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Abstract: Aaron Rizzieri has argued that the problem of divine hiddenness is exacerbated in any theistic tradition which entails that people may experience negative afterlife consequences engendered by a failure to know God exists and relate to God properly. (2021) James Beilby has countered by suggesting an afterlife choice model according to which everyone will have a robust opportunity post-mortem to freely choose to be in relationship with the divine. (2023) I defend Rizzieri’s position against this counterargument on the grounds that it is implausible that everyone will retain their libertarian freedom to be in relationship with the divine no matter what experiences they have had and attitudes they have cultivated in this life. PubDate: 2025-03-25
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Abstract: Is hopeful universalism a coherent belief for a Christian to hold' Recent criticism of the view has suggested it may not be. Most incisively, Michael Rea has highlighted how hopeful universalism seems to require a Christian to desire a state of affairs “that conflicts with what she believes to be the perfectly good will of God.” While there are versions of the view which are guilty of exactly what Rea alleges, it is not necessary for the hopeful universalist to hold to them. Particularly, hopeful universalism can be understood to consist in a fittingness claim about one’s understanding of God’s will which requires no desires in conflict with said will. So, in this paper I argue for such a position, here termed “fittingness hopeful universalism” (FHU). I begin by sketching Rea’s critique to outline what we aim to avoid here. Next, I offer a brief survey of universalism’s place in theological history to highlight why Christians might prefer hopeful universalism to a more dogmatic version of the view. I then construct FHU to demonstrate one way Christians can avoid the problem Rea highlights while heeding historical theological norms. Finally, I anticipate and respond to two potential objections. Namely, that universalism and non-universalism cannot be co-equal goods, and that the co-equality of universalism and non-universalism would undermine divine goodness. PubDate: 2025-03-24
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Abstract: This article examines the importance of the historical fall and doctrine of original sin in context of allegorical doctrines of the fall and sin. The article provides a moderate defense of a historic fall by critiquing what I shall dub Allegorical Accounts. Contemporary Allegorical Accounts of the fall and original sin deny that any historical fall of our human ancestors occurred. These accounts also affirm that all individuals require Christ’s atoning work for sin, freely fall into sin, and are not created sinful or determined to fall into sin. I challenge the Allegorical Account. Given any Allegorical Account’s claims about the fall and original sin, I propose a set of jointly inconsistent propositions which I label as Atonement for All, Good Creation, and Time-Gap. If one assumes the Allegorical Account, any two propositions of the set will imply the falsity of the third. However, each of the three propositions is plausible. I examine possible modifications to avoid the inconsistency or conduct damage control—each of these is found wanting. Since these propositions are jointly inconsistent when one assumes an Allegorical Account, the article suggests that non-Allegorical Accounts of the fall and original sin may be theologically more important than recently regarded. PubDate: 2025-03-19
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Abstract: Ryan Mullins and Joseph Schmid have recently advanced what they dub the “aloneness argument” against divine simplicity. Their argument assumes both that God is omniscient and is free not to create, and they deduce from these (and some other allegedly plausible premises) that divine simplicity is false. In this paper, I respond to their argument. I begin by summarizing a recent characterization of divine simplicity proffered by Eleonore Stump, and then I explain Mullins’s and Schmid’s aloneness argument against divine simplicity. In the next section, I argue that one of the premises of the aloneness argument is plausibly false if divine simplicity is true, and so the aloneness argument faces a dire dialectical issue. Finally, I answer some potential criticisms of my response. PubDate: 2025-03-10
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Abstract: When, if ever, is it reasonable to claim that an absurd event is a miracle' Hume famously says that claims like these are never reasonable. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, says that one is free to do so whenever one can feel an event’s divine origins, but confines himself to these subjective assessments and not claims about the actual causal processes leading to the event itself. In this paper, I argue that there are some cases where particular believers, using abductive reasoning in traditionally induction-reliant objectivist accounts of miracle recognition, can reasonably accept claims about the miraculosity of particular events. I show that this account responds to the problems faced bothby the induction-reliant objectivists and the subjectivists, and that it also more closely corresponds to how we actually reason about claims to miraculosity. PubDate: 2025-03-07
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Abstract: Noah McKay (2023) has proposed a novel argument against naturalism. He argues that while theism can explain our ability to arrive at a body of moral beliefs that are generally accurate and complete’, naturalism fails to do so. He argues that naturalism has only social and biological grounds to account for our moral beliefs, which means that naturalism can only claim pragmatic value for our moral beliefs. McKay dedicates his paper to arguing against naturalism. This paper will focus on theism and examine whether theism can explain what naturalism cannot. Theism could rely on guided evolution or the miraculous intervention of God. In contrast to naturalism, theism has revelatory and supernatural grounds for our moral beliefs. This paper will demonstrate some of the challenges that these grounds would encounter. Finally, McKay’s argument implies a dichotomy between unguided evolution and theism, which rests on a problematic assumption about evolutionary theory; by abandoning the assumption, the dichotomy also dissolves. PubDate: 2025-03-04
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Abstract: When faced with the charge that a given concept of God is contradictory, the standard move among philosophers and theologians has been to try to explain away the contradiction and show that the concept of God in question is consistent. This has to do, of course, with the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). Another option, which has recently generated interest among logicians and analytic philosophers of religion, is to reject such a move as unnecessary and defend what might be called the contradictory God thesis. To be sure, something close to that can be found in philosophers such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas and Nicolaus de Cusa. However, it is only recently that this approach has gained momentum, certainly driven by the contemporary advance of dialetheism and glut theoretic approaches in general, and paraconsistent logic. Needless to say, a standard move among defenders of the contradictory God thesis is to challenge the LNC. The argumentation, however, is seldomly framed in conceptual terms. Instead, it is mostly framed in ontological terms, as God being a contradictory entity. From this perspective, the contradictory God thesis is the thesis that God is a contradictory object. My goal in this paper is to provide a conceptual assessment of the discussion surrounding the contradictory God thesis. To achieve this, I make use of a general and hopefully non-controversial meta-theory of concepts and adopt a semantic approach rather than a metaphysical one. Within this framework, I address the following questions: What are the different ways we can understand the contradictory God thesis' What grounds are there for rejecting a contradictory concept of God' What standard moves are available to defend oneself from such criticisms and how do they relate to the LNC' What challenges do they present' As a secondary goal, the paper introduces a novel defense of the contradictory God thesis, drawing on a specific interpretation of the theology of the 16th-century Indian thinker Jīva Gosvāmī, which avoids the need to challenge the LNC. I term this approach ‘non-dialetheic mystical contradictory theism.’ PubDate: 2025-01-31
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Abstract: Kant’s rational religion has been described as a failure because his idea of redemption contains contradictory appeals to human responsibility and divine assistance. For example, John Hare has argued that Kant cannot explain how human beings can bridge a moral gap between an ideal state of virtue and an imperfect disposition. In this paper, I defend Kant from this criticism, arguing that his rational religion is coherent: human agency and divine assistance may each contribute to redemption without inconsistency. I argue that divine grace may be operative for Kant through the gradual process of character formation, in addition to the instantaneous change of heart, providing an alternative explanation of how the moral gap may be bridged. I compare this account with Erasmus’s account of free will and divine grace, arguing that each account employs a similar strategy and structure to explain the operation of grace. Though Kant’s position is not identical with historical (orthodox) Christianity, he holds that reason is necessarily religious in orientation and must remain open to the possibility that divine grace is necessary for moral improvement. PubDate: 2025-01-20
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Abstract: Many contemporary philosophers have presumed that the doctrine of evil as privation simply means that there can be no evils that count as positive realities. However, this interpretation is naive, and does not cohere well with the Christian theological tradition, especially the work of Augustine, who is widely regarded as the touchstone proponent of the doctrine. The goal of this paper is to clarify the more nuanced, teleological meaning of the doctrine of “evil as privation,” as well as to establish a useful conceptual division between genuine evils of privation (“depraved privations”) and harmless privations (“mere privations”). Additionally, I discuss four challenges to evil as privation: that it entails the inherent evil of all creatures, that the normative property “evil” is itself a positive reality, that it makes no sense to speak of non-existence as a deprivation, and that any attempt to refine the doctrine renders it trivial and vacuous. Finally, I close out the paper by showing that there is still a fifth, unresolved problem facing the more nuanced, teleological version of the doctrine: that it requires us to make significant recalibrations to very tender-hearted and loving moral intuitions. PubDate: 2025-01-05
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Abstract: The dominant explanation of the origins of religion in the nineteenth century was what we will call the Positivist Theory of religion, according to which religion is understood as form of primitive science, falsely based on an animistic method of explanation of events. Recently, this theory has been revived under the guise of evolutionary psychology and has arguably become the dominant naturalistic explanation of religion today. This essay examines this new form of animism based on the hypothesis of an ‘agency detector’ in the human mind that causes us to believe in gods and spirits. The essay argues that the new positivist theory of religion suffers from all the flaws of the earlier one as well as additional problems of its own. PubDate: 2024-12-27
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Abstract: Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion has traditionally been grounded in non-cognitivism about religious belief. This paper shows that the Wittgensteinian tradition has wrongly neglected a significant movement towards cognitivism in Wittgenstein’s later writings. The argument proceeds on the basis of two main claims. First, Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy, as expressed in his Philosophical Investigations, clearly favours cognitivism over non-cognitivism with regard to certain linguistic facts about ordinary religious discourse. Second, during the last decade of his life Wittgenstein’s view of religious belief actually underwent a significant shift in the direction of cognitivism, which finds its most striking expression in the analogy he draws to the ‘honest religious thinker’. PubDate: 2024-12-09
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Abstract: Animal suffering seems to undermine several well-known traditional theistic responses to the problem(s) of evil, such as the appeal to the Fall of Humanity or to human free will. The soul-making theodicy is also inapplicable to non-human animals, if it should turn out that they do not have souls capable of being improved by suffering. Recently, however, it has been suggested by Trent Dougherty that when the soul-making theodicy is combined with the Adams-Chisholm notion of the defeat of evil and other hypotheses regarding the animal afterlife, such a theodicy can overcome the challenge posed by animal suffering. We highlight problems for this strategy, showing that it ultimately keeps the fundamental reason for suffering obscure and requires the addition of several auxiliary hypotheses, thus offering no epistemic improvement over generic Skeptical Theism. We also consider the strategy in the light of a newer argument known as the Expanded Problem of Animal Suffering (EPAS), showing that this puts additional strain on Dougherty’s theodicy. PubDate: 2024-11-27
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Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Are there basic religious certainties' That is, are there any beliefs which religious people legitimately hold without the need for rational justification' The question has been tackled, in different ways, by both Hinge Epistemologists and by Reformed Epistemologists. For the former, discussion has revolved around very general religious beliefs such as ‘God exists’ (e.g. Pritchard, 2000; Helm, 2001; Hoyt, 2007; Ariso, 2020). Reformed Epistemologists, like Alvin Plantinga, argue that Christian theism and particular Christian beliefs are ‘properly basic’ in that ‘I don’t believe them on the basis of any other propositions’ (Plantinga, 1981, p. 42). In this paper I want to do two things. First, I give an account of what basic religious certainty is from a Wittgensteinian, Hinge Epistemology point of view. On this account I will argue that the clearest examples of basic religious certainties are found in local, historical and more narrow expressions of religious belief, as opposed to the very general acontextual religious beliefs usually discussed. Secondly, I challenge the Reformed Epistemological notion that Christian doctrine can be ‘properly basic’, mainly by showing that the New Testament writers did not treat very general religious beliefs, such as ‘God exists’ or God is good’, as properly basic in either the Hinge or Reformed Epistemological ways. I will conclude by drawing out some implications for contemporary Christian epistemology. PubDate: 2024-11-02
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