J. L. Schellenberg
NEWS:
(01/05/24): My new book What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine will soon be released by Oxford University Press. (It'll be out in May in the UK; in July in North America.) Pre-order it now from OUP -- here's the link -- and save 30% by using the promotion code on the image above.
(01/05/24): What God Would Have Known has been selected by RBMedia, the largest global publisher of audiobooks, for inclusion in their audiobook programme.
(01/05/24): My OUP blog post: Has Christian philosophy been having it too easy?
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I am Professor of Philosophy 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.
My doctorate is in philosophy and from Oxford, where I studied with Richard Swinburne, David Brown, Maurice Wiles, and Anthony Kenny in the late 1980s. 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 shown why, even if there is no personal God, we should remain open to other, more general religious possibilities. And I have 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 our early stage of development as a species. This neglected developmental fact provides a basis for what I call early-stage relativism. Put bluntly, it tells us that since we’re at an early stage of species-level development, we humans 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.