3 Links

I'm currently reading Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency by Timothy O'Connor. I'm very interested in the cosmological argument from contingency, and this book is an up-to-date take on that and related metaphyical issues. I hope to have a post on this at some point but in the meantime here is a review from a naturalist's perspective by Graham Oppy (HT: sideblog at FQI).

I really enjoyed this insightful cartoon posted at Cosmic Variance along with the comments by Sean Carroll (the original source for the cartoon is here). No offense to cosmologists, but for purely philosophical reasons I think it is best to identify the actual world with the observable or causally connected universe (not that I think that's all there is, but because the regions we assume exist beyond the observable have a different ontological as well as epistemological status - see a related post here).

Finally, I want to post a friendly link to the discussion forum at Panendeism.org. Panendeism, as I understand it, is meant to be like Panentheism, but with the "deism" label stressing that this is a worldview arrived at through reason, without reliance on authority or revelation.