Rik Peels

This paper provides a defense of the thesis that God has a sense of humor. First, I sketch the four main theories of what it is to have a sense of humor that we find in the literature. Next, I argue that three arguments against the thesis that God has a sense of humor fail to convince. Then, I consider what one might take to be four biblical reasons to think that God has a sense of humor and argue that none of them are convincing. Subsequently, I give three philosophical reasons to think that God (if he exists) has a sense of humor, that is, reasons that any person who grasps the concept of God should be willing to embrace. These arguments differ in strength, but I argue that, jointly, they provide us with sufficient reason to think that God has a sense of humor. Finally, I spell out three implications of the idea that God has a sense of humor.

The main conclusion of Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science? is that we should all be atheists. Remarkably, however, the book contains no argument whatsoever for atheism. Philipse defends the argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddenness, but those arguments count only against an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God, not against just any god. He also defends the claim that there cannot be any bodiless spirits, but, of course, not all religions take their gods to be bodiless. However, because his main tar- get of criticism is monotheism and adherents of monotheism usually claim that God is a bodiless spirit, this paper discusses Philipse’s arguments against the existence of a bodiless spirit. I argue that his three main claims about religious belief in a bodiless spirit are false. First, contrary to what he says, there is good reason to think that the expression “bodiless spirit” is meaningful. Among other things, the Wittgensteinian semantic theory of psychological attribute ascription on which his argument relies turns out to be untenable. Second, Philipse’s thesis that the existence of a bodiless spirit is impossible is also problematic. We can properly use the word person for bodiless spirits. Also, an attribute such as presence or omnipresence can be understood metaphorically without the definition of “God “thereby losing too much meaning. And we do not need any criterion for diachronic personal identity of bodiless spirits; such identity may very well be a primitive fact. Third and finally, there is no reason to think that the existence of a bodiless spirit is improbable. The fact that science has discovered a dependence relation between mental states and brain states and the fact that science has never been able to detect bodiless spirits provide no reason to think otherwise.

I argue that scientism in general is best understood as the thesis that the boundaries of the natural sciences should be expanded in order to include academic disciplines or realms of life that are widely considered not to belong to the realm of science. However, every adherent and critic of scientism should make clear which of the many varieties of scientism she adheres to or criticizes. In doing so, she should specify whether she is talking about (a) academic or universal scientism, (b) reductive, methodological, epistemological, ontological, moral, or existential, scientism, (c) full or partial scientism, (d) strong or weak scientism, and (e) in the case of moral and existential scientism: replacement or illusion scientism. The strongest version of scientism one could defend is a conjunction of the following theses: strong full epistemological scientism, strong full ontological scientism, strong full Illusion-moral scientism, strong Illusion-existential scientism, and strong full reductive scientism. After a detailed discussion of each of the main varieties of scientism and their interrelations, the paper provides a conceptual map, consisting of two figures, which displays the main varieties of scientism and the relations that obtain between them, primarily, those of implication and mutual exclusion.

The fundamental argument against scientism This paper presents and discusses a major worry for scientism, which I take to be the view that only natural science (reliably) delivers rational belief. The argument is that natural science itself is, in some sense of the word, based on the fundament of the deliverances of non-scientific sources of belief, such as auditory perception, metaphysical intuition, logical intuition, and memory, so that if we were to discard these non-scientific sources of belief, we would have to discard natural science as well. After spelling out what I mean by ‘scientism’, I lay out the Fundamental Argument in detail. Subsequently, I discuss three objections that might be leveled against the argument, namely that scientism suffers merely from a local rather than a global basing problem, that the results of natural science are confirmed or repeatable, whereas the deliverances of non-scientific belief sources are not, and that the results of natural science are inter-subjective, whereas the deliverances of non-scientific are not. I argue that each of these objections is unconvincing. I then consider two more sophisticated versions of scientism that are meant to sidestep the Fundamental Argument. On Scientism 2.0, only natural science and those non-scientific sources of belief that are presupposed by natural science deliver rational belief. On Scientism 3.0, only those propositions can be rationally believed that can in principle be known on the basis of natural science. I argue that both of these more sophisticated versions of scientism either fail to escape from the Fundamental Argument or become trivial and uninteresting claims.

In this paper I respond to Gunter Zimmermann's article on doubt and faith in God that was published in this journal last year, by offering some criticisms of his views and elaborating on certain issues that Zimmermann leaves nearly or entirely untouched. First, I argue that Zimmermann's analysis of doxastic doubt is incomplete. Next, I defend the thesis that whether some specific doxastic doubt is compatible with someone's faith depends in at least four regards on the person who has that doubt. Subsequently, I champion the view that some so-called fiducial doubts are compatible with faith in God, whereas certain others are not. Also, I explain why by its very nature having some fiducial doubt entails having some doxastic doubt. Finally, I deal with some biblical passages in order to show why they do not preclude the possibility of someone's having faith and at the same time having certain fiducial doubts.

In a recent paper, Dennis Whitcomb argues that omniscience is impossible. But if there cannot be any omniscient beings, then God, at least as traditionally conceived, does not exist. The objection is, roughly, that the thesis that there is an omniscient being, in conjunction with some principles about grounding, such as its transitivity and irreflexivity, entails a contradiction. Since each of these principles is highly plausible, divine omniscience has to go. In this article, I argue that Whitcomb's argument, if sound, has several unacceptable consequences. Among others, it implies that nobody knows that someone has knowledge, that, for most of us, all of our beliefs are false, and that there are no truths. This reductio all by itself provides sufficient reason to reject the argument. However, I also provide a diagnosis of where precisely the argument goes wrong. I argue that Whitcomb's crucial notion of grounding actually covers two distinct relations and that the principle of transitivity is true only for cases in which one of these relations holds rather than both of them

This paper assesses five main empirical scientific arguments against the reliability of belief formation on the basis of introspecting phenomenal states. After defining ‘reliability’ and ‘introspection’, I discuss five arguments to the effect that phenomenal states are more elusive than we usually think: the argument on the basis of differences in introspective reports from differences in introspective measurements; the argument from differences in reports about whether or not dreams come in colours; the argument from the absence of a correlation between visual imagery ability and the performance on certain cognitive tasks; the argument from our unawareness of our capacity of echolocation; the argument from inattentional blindness and change blindness. I argue that the experiments on which these arguments are based do not concern belief formation on the basis of introspection in the first place or fail to show that it is unreliable, even when limited to introspection of phenomenal states.

This edited collection focuses on the moral and social dimensions of ignorance—an undertheorized category in analytic philosophy. Contributors address such issues as the relation between ignorance and deception, ignorance as a moral excuse, ignorance as a legal excuse, and the relation between ignorance and moral character. In the _moral_ realm, ignorance is sometimes considered as an excuse; some specific kind of ignorance seems to be implied by a moral character; and ignorance is closely related to moral risk. Ignorance has certain _social_ dimensions as well: it has been claimed to be the engine of science; it seems to be entailed by privacy and secrecy; and it is widely thought to constitute a legal excuse in certain circumstances. Together, these contributions provide a sustained inquiry into the nature of ignorance and the pivotal role it plays in the moral and social domains.

In this article I argue that Alston’s recent meta-epistemological approach in terms of epistemic desiderata is not as epistemically plural as he claims it to be. After some preliminary remarks, I briefly recapitulate Alston’s epistemic desiderata approach. Next, I distinguish two ways in which one might consider truth to be an epistemic desideratum. Subsequently, I argue that only one truth-conducive desideratum can count as an epistemic desideratum. After this, I attempt to show that none of the higher-order desiderata that are thought to be favorable to the discrimination and formation of true beliefs are genuinely epistemic desiderata. A strict interpretation of ‘epistemic desideratum’ leads to a rejection of all deontological desiderata as well. Finally, features of systems of beliefs, such as coherence and understanding, cannot count as epistemic desiderata either. In the end only two candidate-desiderata can count as epistemic, one of which is logically trivial. In the epilogue, I offer some suggestions as to how Alston’s epistemic desiderata approach should be amended in order to make it epistemically plural.

William Alston has argued that the so-called deontological conception of epistemic justification, on which epistemic justification is to be spelled out in terms of blame, responsibility, and obligations, is untenable. The basic idea of the argument is that this conception is untenable because we lack voluntary control over our beliefs and, therefore, cannot have any obligations to hold certain beliefs. If this is convincing, however, the argument threatens the very idea of doxastic responsibility. For, how can we ever be responsible for our beliefs if we lack control over them? Several philosophers have argued that the idea that we bear responsibility for our beliefs can be saved, because absence of voluntary control over our beliefs is perfectly compatible with having obligations to hold particular beliefs. With others, I call this view ‘doxastic compatibilism’. It comes in two varieties. On the first variety, doxastic obligations do not require any kind of doxastic control whatsoever. I argue that this variety of doxastic compatibilism fails because it confuses doxastic responsibility with other closely related phenomena. On the second variety, doxastic obligations do not require voluntary doxastic control, but only compatibilist doxastic control (roughly, reason-responsiveness) and we do in fact have such control. I grant that we have such control, but also argue that having such control is insufficient for bearing doxastic responsibility. The plausibility of the examples put forward by doxastic compatibilists in support of the claim that it is sufficient for doxastic responsibility derives from the fact that in these examples, the subjects have control over factors that influence what they believe rather than control over those beliefs themselves

In this paper I argue that the effects of sin for our cognition of God primarily consist in a lack of knowledge by acquaintance of God and the relevant ensuing propositional knowledge. In the course of my argument, I make several conceptual distinctions and offer analyses of 1Cor 13:9-12 and Rom 1:18-23. As it turns out, we have ample reason to think that sin has had and still has profound consequences for our cognition of God, but there is no reason to think that sin has taken away all knowledge of God or that sin has resulted in a loss of specific cognitive faculties that are oriented toward knowledge of God.

Introduction: Prinz’s SentimentalismMany ethicists claim that one cannot derive an ought from an is. In others words, they think that one cannot derive a statement that has prescriptive force from purely descriptive statements. This thesis plays a crucial role in many theoretical and practical ethical arguments. Since, according to many, David Hume advocated a view along these lines, this thesis has been called ‘Hume’s Law’. In this paper, I adopt this widespread terminology, whether or not Hume did indeed take this position. There are some notable exceptions among philosophers, such as John SearleSee John R. Searle, “How to Derive “Ought” from “Is”,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1, (1964), pp. 43–58. and Arthur Prior,See Arthur N. Prior, “The Autonomy of Ethics,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 38, No. 3, (1960), pp. 199–206. but most philosophers have embraced Hume’s Law. Recently, however, Hume’s Law has come under attack. In his book The Emotional Construction of Mor