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Greg Ganssle

Greg Ganssle has been thinking about the intersection of Christian faith and contemporary scholarship for over thirty years. He began as an undergraduate by skipping his classes and reading C.S. Lewis. After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1978, he worked in campus ministry on a variety of campuses. Hundreds of conversations with students from a wide variety of religious and philosophical perspectives drove him to a sustained self-study program. Eventually it occurred to him that he was reading philosophy. Since he had escaped college without taking a philosophy course, he decided to begin with Philosophy 101 at the age of 25. Within weeks he was hooked. Continuing to juggle his full time campus ministry responsibilities, he earned a Master of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Rhode Island in 1990. He then went full time and earned his doctorate in philosophy from Syracuse University in 1995, where his dissertation on God's relation to time won a Syracuse University Dissertation Award. Greg was part-time lecturer in the philosophy department at Yale for nine years and a senior fellow at the Rivendell Institute at Yale. Greg's research interests lie in contemporary philosophy of religion and history of philosophy.

Affiliation Faculty
Position Professor of Philosophy

Author's books

A Reasonable God: Engaging the New Face of Atheism

Eschewing the rhetoric and provocative purposes of best-selling “new atheists” Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, Ganssle offers a nuanced, charitable, and philosophically well-informed defense of the reality of God. Topics include the relationship between faith and reason, moral arguments for God’s existence, Darwinian theories of the origin of religion, and more.

Advice to Christian Philosophers: Reflections on the Past and Future of Christian Philosophy

2024 marks forty years since Alvin Plantinga’s seminal essay Advice to Christian Philosophers. In the forty years since its publication Christian philosophy has blossomed yet Plantinga’s remarks remain as poignant as ever. In celebration of its fourth decade, Hanover Press is pleased to publish a unique volume reflecting on the last 40 years and providing advice for the future from a range of scholars. The book features twenty-three essays by seasoned Christian philosophers across the theological spectrum.

Twelve chapters are written by people who teach at Talbot – Greg Ganssle, JP Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Tim Pickavance
Talbot M.A. Philosophy – Charity Anderson, Michael Austin, Paul Gould, Ross Inman, and Josh Rasmussen
Biola B.A. – Adam Green, Tom Ward, Eric Yang
Biola M.A. – Joshua L Rasmussen

God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature

In God and Time, Gregory E. Ganssle and David Woodruff have brought together 12 previously unpublished essays from leading philosophers on God’s relation to time. Including work from today’s most prominent thinkers in this fascinating field, God and Time represents the current state of the discussion between those who believe God to be atemporal (experiencing everything in the “eternal now”) and those who believe God to be temporal (experiencing events sequentially, somewhat as we do). This collection highlights such issues as how the nature of time is relevant to the question of whether God is temporal and how God’s other attributes are compatible with his mode of temporal being. By focusing on the metaphysical aspects of time and temporal existence, God and Time makes a unique contribution to the current resurgence of interest in philosophical theology in the analytic tradition.

God and Time: Four Views

In this Spectrum Multiview volume, four notable philosophers skillfully take on this difficult topic–all writing from within a Christian framework yet contending for different views. Paul Helm argues that divine eternity should be construed as a state of absolute timelessness. Alan G. Padgett maintains that God’s eternity is more plausibly to be understood as relative timelessness. William Lane Craig presents a hybrid view that combines timelessness with omnitemporality. And Nicholas Wolterstorff advocates a doctrine of unqualified divine temporality. Each essay is followed by responses from the other three contributors and a final counter-response from the original essayist, making for a lively exchange of ideas. Editor Gregory E. Ganssle provides a helpful introduction to the debate and its significance. Together these five scholars conduct readers on a stimulating and mind-stretching journey into one of the most controversial and challenging areas of theology today.

Our Deepest Desires: How the Christian Story Fulfills Human Aspirations

Philosopher and apologist Greg Ganssle argues that our widely shared human aspirations are best understood and explained in light of the Christian story. With grace and insight, Ganssle explains how the good news of Jesus Christ makes sense of―and fulfills―our deepest desires. It is only in the particular claims of the Christian faith, he argues, that our universal human aspirations can find fulfillment and our restless hearts will be at peace.

Philosophical Essays on Divine Causation

This book discusses various aspects of God’s causal activity. Traditional theology has long held that God acts in the world and interrupts the normal course of events by performing special acts. Although the tradition is unified in affirming that God does create, conserve, and act, there is much disagreement about the details of divine activity. The chapters in this book fruitfully explore these disagreements about divine causation.

The Apologetics Study Bible

The Apologetics Study Bible helps today’s Christians better understand, defend, and proclaim their beliefs in this age of increasing moral and spiritual relativism. More than one-hundred key questions and articles placed throughout the volume about faith and science prompt a rewarding study experience at every reading. Highlights of this thinking person’s edition of God’s Word include the full text of the popular HCSB translation, an introduction to each Bible book focusing on its inherent elements of apologetics, and profiles of historic Christian apologists from Justin Martyr to C.S. Lewis.

Thinking About God: First Steps in Philosophy

Can we really think about God? Can we prove God’s existence? What about faith? Are there good reasons to believe in the Christian God? Can we avoid thinking about God? The real problem, says philosopher Gregory E. Ganssle, is not whether we can think about God, but whether we will think well or poorly about God. In the first part of this book Ganssle lays the groundwork for clear and careful thinking, providing us an introductory guide to doing philosophy. In the second part Ganssle then takes us through the process of thinking well about God in particular. In the final part Ganssle helps us thread our way through questions like: What is God like? What can God do? What can God know? How does God communicate? If you’re looking for your first book for thinking clearly and carefully about God, then you’ll appreciate the good thinking found in this book.