Friday, February 4, 2011

TLS on radio (Updated)

Frank Turek of CrossExamined.org interviewed me today about The Last Superstition for his radio show.  The show airs Saturday morning from 9 – 10am Central on the American Family Radio network and will be rebroadcast on Sunday morning.  You’ll also be able to hear the podcast at the show’s website.  (You can find links to some of my earlier radio interviews here.)

Update 2/8: The podcast is now up at the CrossExamined.org website.

17 comments:

  1. What time zone are you referring to?

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  2. Whoops, sorry. It's central time. I've added that to the post.

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  3. Thanks! I'm looking forward to it! :)

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  4. Is anyone else having trouble accessing the previous podcasts? Those sits are terrible.

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  5. Brian, if you're referring to:

    http://podcasting.sacredheartradio.com/

    I had the same problem. The server is down or something.

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  6. I see Colbert needs to read TLS rather than attacking the straw man ... http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/02/04/colbert-vs-oreilly-on-the-argument-from-design-best-comic-use-of-st-thomas-aquinas-award/

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  7. re: Brian - Yeah, as far as I can tell none of the links work. Some of them go to the website of the radio-hosts. Others are just "page does not exist."

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  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  9. Dr. Feser,

    Related to radio and the subject of your book:

    Stephen Law and Alister McGrath recently discussed new atheism on the Unbelievable radio program. I think you would be astounded at some of the comments Stephen makes on this show; in particular, about how "there simply aren't any" new atheists who are saying religious viewpoints should be forced out of the public square.

    Here is the link:
    http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/4df1c291-1e70-483d-9b65-8f6108e3ce50.mp3

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  10. ^Funny that Colbert, a "Catholic", makes fun of him. Physical constants and regularities are actually often invoked in serious design arguments. Whether those attempts succeed or not is another question.

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  11. Hi Dr. Feser,

    I've just received a copy of TLS from Amazon. Your book, "Aquinas," reached me a few days ago. I'm looking forward to reading both of them at my leisure. Thanks.

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  12. Hmm I'd like to listen but I cannot find it in the podcasts section. Maybe it will be uploaded after tomorrow.

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  13. I, too, am not able to find the older broadcasts. I was looking forward to listening to them, but apparently they are too old and have been removed.

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  14. Hello all,

    Sorry about that. I assumed at least some of those older shows might still be up.

    Anyway, the podcast for Saturday's show has now been posted at the CrossExamined.org site.

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  15. Dr. Feser,

    Great interview. You (and other classically theistic philosophers) should do this sort of thing more often.

    Quick question though. In the interview, you compare God's relationship to all of the things in the world to a puppeteer's relationship to a puppet. The knee-jerk reaction here is: "How, then, do we have genuine freedom?"

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  16. Anon, I think because God's relationship is not exactly like that of a puppeteer.

    Even humans have the capacity to be the cause of someone else's action without inhibiting their freedom: if I teach my child that poison hurts you, I cause him to avoid poison, even though he does it freely. A teacher who teaches how to fix an airplane engine is a cause of his students fixing engines, but he does not diminish their freedom - rather, he expands it.

    God is like that, only more so: not only can he cause us to move by enlightening our intellects to see the good (i.e. as an extrinsic mover), he is the actual first cause of movement when our will moves toward the good apprehended. That is, without God's moving the will, there is no free action at all.

    As an aside, nobody ever seems to be concerned with the fact that men are not free to wish to be unhappy is a form of defect in freedom. "That's just the way we are built" seems to be the underlying thought. But that's true of how the will moves anyway: God moves it, and that's just the way it is built. The free-ness of the free will consists in this, a sort of indeterminacy: the will is free to turn away from one good to another good, as long as the former good is not "that ultimate good which encompasses all possible desirability." Nobody is able to turn away from that kind of good. And yet that inability is not a lack of freedom.

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  17. you compare God's relationship to all of the things in the world to a puppeteer's relationship to a puppet. The knee-jerk reaction here is: "How, then, do we have genuine freedom?"

    My take on it is that God is a necessary cause of our ability to choose. It's not that God makes decisions for us, but he is, at this very moment, sustaining everything - including our ability to choose what we're going to do next. (I hope that makes sense.)

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