Ray VanArragon

 Office: AC 323A
 Ext: 6484
 P.O. Box: 54
 E-mail: r-vanarragon@bethel.edu

Academic Degrees

• Ph.D., Notre Dame
• M.A., Notre Dame
• B.A., Calvin College
  

Short Biography

I have been interested in philosophy for as long as I can remember, but I decided to major in philosophy and pursue a career in the subject during my freshman year in college.  Issues in philosophy of religion were the ones that initially pulled me in, and those concerns have motivated my study of various subjects in philosophy since then.  For example, in graduate school at Notre Dame I wrote my dissertation on skepticism.  The official topic was skepticism about sense perception and the like, but it was and remains skepticism about religious claims that has motivated my interest in the subject. These days I most enjoy spending time with my family--my wife Janel and our children Caleb and Kathryn.  We enjoy reading books, playing games, going for walks, and playing golf (and in the winter, playing hockey).

Areas of Interest

My interests include epistemology (especially religious epistemology, but also skepticism), metaphysics (especially issues concerning freewill), and philosophy of religion.  I also have interests in ways that the above topics intersect with ethics.  I'm interested, for instance, in moral responsibility and the ways that Christians ought to deal with religious diversity and disagreement about moral and political issues.

Current Work

Currently, I'm working on a paper on religious epistemology, more specifically the topic of whether a person who comes to accept a naturalistic explanation of her religious experience has reason to give up the religious beliefs produced by that experience.  I'm also working on a response to William Lane Craig about his contention that it is plausible to think that most people who never hear the gospel would not have responded to it even if they had heard (known as the thesis of transworld-damnation).