I FIRST HEARD OF J. P. Moreland in January 1986, while I was a philosophy and theology student at Trinity Seminary in Deerfield, Illinois. My philosophy professors were Stuart Hackett and William Lane Craig, who themselves would come to have a significant influence in my life. While Bill Craig happened to be out of town, I was able to drop in on another of Bill’s classes to watch a video-taped debate involving an atheist as well as a rising young Christian philosopher, who turned out to be none other than J. P. In this video, J. P.’s opponent was a dyed-in-the-wool verificationist, and J. P. thoroughly, though graciously, exposed this atheist’s metaphysical undergarments and gave a superb array of arguments for God’s existence and the uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth.
Shortly after my graduation from Trinity in June 1988, I began to read J. P.’s book Scaling the Secular City.1 I found J. P.’s book to be densely packed with thoughtful arguments on the New Testament’s reliability, the resurrection of Jesus, and—less usual for apologetics books—the relationship of Christianity and science. The book also contained a cluster of arguments in defense of God’s existence: the cosmological, teleological, and (to some extent) moral arguments, as well as the argument from mind and another on the meaning of life.2 I was so impressed with J. P.’s command of the issues and his layout of the arguments that I typed up extensive notes on most of the book—a handy summary of well-reasoned defenses of the Christian faith that served as an aid in my own thinking and ministry early on.
In light of the God-science discussion in Scaling the Secular City, I began to explore J. P.’s second book, Christianity and the Nature of Science.3 The philosophy of science was fairly new territory for me, but J. P. proved a helpful guide. (I would later draw on this book for my PhD philosophy of science course at Marquette University.) The following year I started to read J. P.’s debate book with atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?—a fascinating interchange on natural theological arguments, pro and con. In this exchange, J. P. proved himself more than capable in responding to his opponent(s) once again.4
During this time, I was on the pastoral staff of a church in Schenectady, New York, and I invited J. P. Moreland to do a series of talks at our church and an outreach event held at a nearby school. J. P. came gladly, and this was the beginning of our friendship that has continued for over twenty years. We have served together as officers in the Evangelical Philosophical Society (EPS), and have teamed up as conference speakers and on various book projects.5 Moreover, J. P. has been an amazing source of personal encouragement to me over the years. He has been a public champion for the kingdom of God, and he has deeply affected my life and the lives of so many others over the years through his faithful service.
I have taken a bit of extra space here to highlight the influence that J. P.’s thinking, example, and encouragement have had on me in very tangible ways. In light of the debt of gratitude I owe him, it is truly an honor for me to explore the features of J. P.’s natural theology and his contribution to the literature.
Psalm 19—the most beautiful of poems, according to C. S. Lewis—makes plain that the glory of God is revealed in the natural world:
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. (Psalm 19:1–3).
Likewise, Romans 1:19–20 indicates that evidence for God’s existence and various attributes are abundantly available:
Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
In Acts 14, Paul tells his pagan audience at Lystra that God “did not leave Himself without witness” in providing rain, fruitful seasons, and the enjoyment of food and life itself (v. 17 NASB). A marvelous—but often overlooked—passage that relates to natural theology is found in Isaiah 28:23–29 (NASB):
Give ear and hear my voice,
Listen and hear my words.
Does the farmer plow continually to plant seed?
Does he continually turn and harrow the ground?
Does he not level its surface
And sow dill and scatter cummin
And plant wheat in rows,
Barley in its place and rye within its area?
For his God instructs and teaches him properly.
For dill is not threshed with a threshing sledge,
Nor is the cartwheel driven over cummin;
But dill is beaten out with a rod, and cummin with a club.
Grain for bread is crushed,
Indeed, he does not continue to thresh it forever.
Because the wheel of his cart and his horses eventually damage it,
He does not thresh it longer.
This also comes from the Lord of hosts,
Who has made His counsel wonderful and His wisdom great.
The Scriptures make clear that something of God’s existence and nature is manifested in the natural world and in the human heart—or as the philosopher Immanuel Kant phrased it, “The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”6
J. P. offers robust arguments for God’s existence! With Bill Craig, he coedited The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, which has come to be recognized by many as the gold standard for natural theology. In this volume, they define natural theology as “that branch of theology that seeks to provide warrant for belief in God’s existence apart from the resources of authoritative, propositional revelation.”7 Natural theology, of course, is distinguished from revealed theology. Natural theology is anchored in and derived from natural revelation—that is, God’s self-revelation through nature, reason, conscience, and human experience. By contrast, revealed theology is anchored in special revelation—in the Scriptures and the incarnate Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course, when we are speaking of God, we mean a God with specific great-making qualities—a worship-worthy being suited to the title “God.” In the spirit of Thomas Aquinas’s “Five Ways,” J. P. would say, “This everyone understands to be God.” So, the gods of the Greco-Roman world were all too human and morally compromised to fit the bill. And J. P. does not simply argue to a property-less “Ultimate Reality”—an ultimately incoherent notion such as the philosopher of religion John Hick held. Nor are we referring to an impersonal Eastern version of Brahman (“God”), nor the undifferentiated oneness (monism) of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism (nirguna brahman), nor Ramanuja’s pantheistic version of differentiation within oneness (saguna brahman).
Though still not specific enough to give us the God of the Bible, the ontological argument for a Greatest Conceivable Being of Anselm attempts to argue for a more robust understanding of God than do the other, more-modest natural theological arguments. A cosmological argument can help show that a powerful (not necessarily all-powerful) being exists, and a design argument can point to the existence of an intelligent (not necessarily omniscient) being. The biblical God would certainly fit the picture, but that is not the project of natural theology. We can even strengthen the case for God by combining various arguments for God’s existence to move us in this direction of greater specificity. But natural theology, by definition, recognizes the need for special revelation to give greater specificity to who the Creator and Designer is.8
Does this mean that God’s existence cannot be denied? Are natural theological arguments demonstrative “proofs” for God’s existence? J. P. says that this is the wrong question, since the notion of proof sets too high a standard—a standard entailing no possibility of being mistaken. This kind of proof, he argues, “is so rare that it is almost impossible to think of an example that satisfies it. About all I can come up with is proof in logic and math… But even here, there will be dissenters.” Besides, he adds, “We all have more than adequate grounds for believing many things that fail to live up to the proof standard.”9 So, though we could be mistaken, we can be confident about what we had for breakfast this morning, that 1+1=2, that other minds or persons exist, and a host of similar beliefs.
Rather than using “proofs,” J. P.’s argumentation for God’s existence utilizes a “cumulative case inference to the best explanation.”10 The inference to the best explanation will identify a relevant range of evidence or data to be explained, formulate a pool of possible explanations, and determine which explanation is the best of the lot. In making his case, J. P. identifies “a range of factual data that find their best explanation by far in the existence of a single, personal God.”11 In terms of a cumulative case, this occurs when “several independent strands of evidence to support the same conclusion” come together.12 So, even if one line of evidence is insufficient to warrant a conclusion, the combination of the various multiple strands of evidence can do so.
Natural theological arguments can be utilized to argue for a personal, intrinsically good, intelligent, and powerful Creator (theism/monotheism). As we’ll see below, J. P. recognizes that natural theology has implications for nontheistic versions of the Ultimate Reality—say, in process theism and in Eastern religions and philosophies such as Buddhism. As the Eastern philosophy and Asian religions scholar Ninian Smart has observed, the “Western [i.e., theistic] concept of the importance of the historical process is largely foreign to these [Eastern] faiths,” adding that “the notion of a personal God is altogether less prominent.”13
However, most of J. P.’s natural theological firepower is directed at the philosophical commitments of naturalism, which dominates the academy in the West. In J. P.’s writings, he frequently describes naturalism as having three major features.14 First, its view of reality (metaphysics) is that matter is all that exists, and that all of reality—space, time, and matter—originated with the Big Bang. Second, its view of causation (etiology) is that all events are physically determined by prior physical events going all the way back to the Big Bang. Third, its view of knowledge (epistemology) is that the only (or best) way to know is through the scientific method; scientism (not “science”) expresses the epistemological aspect of naturalism.
Naturalism’s Grand Story (metanarrative) has four features: (1) an atomic theory of matter and a theory of unguided evolution (thus involving bottom-up, rather than top-down, causal explanations); (2) philosophical monism (everything that exists is fundamentally matter); (3) the conjunction of the atomic theory of matter and the theory of unguided evolution, implying that genuine substances do not exist (substances integrate functioning parts, endure through change, and have a nature possessed by members of their natural kinds); and (4) all existence is bound up with the space-time world.
J. P.’s natural theological project includes a steady stream of books (authored and edited) and articles arguing against the pretensions and problems of naturalism in its various—though ultimately monistic—expressions.
What are some of the natural theological arguments J. P. has utilized in his calling as a scholar and author? I will focus on three of them: the cosmological and teleological arguments, and the argument from mind.
There are three major versions of the cosmological argument: the Thomistic, Leibnizian, and kalam arguments. J. P. has focused on the kalam version (kalam is an Arabic word, meaning “speech”). The argument maintains that the universe began to exist a finite time ago, and that an infinite series of past events is impossible.15 The universe’s beginning is best explained by a personal Creator. The argument moves through a series of disjuncts to show this:
The universe either began to exist or it has always existed.
If it had a beginning, the beginning was either caused or uncaused.
If the beginning was caused, it was either personal or not personal.
The disjuncts can be broken down this way:
The argument begins with the assumption that the universe exists—an obvious fact we need not question. Yes, there are some schools of thought that would deny the reality of a mind-independent universe, saying that it is an illusion. However, there is no good reason at all to deny what seems so obvious to us and embrace what strikes us as so counterintuitive and contrary to our daily experience. So, given the universe’s existence, did it begin or not? J. P. notes that there are philosophical reasons to challenge the infinity of the past. For example, if the series of past events were infinite, then it would be impossible to traverse the past, and we could never have arrived at today. Furthermore, it is absurd to say that the series of past events could be numbered up to infinity; that would mean that we would have exhausted all the natural numbers (1, 2, 3…). What’s more, there are also scientific supports for the universe’s beginning—the universe’s expansion as indicated by the red-shift of light from distant galaxies, as well as its running out of usable energy by the second law of thermodynamics. J. P. challenges the notion that the universe is not subject to the second law of thermodynamics and is thus beyond the reach of science. If that were the case, the universe becomes more like a nonphysical reality that could be discussed only metaphysically. But there is no reason for such maneuvers, since every part of the universe—and thus the whole—is inescapably subject to the second law.
The fact, then, is that the universe came into existence a finite time ago, bringing about an alteration from a changeless state to a changing one. Time does not exist without events or happenings. And if time came into existence from a changeless state, this would imply that a personal agent brought it into existence (agent-state causation), as opposed to a set of pre-existing quiescent physical conditions (state-state causation). So, if there once existed a timeless, changeless state, then a personal, free being must have instantiated the first event.16
J. P. has been an advocate for the teleological argument in its varying hues.17 For example, when we consider the universe’s orderly arrangement in, say, orbiting planets or changing seasons, we can detect basic patterns in keeping with nature’s laws that reflect a rational Mind behind them. Indeed, these very laws raise the question: Are these laws just brute givens, or do they serve as evidence for a rational Creator? According to J. P., because a range of arguments from design exist, even if one of these may be strongly criticized, others may be left untouched. What about the question of evolution? J. P.’s strategy here is to keep the main thing the main thing. Ultimately, evolution doesn’t really affect many aspects of this argument.
What are these design arguments? J. P. points to four such arguments: beauty, irreducible complexity, specified complexity, and biological information. First, the beauty of the Rockies, a tropical sunset, or Vermont fall foliage cannot be accounted for in terms of survival value. Beauty has a transcendent quality, pointing to something beyond rather than being reducible to an arrangement of molecules. Second, the irreducible complexity argument states that certain parts (say, those of a cell) must all work together simultaneously to function at all; to remove any one part causes the cell’s integrity to fail. Design best accounts for such simultaneous interworkings.
Third, design is suggested by specified complexity. The likelihood that the four heads on Mt. Rushmore were created by erosion is virtually nil (complexity), and we detect the images of four US Presidents (specified)—a clear indication of design. Likewise, we can see specified complexity in the eye, the heart, or the cell. The atheist Richard Dawkins himself notes that biology studies things that appear to be designed for a purpose but are not. If an organism appears designed, then why could it not actually have been designed? Science can’t tell us that it isn’t; this is a metaphysical judgment. Fourth, the argument from biological information states that living organisms contain not only order but information, such as DNA. And information can only come from a rational being. After all, if we observe in the sand this sequence of letters—JOHN LOVES MARY—but this is merely the result of natural forces like erosion, then it is meaningless. And we know that information exists independent of and prior to the arrangement of parts, which suggests the information must have been imposed on these parts by a Mind.
Though J. P. is no evolutionist, he rightly argues that if evolution is true, we have here a most amazing example of design and thus an argument for God’s existence. God is not only the final cause (creating the process with an end or aim in mind) but also the efficient cause (that by which the change is wrought). What’s more, even apart from evolution, there are other areas suggesting design such as the existence of beauty, natural laws, and cosmic singularities that make a life-permitting universe possible. If we were called upon to decide between a chance universe and a “rigged” one to account for the specific cosmic “deal of cards” we observe, we should opt for the rigged one. That is, the theistic background makes better sense of this particular arrangement than a naturalistic/chance alternative.
In J. P.’s book The Recalcitrant Imago Dei (I love this title!), he highlights five irreducible features of human nature and experience that reflect the image of God: consciousness and the mental, free will, rationality, unified selves, and intrinsic equal value/rights. The existence of these features in human persons is exactly what we would expect if we are the creation of the God of Christian theism—a personal spirit Being that is supremely good, conscious, intelligent, and free. By contrast, a naturalistic metaphysic—that is, matter directed by deterministic, mechanical, valueless, nonconscious, undesigned processes—is utterly inadequate to account for these features.18
I’ll highlight one of these arguments for God’s existence—the one from consciousness. J. P.’s monograph on the argument from consciousness, Consciousness and the Existence of God: A Theistic Argument, persuasively argues that consciousness is best explained by the existence of a conscious Being.19
J. P. argues that the emergence of consciousness cannot be accounted for by a rearrangement of matter. Conscious/subjective experience is radically distinct from the stuff of matter—a point which a number of naturalists like Colin McGinn and John Searle readily admit. Indeed, the emergence of consciousness in a material world without God looks more like creation out of nothing than an emergent property. To simply appeal to the emergence of consciousness based on an organism’s achieving a certain level of complexity is, he argues, a label and not an explanation.
What are these mental states that are so discontinuous with matter? He gives six key features:20
(1) There is a raw qualitative feel or a “what it is like” to have a mental state such as pain;
(2) Many mental states have intentionality—ofness or aboutness—directed toward an object (e.g., a thought is about the moon);
(3) Mental states are inner, private, and immediate to the subject having them—mental states necessarily owned and unified by an “I” or a self;
(4) Mental states fail to have crucial features (e.g., spatial extension, location) that characterize physical states and, in general, cannot be described using physical language;
(5) Mental states are constituted by qualitatively simple properties (e.g., being a pain or a sensation of red), but physical states are constituted by quantitative, structural properties (e.g., being a C-fiber firing);
(6) Libertarian free acts exemplify an active power and not passive liability.
Using the inference to the best explanation for these features of consciousness, J. P. concludes that, on theism, such phenomena are natural and “hardly surprising.” By contrast, naturalism gives us no reason to think that consciousness should emerge given its materialistic ontology and mechanistic etiology.21
The discussion of consciousness naturally leads to the topic of substance dualism. J. P. is a robust defender of substance dualism. The version he defends is the more integrated, organic, “functional holistic” Aristotelian–Thomistic view, not the more compartmentalized version of René Descartes. Unfortunately, naturalistic materialists tend to avoid sophisticated versions of substance dualism, instead preferring to attack a metaphysical strawman.22 As J. P. notes in his book on consciousness, substance dualism is not at home in a naturalistic world because it seems to suggest a transcendent—indeed, supernatural—realm, and this is a key reason he thinks that many naturalists resist it so strongly. Most naturalists cling tenaciously to their materialism—what he calls hylomania—largely because of their pneumatophobia or fear of the spirit/soul. J. P. documents how many naturalistic philosophers of mind either ignore or refuse to engage the most sophisticated versions of substance dualism. For example, they don’t even include such works in their bibliography. In other cases, they merely beat up on Descartes’s problematic version of dualism.23
Further, J. P. is troubled by a number of Christian philosophers who have embraced materialism, which he considers a capitulation to the spirit of the age.24 At a meeting of the American Academy of Religion sponsored by the EPS, J. P. directly asked fellow-panelist and Christian materialist Kevin Corcoran whether he thought that Jesus and Paul were substance dualists, and Corcoran readily acknowledged that they were.25 This is a sad irony indeed—not only because of the dualist position of Jesus and other biblical writers,26 but also because materialism itself has been in decline over the past fifty years or so.27
J. P. utilizes an argument for the soul—that is, the “self” or the “I”—against the process theologian, which would also apply to the Buddhist no-self doctrine (anatman). Both these views deny an enduring self that maintains absolute identity through change. The self is nothing more than a series of interrelated actual occasions, a stream of consciousness—like old celluloid films (which have discrete, though unconnected, frames) or like a flickering candle. J. P. argues that this view is intuitively implausible. “In successive moments of experience, I not only have an awareness of those successive experiences, but I am also aware of an “I” which is identical in each moment and which is identical to my current self.”28 I (= my soul) am a self-identifying unity; I don’t find myself to be a succession of units. “I” am not a bundle of properties. If that were the case, how could change take place? After all, change presupposes sameness, and the nature of a substance is that it endures despite changes in its properties.
According to the noted Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, the term popularizer is commonly disdained among academics. Despite this, he urges Christian scholars not to leave their work “buried away in professional journals,”29 but to make it available to the broader Christian community to help them think Christianly and to work through their intellectual questions: “If [Christian philosophers] devote their best efforts to the topics fashionable in the non-Christian philosophical world, they will neglect a crucial and central part of their task as Christian philosophers.”30
J. P. has been committed to this “crucial and central part” of his task. He has not only written works of natural theology that are academic and densely argued, but he has also made these arguments accessible to the thoughtful lay Christian. And he has done so in such a way that Christians can apply these arguments in everyday conversations with unbelievers. For example, in his book The God Conversation: Using Stories and Illustrations to Explain Your Faith,31 coauthored with Tim Muehlhoff, J. P. talks about the astronomer Donald Page’s calculations of the odds of a life-permitting universe as being 1 out of 1010(123). J. P. notes that, unless one has a PhD in mathematics, such numbers will seem meaningless. If you wrote out on a napkin during lunch what 1018 would look like, it would be 10000000000000000000. Now, the number of subatomic particles in the entire universe is around 1080! That number is a mere trifle compared to the staggering odds of a life-permitting universe.
Now, to help your friend grasp what 1 out of 1010(123) looks like, grab a new napkin and start writing down a one followed by zero after zero after zero: “As you explain to your friend how unimaginable this number is, keep writing as you speak. Tell your friend that if you started writing this number from when the universe began [13.7 billion years ago], you still would not be finished.”32
Given the breathtaking odds against a life-permitting universe, it seems that an irrational fear is what prevents the atheist from considering a supernatural intellect behind it all. In giving an assessment, J. P. cites Peter Kreeft: “At this point, we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.”33
J. P. not only outlines practical suggestions for readers, he has done plenty of hands-on natural theology himself. I frequently tell one of J. P.’s stories—an encounter with a relativistic student at the University of Vermont. J. P. was speaking in a dorm room, and a student who lived there told J. P., “Whatever is true for you is true for you and whatever is true for me is true for me. If something works for you because you believe it, that’s great. But no one should force his or her views on other people since everything is relative.”34 J. P. pointed out to him that, if so, there was no such thing as wrongdoing. To drive this home, as J. P. was leaving, he unplugged the student’s stereo and started to walk out the door with it.
The student protested: “Hey, what are you doing? …. You can’t do that!”
J. P. replied, “You’re not going to force on me the belief that it is wrong to steal your stereo, are you?”
J. P. pointed out that when it’s convenient, people will say they don’t care about sexual morality or cheating on exams, but they readily become moral absolutists when someone steals their things or violates their rights. The happy ending to the story is that this student saw this inconsistency and was able to make the connection between dignity and human rights and being being made in the image of God. A few weeks later, he committed his life to Christ. I like to tell people that this could be a groundbreaking new evangelistic method churches could use called “stealing stereos for Jesus”!
J. P.’s natural theology has many other practical, everyday outworkings. J. P. is keen on highlighting these for laypersons, not just scholars.
In one debate J. P. had with an atheist, he told the audience: “If you’re an atheist, I’ll bet you a steak dinner that you’ve had authority issues with a father figure.”35 When I watched that first debate between J. P. and an atheist, I remember how J. P. raised not only arguments for God using evidence and reason, but he also appealed to the argument from need or longing for God as well—what Clifford Williams calls “existential arguments” for belief in God.36 In that video, J. P. commented on the well-known psychologizing argument against God used by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud; that is, human beings fabricate a father figure to get them through life’s difficulties; thus religion is utterly weak-minded and pathetic.37 J. P. pointed out that this Freudian argument commits the genetic fallacy—attributing truth or falsehood to a belief based on its origin. God’s nonexistence doesn’t at all follow from how a person came to believe in God. The existence of God must be distinguished from how humans come to believe.
Citing Christian psychologist Paul Vitz, J. P. added that we could turn the Freudian argument on its head. If humans have this deep need or longing for the transcendent, for meaning, for significance, then this could actually serve as a pointer to God’s existence. Indeed, many leading atheists like Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, and Russell had negative or nonexistent relationships with their fathers.38 In his argument, J. P. reminds us that both evidence and need, the rational and the existential, are part of a broader, holistic framework that point us in a God-ward direction. As humans made in the divine image—the recalcitrant imago Dei—we can find belief in God both intellectually as well as existentially satisfying.
This is the point that C. S. Lewis argued over a generation ago—now known as “the argument from desire.” It would seem strange to experience hunger or thirst if no food or water existed to satisfy those longings. Likewise, it would seem legitimate to consider our deepest inner needs as well—the longing for significance, security, immortality, deliverance from the fear of death. What if our deepest needs actually point to an ultimate source of satisfaction beyond the this-worldly? In the spirit of the philosopher Blaise Pascal (famed proponent of the “wager argument” for belief in God), Clifford Williams lays out the argument this way:
(1) Humans have an indefinite and intense craving for true happiness.
(2) Only faith in God satisfies this craving.
(3) If only faith in God satisfies this craving, then we are justified in having it.
(4) Therefore, we are justified in having faith in God.
While not arguing that the Christian faith is therefore true, this “existential” argument asserts that faith in God is justified or legitimate to have since “it brings about the satisfaction of the indefinite and intense craving mentioned in the first premise.”39 We have been created with certain crucial needs, and it makes sense God alone would be capable of fulfilling them.
When J. P. presents natural theological arguments in academic journals or monographs, his case for God may appear abstract and detached from the real world. J. P.’s natural theology is no mere armchair discussion. It has a weighty purpose, which can be summarized in the apostle Paul’s words: “… so that they would seek [God] and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:27). As important as God’s existence is, this is a preliminary step in something more specific and personal. If a good, personal, powerful, conscious, and intelligent Creator exists, J. P. frequently asks: what has this Being actually done to help humans out of their miserable, broken condition? Natural theology can serve as a doorway to Christ—that is, arguments for God’s existence create a “plausibility structure,” in which embracing Jesus of Nazareth becomes a credible option. A defense of Jesus’ superior uniqueness—the one who perfectly reveals God (John 14:6–9)—over against world religion founders such as Muhammad, Buddha, or Lao-Tzu or arguments for the historical, bodily resurrection of Jesus naturally springs from the backdrop of a personal, good, powerful, and intelligent Creator. So, if we have good evidence for a God who creates the universe ex nihilo, then we are warranted in believing in the virgin birth or in miracles like the resurrection.
I am one very grateful witness to the remarkable impact of J. P. Moreland on my life, which, thanks to his influence and God’s grace, has been extended in my own writings, teaching, and ministry to touch the lives of others. Indeed, this same experience could be recounted by numerous people—indeed many, many thousands, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. We can readily attest to—and give thanks for—the high-quality philosophical work in which J. P. has been engaged for the sake of God’s kingdom.
1. J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1987).
2. The latter argument J. P. expanded into the article, “Reflections on Meaning in Life without God,” Trinity Journal 9 (1988): 18–34, which was also formative in my thinking about this topic.
3. J. P. Moreland, Christianity and the Nature of Science: A Philosophical Investigation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1989).
4. J. P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist? The Debate between Theists and Atheists (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1993).
5. For example, J. P. contributed to my coedited books The Rationality of Theism (London: Routledge, 2003) and The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013). J. P. and I were on a team of coeditors for The Apologetics Study Bible: A Guide to Defending the Christian Faith (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2007). I also contributed essays to books J. P. has coedited: “A Moral Argument,” in To Every One an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004); and “Ethics Needs God,” in Debating Christian Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 133.
7. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, “Introduction,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), ix.
8. J. P. suggests this in Does God Exist? where he speaks of “Atheism and Leaky Buckets: The Christian Rope Pulls Tighter.”
9. J. P. Moreland, The God Question (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2009), 55.
10. Ibid., 56.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ninian Smart, “Religion as a Discipline,” Concept and Empathy, ed. Donald Wiebe (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 161.
14. This particular version is taken from J. P. Moreland, “The Ontological Status of Properties,” in Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, eds., William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (London: Routledge, 2000), 72–79.
15. J. P. discusses the kalam argument in Scaling the Secular City, chap. 1 and The God Conversation, chap. 3.
16. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City, 41–42.
17. See Moreland, Scaling the Secular City, chap. 2 and Moreland, The God Conversation, chap. 4.
18. J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Nature and the Failure of Naturalism (London: SCM Press, 2009).
19. See Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God: A Theistic Argument (London: Routledge, 2008).
20. This list is a combination of items in Consciousness and the Existence of God, 38–39; and J. P. Moreland, “Arguments about Human Persons,” in The Routledge Companion to Theism, eds. Charles Taliaferro, Victoria S. Harrison, and Stewart Goetz (London: Routledge, 2013), 404.
21. See Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God, 32.
22. See J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000).
23. See Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God, chap. 9.
24. J. P. and I have had several discussions on this topic over the years.
25. This panel discussion—“Prospects for Body/Soul Dualism Today”—took place on November 19, 2011, in San Francisco, CA.
26. See N.T. Wright’s robust defense of this “duality” in his The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). Wright prefers not to use the term dualism.
27. Robert C. Koons and George Bealer, “Introduction,” in The Waning of Materialism, eds. Robert C. Koons and George Bealer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xvii–xxi.
28. J. P. Moreland, “An Enduring Self: The Achilles’ Heel of Process Philosophy,” Process Studies 17 (1988): 193.
29. Alvin Plantinga, “Twenty Years’ Worth of the SCP,” Faith and Philosophy 15 (1998): 153.
30. Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Faith and Philosophy 1 (1984): 255.
31. J. P. Moreland and Tim Muehloff, The God Conversation (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007).
32. Ibid., 146.
33. Ibid., 147.
34. J. P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1997), 153–54.
35. “Does the Christian God Exist?” debate between J. P. Moreland and Clancy Martin at Word of Life Church, Saint Joseph, Missouri, December 1, 2005. Audio available at: http://www.brianauten.com/Apologetics/moreland-martin-debate.mp3.
36. Clifford Williams, Existential Reasons for Belief in God: A Defense of Desires and Emotions for Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011).
37. See Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion, ed. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961).
38. Paul C. Vitz’s earlier work found its way into the book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism (Dallas: Spence, 1999). In private conversation, Vitz has mentioned to me that this book will come out in a new edition, which takes up several of the “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.
39. Ibid., 54.