Common Sense Epistemology

Have you ever experienced a genuine miracle ? How would you know if you did ? We are delighted to have Dr. JP Moreland, Ph.D. as our special guest today to help us work through these issues and more.

JP Moreland is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Biola University’s graduate MA program. He has written delivered countless talks and written numerous books and articles related to all the ways that Biblical Christianity relates to high-level academic, rigorous Philosophy and contemporary culture.

Dr. Moreland earned a Ph.D. at the University of Spoiled Childr — I mean Southern California (USC) — in Philosophy under the guidance and dissertation mentoring of the late, great Dr. Dallas Willard, one of the greatest Christian philosophers in American history and one of the pioneers in the contemporary Spiritual Formation movement. So Dallas Willard is our intellectual and philosophical grandfather, as it were, through JP (and others).

More personally, JP was our/my (Dr. Mather’s) professor for three key courses of mine in that MA program in Philosophy: Metaphysics I, Philosophy of Mind, and Metaphysics II: The Nature and Origin of Consciousness, and that program was what brought those involved in this project together. We all took key courses from Moreland (Kurtis took upper level Apologetics from him as an undergrad Philosophy major at Biola before his graduate work, for example). We’ve been friends ever since.

What is unique about JP is that he brought a sophisticated sense of humor to his own project of melding together Common Sense and rigorous, logical thought grounded in the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary analytic academic discipline of Philosophy. If something he says sounds Common Sense, that’s on purpose–it is ! But just as often, JP will elevate your discourse, your thought life, and will stretch you just beyond what you’re able to handle in order to grow you. This is an odd mixture of feelings for the student: laughing, making connections and growing confidence, and getting smarter and smarter and sharper and sharper at making distinctions and learning about Reality.

It was a wonderful education.

Here JP discusses his most recent book, “A Simple Guide to Experience Miracles: Instruction and Inspiration for Living Supernaturally in Christ” available here on Amazon : https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-E…

In this simple but careful, rigorous book, JP continues on that tradition of modeling Common Sense with logical thought. He suggests principles for determining whether you’ve experienced a genuine miracle or not. These are criteria you can apply confidently–because they are at once careful, rigorous, and common sense all at the same time–to test the testimony of others as well.

The result is: it is possible to know (yes, KNOW) that you’ve experience a miracle.

That word “Know” has the same meaning, the very same definition that it has in Law and Science. It does not change meaning. Philosophers are very careful with the meaning of words, and it means the same exact thing here as it does in those other disciplines.

He also includes a list of suggested criteria (about a dozen or so) to apply when God does not answer prayers to help you know or understand why the Lord didn’t intervene in that situation. This material seems to be worth the price of the book by itself, as far as we are concerned.

This conversation was a joy.

Join our conversation here with JP on the metaphysics and epistemology of #Miracles

Welcome, JP Moreland !

The Republican Professor Podcast team