About Me

I’m a Professor of Philosophy at Trinity Western University and, until 2023, Visiting Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia.

My main research areas are philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and cognitive science of religion, with some forays into epistemology, metaphysics, and Anabaptist theology. I also direct the Humanitas Anabaptist-Mennonite Centre at TWU.

I first became interested in philosophy because philosophers seemed to have a helpful set of tools for thinking through questions that are big, important, and meaningful, but difficult to find quick and satisfying answers—questions like: Is there a God? If morality is objective, why do people make different moral judgments? What’s the difference between claiming to know something and actually knowing something? I started working on these kinds of questions at Regent College (Vancouver) where I wrote a Master’s thesis on John Hick’s religious pluralism. Following my Master’s, I did a Ph.D. at Purdue University where I wrote a dissertation on fallibilism about knowledge—the idea that you can know something without being certain that it’s true. I spent a year at the University of Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion working on my dissertation before starting my career at TWU where I’ve been since 2005.

The questions that I’ve been most interested in lately (the last decade or so) are connected to science—in particular, philosophical issues in science, and scientific approaches to the study of religion. Questions of the first sort include: Does science aim at truth? If so, does the success of science give us a good reason to think that scientific descriptions of the world are accurate? I think the answer to both of those questions is a qualified “yes,” and the position I’m inclined to defend is scientific realism. In terms of using science to study religion, the last few decades have seen an explosion of research by scientists using cognitive and evolutionary methods to understand and explain beliefs, behaviors, and practices deemed “religious.” I think that anyone interested in understanding religion—whether philosophically, theologically, scientifically, or personally, has much to learn from these approaches. I’ve benefitted a lot by collaborating with scientists on all of these science related questions and have learned some science along the way (my current stint at UBC is geared towards giving me tools to conduct and participate in my own scientific research).