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In this paper, a critical response is offered to James Anderson and Greg Welty’s “The Lord of Noncontradiction” (Philosophia Christi, 13:2 2011) by drawing attention to oft-neglected distinctions (e.g. de re and de dicto necessity), the limits of some explanatory categories (possible worlds) relative to revealed theology, and the philosophical import of evangelical theological commitments (for example, that God is not essentially creator).

Shannon’s article is also part of a series of articles that have critiqued Anderson and Welty’s article. Other contributions are from Alexander Bozzo and Tony Lloyd.

The full text of Shannon’s article can be accessed for FREE by clicking here.

Anderson and Welty reply to Shannon, Bozzo and Lloyd in their 2013 paper, “In Defense of the Argument for God from Logic.”

This paper contributes to a series of EPS web articles (with Nathan Shannon and Tony Lloyd), which responds to the 2011 Philosophia Christi article, “The Lord of Noncontradiction: An argument for God from Logic,” by James Anderson and Greg Welty.

Anderson and Welty maintain in their 2011 article that God’s existence can be demonstrated on account of the necessary existence of the laws of logic. One consequence of their argument is the stipulation that propositions are divine thoughts. In this philosophical note, Alexander Bozzo objects that this conclusion entails either that God’s thoughts are numerically identical to human thoughts, or that human thoughts contain elements internal to God’s mind.

The full-text of Bozzo’s contribution is available for FREE by clicking here.

Anderson and Welty reply to Shannon, Bozzo and Lloyd in their 2013 paper, “In Defense of the Argument for God from Logic.”

Last week, Stuart Cornelius Hackett (b. 1925)—a beloved philosophy professor, friend, and brother in Christ—departed this life to go where all true believers long to be. His mental brilliance, affected in his later years by Alzheimer’s, has been restored, and he is a now a clearer thinker than anytime during earthly days.

When I began to study at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1985, my very first class during my first quarter—we didn’t have “semesters” then—was Hackett’s “Religious Epistemology” class. This remarkable course introduced me to rationalism, empiricism, testing truth claims, Kant and the synthetic a priori. My eyes were being opened to the larger world of philosophy, and just a few weeks into the semester I was more than sufficiently inspired to pursue an M.A. degree in philosophy of religion—in addition to my M.Div. degree. I would write my master’s thesis on “The Impossibility of an Infinite Temporal Regress of Events”—an argument Hackett resurrected from medieval Jewish and Muslim philosophy and utilized in his Resurrection of Theism. (Of course, William Craig, also a former student of Hackett’s, has been most closely identified with this theistic proof—now referred to as the kalam cosmological argument.)  Hackett’s early influence on my study of philosophy led me to dedicate my 2007 book Loving Wisdom to him.

As for the personal side of Dr. Hackett, he was quite colorful, both in personality and in his dress. He would wear brightly- and outrageously-colored, mismatched polyesters to class. One day he told us, “My wife wanted me to be sure to tell you that she does not approve of what I’m wearing today.”  In addition to sporting thick black-framed glasses, he would keep his hair quite short and his beard barely longer—perhaps ten days’ growth of stubble.  Once, when Hackett was wearing his well-worn dark overcoat in the middle of winter, someone at Trinity commented that it looked like someone had dragged him onto the seminary property off the streets of Chicago! One day in class, Stu Hackett told us, “I am often described as a weird person…I don’t know that I’m weird in an absolute sense—I mean I’m not a werewolf or a vampire or anything like that. I’m just highly individualistic.”

He was an enthusiastic teacher who would often greet us in Latin, Pax vobis cum—and then finish the reply himself—et te cum spiritu. He would cite Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, telling us that we needed to move ahead with “unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, and majestic instancy.”  He was ever full of good humor—to the point that some students complained that they weren’t getting their money’s worth in class: “I’m gonna’ lay this stuff on you like one great big metaphysical egg!” Confessing that “I don’t have a Reformed bone in my body,” he summarized his credo: “I’m a whiskey Calvinist—of the five points, I can only swallow one fifth.” (His wife Joan once told me that for an entire afternoon, the Calvinist theologian Roger Nicole doggedly tried to persuade Hackett to become a Calvinist. But it was not predestined to be.)

To add to the atmosphere, Hackett would specialize in extraordinarily long, Germanic-style sentences, which called for focused vigilance so as not to lose the thread of what he was saying. To give you an idea, here is a sample sentence—yes, one sentence—taken from his book The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim:

If the very possibility of a contingent cosmos or world order is fully conceivable only through its dependence on a transcendent realm of essence and directive selection; and if the very notion of an actually infinite series of past temporal states of the temporal universe involves a self-contradiction, whether that universe is construed in mentalistic or materialistic terms; and if the pervasion of the universe by significant order or purposive adaptation is itself best explained through an operation of transcendent self-directive mind through its own operative causality—and these are the very claims that our previous arguments have defended as plausible—then the supposition that selfhood (self-awareness, conceptualization, and self-direction) could not be explained in terms of material constituents, which themselves require explanation on transcendent and essentially immaterial or spiritual grounds, seems questionable indeed (p. 110).

Dr. Hackett was a friend to so many, and we loved him, eccentricities and all. He was a dedicated follower of Christ, who would read through his Greek New Testament each year. When he retired, he began to brush up on his Hebrew so that he could resume reading the Old Testament in that language. He prayed before every class, and he would often offer words of spiritual encouragement to his students. Before he came to school each day, he prayed that if he said anything false, this teaching would simply fall to the ground and be forgotten. But if he taught what was true, he prayed that it would be forever emblazoned upon his students’ minds. (Of one of his theological opponents, Hackett said, “If that person had prayed that prayer, he would have died in utter obscurity!”)

All of us philosophy students would gather together at the Hackett home for our regular end-of-the-quarter bash—complete with Sarah Lee sweets accompanied by guitar music by our beloved professor, who would sing self-composed songs such as “Plato, dear Plato, how I love you!” Just before I graduated, someone took a picture of a group of us at his home. When I visited the Hacketts years later in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, I saw this photo underneath the glass top of his desk. His wife Joan told me that it was a reminder for him pray for us, which he did every day.

Hackett—or “Big Stu” as he enjoyed being called—taught and inspired not only me, but other philosophers and apologists, including William Lane Craig, Stephen Evans, Jay Wood, Mark McLeod-Harrison, Chad Meister, Mark Linville, Mark Mittelberg, Nicholas Merriwether, and many more. Others influenced by Hackett include the pastor and author John Piper as well as own pastor Dennis Reiter, with whom I worked in Storrs, Connecticut; they, along with many others, benefited from his philosophical teaching while at Wheaton College, where he taught alongside Arthur Holmes before he was at Trinity.

Preferring to call himself a “student of philosophy” rather than a “philosopher,” Dr. Hackett wrote several articles for professional journals such as the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. He also authored four books: Oriental Philosophy, The Resurrection of Theism, The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim, and The Rediscovery of the Highest Good. Hackett’s Oriental Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press) is a superb introduction to the topic (Hackett had even gone to India to learn Sanskrit as part of this writing endeavor). The latter three books are rigorous, lucid texts covering epistemology, apologetics, philosophy of religion, and ethics. They are currently available through Wipf and Stock, and I would encourage you to explore these writings of a noteworthy philosopher from a previous generation. In addition, I should mention a Festschrift in Hackett’s honor was published in 1990, The Logic of Rational Theism (Edwin Mellen Press), coedited by William Lane Craig and Mark McLeod. Hackett offered a response to these essays, which can be found at The Interactive Hackett—a website that Tim Cole, a former classmate and Hackett student, has maintained and updated over the years.

Though Hackett kept a low profile and did not receive the attention he rightly deserved, his legacy lives on through many of the students he faithfully served and taught over the years—not to mention others who have benefited from his writings. His quiet, faithful ministry reminds me of the heroine in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea:“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Give thanks with me for Stuart Hackett’s legacy. We have been enriched, made wiser, and better equipped to be witnesses to the good news of Jesus Christ through this faithful servant. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord…for their deeds follow them.”

My first class my freshman year at Wheaton College was “Introduction to Philosophy” with Stuart Hackett. I didn’t know what to make of this strange fellow. He had a sort of disjointed manner and always burst into class carrying his briefcase, out of which he extracted his lecture notes, and his green plastic glass with an STP sticker on the side containing his water, to which he frequently recurred as he lectured. He told us that he disdained neckties but wore them for the sake of his wife; but as a sort of gesture of defiance he wore the most outrageous and outlandish ties you can imagine, some of them homemade affairs from his daughter Becky. One of them that stuck in my memory had a row of dangling fluff balls at the bottom. When he spoke, his Germanic sentences were so long and prolix, punctuated by throat-clearing and snorts on his part, with one subordinate clause and qualifying expression piled upon another, that by the time he reached the end of his sentence, I didn’t know what he had just said. At first I thought that he was just showing off, but I soon came to realize that this was just his natural way of talking.  He frequently rephrased students’ innocent questions into long, rambling queries, terminated by, “Is that what you meant to say?” At which point the intimidated student would reply, “Uh, yeah!” or “I guess so” in order to save face. I must confess that this habit rather deterred the asking of questions on my part.

The day he really won me over was the day when Jack Wyrtzen of Word of Life spoke in the morning chapel. Speaking on Paul’s address on Mars’ Hill in Athens, Wyrtzen said that the philosophers whom Paul encountered there called him a “babbler” (literally, a seed-picker), and that, Wyrtzen declared, is what philosophers really are! This diatribe was especially awkward as it fell on the morning of the respected annual Wheaton College Philosophy Conference. Our class followed chapel, and so we all eagerly awaited Dr. Hackett’s reaction to Jack Wyrtzen’s chapel message. Sure enough, when he came into the room, he greeted us all with a loud, “How are all of you seed-pickers today?” After the laughter subsided, Dr. Hackett grew serious and said, “Here’s all I’ve got to say: when I’m responsible for the salvation of as many souls as Jack Wyrtzen is, then I’ll criticize!” Then he went right into his lecture. My respect for this gracious Christian man soared.

I never dreamt that someday Stu and I would become colleagues. But years later, Stu left Wheaton to join Norman Geisler at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the Philosophy Department. When Norm left Trinity for Dallas Seminary, I was contacted in Germany, where I was finishing my doctoral work in theology, to fill his position. In January of 1980 I joined my former professor as his colleague in our two-man department at Trinity. Stu was a great departmental chairman. Since he hated administration and meetings, we never had any departmental meetings but would just chat briefly on the phone to discharge our business. Jan and I grew to be good friends with Stu and Joan during those years. Stu even entertained our two year old daughter Charity while our son John was being born. Quite a baby-sitter!

In 1986 Jan and I went through the painful process with Stu and Joan of having our department abolished and losing our positions at Trinity. Going through that awful time together welded us couples together, and we came to find in Stu and Joan a source of great encouragement and strength. The way in which Stu, a senior professor at the height of his career, was treated was especially shameful. He was shunted off to Trinity College, a low level and long neglected institution across the street to finish out his career. Stu and Joan actually had the harder lot because they had to remain and bear the ignominy of having been discarded by the seminary. Jan and I were catapulted out of the evangelical pond to Belgium and to a ministry I could only have dreamed of.

Stuart Hackett the philosopher had a profound impact upon my life and thinking. Just prior to graduating from Wheaton in 1971 I came across a copy of his out-of-print book The Resurrection of Theism: Prolegomena to Christian Apology  (1957) on a clearance table at the college bookstore. I had heard of this book, though I had no understanding of its contents or even its enigmatic title, so I bought a copy. That following fall, I opened the book and was stunned by what I read. In college my theology professors had taught us that there are no good arguments for God’s existence. At that time at Wheaton all we had by way of an apologetic was purely negative: a Francis Schaefferian demonstration that if theism is not true, then human life is absurd and culture goes down the drain. To my astonishment, here was Dr. Hackett rigorously defending traditional arguments for the existence of God and responding to every conceivable objection that might be brought against them. At the center of his case stood the much despised temporal version of the cosmological argument aimed at demonstrating the existence of a First Cause of the origin of the universe. Ever since I was a boy, I had felt keenly the craziness of an infinite past but assumed on the basis of what my professors said that my intuitions were just wrong. Now Hackett was defending philosophically what I had sensed intuitively. I had to find out if he was right.

That book prompted me to go into philosophy. Reading Frederick Copleston’s A History of Philosophy in preparation for the advanced Graduate Record Exam in philosophy, I discovered that Hackett’s version of the cosmological argument had a long and fascinating intersectarian history. I determined that if I could ever go on to do doctoral work in philosophy, I would write my dissertation on this argument. Eventually I came to do so under the direction of John Hick at the University of Birmingham. Because of its prominence in mediaeval Islamic theology, I styled the argument the kalam cosmological argument.

Hackett was the philosopher responsible for resurrecting the kalam cosmological argument.  There was simply nothing else like The Resurrection of Theism in the late 1950s. What other Christian writer at that time was interacting, not only with the great classics of Western thought, but also with contemporary studies like Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”? I have said before and say again that had The Resurrection of Theism been published by Cornell University Press instead of buried at Moody Press, the contemporary renaissance of Christian philosophy would have begun ten years earlier than it did.

Hackett’s first book was followed by a sequel The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim: A Philosophical and Critical Apologetic (1984) and then late in life, through the efforts of his former students, particularly Phil Hillmer, who had Dr. Hackett’s hand-written manuscript typed, his The Rediscovery of the Highest Good: A Philosophical and Critical Ethic (2009). These books compose a trilogy which Dr. Hackett projected in his first book and which is now in print in its entirety with Wipf & Stock. In addition to these Dr. Hackett published a small book with University of Wisconsin press entitled Oriental Philosophy: A Westerner’s Guide to Eastern Thought (1979), a unique book which, I must say, has served me very well in speaking on university campuses in India and China.

Stu Hackett touched very many lives through his work and example. God used him to transform mine.

In this paper, Paul Moser replies to specific claims about ambiguity raised by Graham Oppy.

He also suggests that Christ-Shaped Philosophy does not settle for broad goals that are identical with the goals of the natural sciences, even if it is broadly continuous with reliable science. If it did settle thus, it would offer nothing distinctive. Instead, it offers a philosophical approach that goes beyond mere truth-seeking and understanding to redemption by God in Christ. Anything short of this will fail to be Christ-Shaped Philosophy. It thereby will fail to incorporate the distinctive kind of wisdom or philosophy recommended by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:6-7. “Christ-Shaped Philosophy” aims precisely to restore attention to that kind of philosophy.

The full-text of this contribution is available for FREE by clicking here.

Graham Oppy argues that Moser’s call for “Christ-Shaped Philosophy” suffers from some serious ambiguities.

On the one hand, he fails to distinguish clearly enough between the contents of philosophical positions and the attitudes that are constitutive of philosophical engagement. On the other hand, he fails to distinguish clearly enough between the claim that Christian philosophy should be consistent with Christian doctrine, the claim that Christian philosophy should entail Christian doctrine, and whatever claims there might be that are intermediate between these two.

Oppy suggests that the most that “Christ-Shaped Philosophy” should require is that the attitudes that Christians take in their engagement with philosophy should be consistent with their Christian beliefs.

Finally, Oppy suggests that the claim that Christian philosophy should always entail Christian doctrine is plausibly at odds with attitudes that are constitutive of philosophical engagement (in particular, with commitment to the goal of achieving genuine understanding of diverse worldviews).

The full-text of his contribution is available for FREE by clicking here.