God. Even though he spurns the idea that evil is a privation of good, his account of an evil world is parasitic on a good ideal; this is no surprise, though, since all evil is parasitic on good ( SCG I, 11 ). Based on the conclusions of se...

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Here's my central criticism of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). It's novel and was published in Analysis last year. Here's the gist. Plantinga argues that if naturalism and evolution are true, then semantic epiphenomenalism is very probably true - that's to say, the content of our beliefs does not causally impinge on our behaviour. And if semantic properties such as having such-and-such content or being true cannot causally impinge on behaviour, then they cannot be selected for by unguided evolution. Plantinga's argument requires, crucially, that there be no conceptual links between belief content and behaviour of a sort that it's actually very plausible to suppose exist (note that to suppose there are such conceptual links is not necessarily to suppose that content can be exhaustively captured in terms of behaviour or functional role, etc. in the way logical behaviourists or functionalists suppose). It turns o...

Stephen Law

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