Friday’s edition of the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is up, with three new papers by Stephen Schiffer (on paradox, descriptions and justification respectively), a paper by Alexander Pruss arguing that western monotheism is incompatible with standard versions of evolutionary theory, and new entries in the Stanford Encyclopaedia and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

The Pruss paper is a little misleading I think, because what’s he really objecting to isn’t the evolution, but the indeterminism. I’ve long thought that if theists wanted to object to one part of modern science, it should be indeterminism, not evolutionary theory. Evolution, after all, undercuts at most two theistic beliefs, and they were pretty implausible to start with. (The two are the literal truth of Genesis and the soundness of the teleological argument. Since Genesis is self-contradictory the first is clearly wrong. And Hume disposed of the teleological argument a century before Darwin.) On the other hand, indeterminism seems to imply that God isn’t really in control.[1] And that seems to really be inconsistent with the theological picture.

fn1. Pretend there’s a long discussion of middle knowledge here that deals with all possible objections to the previous claim but ends up concluding that, as always, I’m 110% correct.