NEWS (01/06/23): I’ve just returned from a four- week graduate seminar taught (with Mark Wynn) at Oxford and a week of teaching (with Klaus Viertbauer) as well as much interaction with German philosophers and theologians at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Bavaria. Klaus very kindly organized a conference on my work from decades past, and Mark graciously invited me to organize the seminar around some of my latest work, which concerns problems for Christian doctrine arising from cultural development. I am very grateful to the participants in all these discussions, and especially to the Oxford seminar participants (Mark’s students and colleagues), whose comments I’ll be mulling over this summer as I make the final revisions to my manuscript, which Oxford University Press will publish next year.

Shortly after getting home I received copies of the Chinese translation of my book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, which has just been published by National Taiwan University Press. I am grateful to the Press, and to Dr. Lok-Chi Chan, the meticulous translator. 
 
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I’m a philosophy professor at Mount Saint Vincent University and adjunct in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University. Both universities are in Halifax, the capital city of beautiful Nova Scotia. I live in a rural, wooded part of the province, about 35 minutes from Halifax, with my artist wife Regina Coupar. 

In the late 1980s I got a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, studying with Richard Swinburne, David Brown, Maurice Wiles, and Anthony Kenny. The book that emerged from this study, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell, 1993), introduced a new argument against the existence of a personal God known as the hiddenness argument. This argument has enjoyed a good deal of attention in philosophy. But in a subsequent trilogy (also from Cornell), and in several later volumes, I’ve argued that the success of such reasoning is perfectly compatible with the truth of higher-order religious propositions. And I’ve argued for the viability of an associated form of religious faith grounded in imagination rather than belief. Much of the support for this hybrid stance in the philosophy of religion – part critical, part constructive – comes from the view I’ve formed about our early stage of development as a species. This neglected developmental fact provides a basis for what I’m calling early-stage relativism. Put bluntly, it tells us that since we’re at an early stage of development, we should behave in a manner appropriate to that stage and not as though we’re already fully developed. Early-stage relativism seems to me to have important consequences across a range of philosophical concerns, not just those involving religion, and in the last few years I’ve been busy exploring them. Most recently, I’ve also been giving attention specifically to classical Christian claims about reality. Here my results are again both critical and constructive, though only the former have been brought into a publishable condition.