My intellectual development

Having been a Christian blogger and apologist, this might be a good time to say something about my intellectual development and predilections:

• I never pursued an academic career because that requires a field of specialization, and my interests are too varied to sacrifice. Moreover, I think my wide-ranging interests enrich my apologetic resources. 

• Everything I care about ties into Christian theology. All my varied interests tie into Christian theology. That provides a unifying principle. I don't have a fallback position. I can't detach Christianity from what matters. I have no positions independent of Christianity. It's Christianity all the way down. All my positions in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology are guided by or grounded in Christian theology. 

• I backed into apologetics to answer other people's questions rather than my own. However, there came a point in life where it was helpful having that in reserve.

• I think naturalism is a recipe for moral nihilism, existential nihilism, and epistemic nihilism. As such, naturalism is a backstop against apostasy because there is no alternative to Christian reality.  

• Because apologists influence each other, apologetics can get stuck in a rut. It becomes too stereotypical and repetitive. One thing I've tried to do is to explore neglected lines of evidence for the Christian faith, thereby broadening the evidential basis for Christianity. 

• I became a Calvinist for what at the time were inadequate reasons. However, I made the right call. My initial understanding of Calvinism was formed and informed by reading Warfield and Cunningham. Paul Helm has also been useful over the years. 

• Although freewill theism has produced a number of eminent thinkers, I just can't take it seriously as a solution to the problem of evil. And the God of freewill theism is a smaller God than the God of Calvinism. Not the greatest conceivable being. 

• As a young Christian I explored Catholicism, but I was always too Bible-centered to find Catholicism satisfactory. Aesthetically I identify with the high-church tradition but theologically I identify with the low-church tradition. 

• Correspondence with Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, Vern Poythress, and William Young served as sounding boards in the initial formulation of my theology. 

• I'm basically a classical theist, although I reject Thomistic simplicity 

• I prefer exegetical theology and philosophical theology to historical theology

• I prefer metaphysics to epistemology

• I prefer the principle of plenitude to the principle of parsimony 

• I prefer rationalism to empiricism. I like philosophical and scientific thought-experiments. However, the empiricist emphasis on sense knowledge is a salutary corrective to the rationalist derogation of sense knowledge. 

• I subscribe to the Medieval exemplarist tradition

• I find symmetries interesting, especially reflection symmetries, crystallography, tessellation, infinity mirrors, Pachelbel's canon, &c. The Trinity is the paradigm symmetry. Reality is ultimately complex rather than simple. 

• I'm an indirect realist. To that extent, I'm a scientific antirealist. Appearances all the way down. Layered appearances. In that regard, divine revelation is necessary to provide an intersubjectival check on sensory perception. 

• The philosophy of time is an interest of mine 

• John Ruskin and Christina Rossetti are side interests

• Historic thinkers I find stimulating include Anselm, Berkeley, Descartes, Leibniz, Newman, Philoponus, and Pascal.

• Recent thinkers I find stimulating include Robert Adams, Dembski, Geach, Gödel, David Lewis, Le Poindevin, Thomas Nagel, Plantinga, Pruss, Poincaré, Josh Rasmussen, Sheldrake, van Fraassen, van Inwagen, Van Til. 

• I often correspond with Greg Welty, Paul Manata, James Anderson, Tim and Lydia McGrew

• When I was younger I used to think ethicists were philosophers who lack the acumen to do metaphysics, or aging philosophers who lost their intellectual edge. However, I developed a greater appreciation for ethics as I came to view it in a broader existential light: what makes life meaningful. 

• Favorite theistic proofs:

Argument from miracles

Argument from numbers

Argument from counterfactuals

Argument from truth (Aquinas)

Argument from logic

Argument from reason (Rasmussen)

Argument from contingency (Leibniz)

Evolutionary argument against naturalism

Pascal's Wager