We are proud to announce that Dr. Alex Pruss has accepted a wonderful invitation to give the highly regarded Wilde Lectures at Oxford University next Summer.

The lectures have been hosted at Oxford since 1911 and are rightly regarded as the most prestigious available to philosophers and theologians. Former lecturers include Robert M. Adams, Alvin Plantinga, Eleonore Stump, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Linda Zagzebski, Sir Anthony Kenny and many others among the very best in the discipline.

The Wilde Lecturer will give one or two a week, totaling to four or eight. This incredibly prestigious Lectureship is a well-deserved recognition to Dr. Alex Pruss.

Currently, Dr. Pruss is preparing to give about five talks on arguments for the existence of God that have not received ample attention in contemporary philosophy. He will likely begin with an introductory talk on why it is important to study arguments for the existence of God and why there is nothing wrong with “God of the gaps” reasoning. If God exists, then he is behind everything and thus we would expect the world to be full of signs of God.

Steve Evans book, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, develops this point: we could expect that if we examine any truth deeply enough, we will find God at the heart of it.

Specifically, Dr. Pruss would like to discuss the following arguments:

1. The argument from beauty
2. The argument from human fulfillment
3. The argument from apparently arbitrary boundaries and constants in physics, ethics, semantics and epistemology (on the physics side, this argument goes back to the French polymath Marin Mersenne in the 17th century; it is related to, but different from, the fine-tuning argument that is commonly discussed these days).
4. The argument from knowledge and the falsity of skepticism.

Overall, Alex’s project for the Wilde Lectures will examine features of nature or human experience deeply and argue that God is at the center of these phenomena.

This is a very high honor if you would join us in congratulating our friend, colleague and mentor, Dr. Alex Pruss.