In Alvin Plantinga’s 1980 address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association “The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology”,[i] the proposition God exists is declared to be properly basic by the reformers and as a result natural theology—the arguments for God’s existence—is unnecessary.  Following a brief summary of Plantinga’s paper, three benefits of properly basic beliefs will be outlined, and then three reasons will be presented as to why the complete rejection of natural theology using Plantinga’s account of properly basic beliefs simply goes too far.

Plantinga points out this conclusion by establishing that the Classical foundationalist approach of knowledge (commonly attributed to Plato through Aquinas and then a modified form to Descrates through the 20th Century) required all knowledge be built upon certain foundational propositions—namely those that are either self-evident, evident to the senses, or incorrigible—made natural theology necessary.  However, reformers like John Calvin rejected Classical foundationalism (in lieu of a form of weak foundationalism) on the grounds that God exists is a foundational proposition per scripture but does not fit the requirements to be a foundational proposition (that is the existence of God is not self-evident, evident to the senses, or incorrigible).  As a result, since theologians no longer need to work with foundational principles to arrive at the knowledge of God natural theology becomes unnecessary.  Joseph Boyle’s response to Plantinga concisely captures the line of thought: “The Christian knows God exists. Natural theology makes sense only if God's existence is not in the foundations. But it is.”[ii]

Abstract:
It is the aim of this paper is to show that Allen Wood’s compatibilism should ultimately be rejected since his view suffers from two major challenges, 1) the necessity of Intelligible causality for Empirical causality and 2) timeless agency.  To do so this paper is comprised of two major sections: a survey of Kant’s stated position on how the third antinomy is actually an illusion since both freedom and determinism can both viably exist in Part I, and then a critique of Allen Wood’s theory on how best to interpret the compatibilism Kant achieves in Part II.  This will show that the compatibilism Wood promotes, while not necessarily dissatisfactory as a coherent perspective, is ultimately unsatisfactory since it essentially disengages freedom from the natural world.
(a PDF can also be found in the Academic Section). 

Most of my Spring Semester was consumed researching and writing this.  Enjoy...
(a PDF can also be found in the Academic Section).

Abstract:
By reviewing attempts by the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, Evangelical Churches, Protestant Neo-Orthodoxy and the recent contributions of Speech Act theory on divine discourse to reconcile the two forms of the Word of God (The Written Word and the Living Word), this paper aims to address how the gap between mankind and the transcendent God can be bridged to allow for the proper order of metaphysics leading to epistemology without denigrating God’s Word by answering the question: is Christ as the illocution of God the essential link between ontology and epistemology, and thus the starting place for Christian systematic theology?