Michael Rea

My goal in this paper is to show that naturalists cannot reasonably endorse moral realism. My argument will come in two parts. The first part aims to show that any plausible and naturalistically acceptable argument in favor of belief in objective moral properties will appeal in part to simplicity considerations (broadly construed)—and this regardless of whether moral properties are reducible to non-moral properties. The second part argues for the conclusion that appeals to simplicity justify belief in moral properties only if either those properties are not objective or something like theism is true. Thus, if my argument is sound, naturalists can reasonably accept moral realism only if they are prepared to accept something like theism. But, as will become clear, naturalists can reasonably accept theism or something like it only if belief in some such doctrine is justified by the methods of science. For present purposes, I’ll assume (what I think virtually every naturalist will grant) that belief in theism and relevantly similar doctrines is not justified by the methods of science. Thus, I will conclude that naturalists cannot reasonably accept moral realism.

The essay is divided into three parts. In the first part, I try to get clear about what we might mean in calling a text authoritative. In the second part, I draw distinctions between different things that we might mean by saying that a text is truthful. My goal in both of these parts is to arrive at some general conclusions about texts, rather than specific conclusions about the Bible. Consequently, I try to refrain from making assumptions about (e.g.) biblical interpretation or about the truth of particular biblical texts. Indeed, for much of the discussion, the Bible is not even directly in view. In the third part I draw out some of the implications of the discussions in the first two parts for the question of how textual authority and textual truth are connected to one another. I also comment on the significance of these conclusions for discussions about the relation between biblical authority and biblical inerrancy.

According to Hudson, belief in hyperspace can provide the resources for buttressing one of two traditional responses to what might be called the Best World Problem. Moreoever, if he is right, it turns out that an unadvertised side-benefit is that belief in hyperspace provides an answer to an argument for atheism that arises in connection with the Best World Problem and that has received a great deal of recent attention. In this paper, however, I shall argue that belief in hyperspace in fact provides neither of these benefits. I'll begin by briefly sketching the Best World Problem and the argument for atheism that arises in connection with it; I'll then explain who belief in hyperspace is supposed to help solve the Best World Problem and to answer the atheistic argument. I will then argue--in the familiar tradition of trying to show respect and affection for one's friends by objecting vigorously to their arguments and conclusions--that belief in hyperspace in fact offers no help with respect to either the Best World Problem or the atheistic argument, and that even if it did, this fact would not count as reason to believe in hyperspace.

In "Evil and the Justice of God", N.T. Wright presses the point that attempting to solve the philosophical problem of evil is an immature response to the existence of evil--a response that belittles the real problem of evil, which is just the fact that evil is bad and needs to be dealt with. As you might expect, I am not inclined to endorse this sort of sweeping indictment of the entire field of research on the philosophical problem of evil. (I sort of doubt that Wright really meant to either.) But I do think that there is a kernel of truth in what I take to be Wright's fundamental objection to attempts to solve the philosophical problem of evil. In the first section of what follows, I will try briefly to explain why. I will then go on to argue that, despite this fact, certain efforts at solving the problem of evil avoid Wright's objection. Indeed, drawing on recent work by Elenore Stump, I will argue that one perfectly legitimate way to try to solve the philosophical problem of evil is to follow precisely what seems to be the main piece of advice in "Evil and the Justice of God": namely, to look more seriously than we have at the attitudes taken toward evil by human authors of and characters in the Bible, and to attend more carefully to what the Bible says about how God deals with evil.

The most comprehensive text in its field, this anthology includes 74 articles in 9 areas of philosophy of religion: The Concept of God; Traditional Arguments for the Existence of God; Religious Experience; The Problem of Evil; Miracles, Death and Immortality; Faith and Reason; Science, Religion, and Evolution; and Religious Pluralism. The arrangement of the articles and the introductions which accompany them help students place the readings in their historical or contemporary context, and to ensure that students can be exposed to a spectrum of viewpoints.

Christian philosophers and theologians have long been concerned with the question of how to reconcile their belief in three fully divine Persons with their commitment to monotheism. The most popular strategy for doing this—the Social Trinitarian strategy—argues that, though the divine Persons are in no sense the same God, monotheism is secured by certain relations that obtain among them. It is argued that if the Social Trinitarian understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity is correct, then Christianity is not interestingly different from the polytheistic Amun-Re theology of Egypt’s New Kingdom period. Thus, Social Trinitarianism should be classified as a version of polytheism rather than monotheism.

Metaphysics: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to the philosophical study of the world and universe in which we live. Concerned with questions about reality, existence, time, identity and change, metaphysics has long fascinated people but to the uninitiated some of the issues and problems can appear very complex. In this lively and lucid book, Michael Rea examines and explains key questions in the study of metaphysics such as: • Can two things be in the same place at the same time? • Do creatures of fiction exist? • Are human beings free? • Is time travel possible? • Is there just one world or many worlds? With a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading, the book considers key philosophical arguments around Metaphysics, making this an ideal starting point for anyone seeking a full introduction to the debates both within and about metaphysics.

For over two decades, the philosophical literature on divine hiddenness has been concerned with just one problem about divine hiddenness that arises out of one very particular concept of God. The problem - I'll call it the Schellenberg problem - has J. L. Schellenberg as both its inventor and its most prominent defender. The concept of God in question construes God as a perfect heavenly parent, and seems to be the product of perfect being theology deployed within the constraints imposed by modern ideals of parenthood. In this paper, I argue that the Schellenberg problem is an attack on a straw deity. More specifically, I argue that Schellenberg's argument against the existence of God depends on certain theological claims that are not commitments of traditional Christian theology and that would, furthermore, be repudiated by many of the most important and influential theologians in the Christian tradition. I close with some very brief remarks about the implications of this conclusion for what I take to be the real import of the Schellenberg problem.

A bronze statue is a lump of bronze – or so it might appear. But appearances are not always to be trusted, and this one is notoriously problematic. To see why, imagine a bronze statue (perhaps a statue of David) and ask yourself: Which lump of bronze is the statue? Presumably, it is the lump that makes up the statue (or, as we say, the lump that constitutes the statue). After all, why should the statue be any other lump of bronze? But if that is right, if the statue is the lump of bronze that constitutes it, then why can the lump of bronze survive being melted down whereas the statue it constitutes cannot? It seems that in fact the bronze statue is not the lump of bronze that constitutes it, since the statue and the lump of bronze have different persistence conditions. But then is it some other lump of bronze? Is it a lump of bronze at all? These questions are troubling; they appear to have no easy answers.

We lay out the fatalist’s argument, making sure to clarify which dialectical moves are available to the libertarian. We then offer a more robust presentation of Ockhamism, responding to obvious objections and teasing out the implications of the view. At this point, we discuss presentism and eternalism in more detail. We then present our argument for the claim that the libertarian cannot take Ockham’s way out of the fatalism argument unless she rejects presentism. Finally, we consider and dispense with objections to our argument. In the end, it ought to be clear that the libertarian must make a choice between Ockham’s way out and presentism.

Philosophy of religion comprises philosophical reflection on a wide range of religious and religiously significant phenomena: religious belief, doctrine and practice in general; the phenomenology and cognitive significance of religious experience; the authority and reliability of religious testimony; the significance of religious diversity and disagreement; the relationship between religion (or God, or the gods) and morality; the doctrines, practices and modes of cognition distinctive to particular religious traditions; and so on. It is as old as philosophy itself and has been a standard part of Western philosophy in every period (see Religion, history of philosophy of). Since the latter half of the twentieth century, there has been a great growth of interest in it, and the range of topics that philosophers of religion have considered has expanded considerably.

Co-location is compatible with the doctrine of microphysical supervenience. Microphysical supervenience involves intrinsic qualitative properties that supervene on microphysical structures. Two different objects, such as Socrates and the lump of tissue of which he is constituted, can be co-located objects that supervene on different sets of properties. Some of the properties are shared, but others, such as the human-determining properties or the lump-determining properties, supervene only on one object or the other. Therefore, properties at the same location can be arranged so as to constitute more than one object at the same time.

Over the past sixty years, within the analytic tradition of philosophy, there has been a significant revival of interest in the philosophy of religion. More recently, philosophers of religion have turned in a more self-consciously interdisciplinary direction, with special focus on topics that have traditionally been the provenance of systematic theologians in the Christian tradition. The present volumes Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology, volumes 1 and 2 aim to bring together some of the most important essays on six central topics in recent philosophical theology. Volume 1 collects essays on three distinctively Christian doctrines: trinity, incarnation, and atonement. Volume 2 focuses on three topics that arise in all of the major theistic religions: providence, resurrection, and scripture.

This paper defends Mereological Universalism(the thesis that, for any set S of disjoint objects, there is an object that the members of S compose. Universalism is unpalatable to many philosophers because it entails that if there are such things as my left tennis shoe, W. V. Quine, and the Taj Mahal, then there is another object that those three things compose. This paper presents and criticizes Peter van Inwagen's argument against Universalism and then presents a new argument in favor of Universalism. It turns out that the most reasonable way to resist the argument for Universalism is to deny the existence of artifacts; thus, if we believe in artifacts, we have no real choice other than to embrace Universalism.

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were married on July 29, 2000 and divorced on October 2, 2005. If I correctly understand the position defended in Thomas Sattig’s The Language and Reality of Time, this fact implies that every instantaneous region of space occupied by Brad between those dates is married to some instantaneous region occupied by Jen. Yes, the regions are married, and they are distinct from Brad and Jen. Moreover, some of them are cheating on the regions to which they are married. To their discredit, they are having affairs with regions occupied by Angelina Jolie. (Shame on those regions.)

There are five individually plausible and jointly incompatible assumptions underlying four familiar puzzles about material constitution. The problem of material constitution just is the fact that these five assumptions are both plausible and incompatible. I will begin by providing a very general statement of the problem. I will present the five assumptions and provide a short argument showing how they conflict with one another. Then, in subsequent sections, I will go on to show how these assumptions underlie each of the four puzzles. I will conclude by providing an exhaustive taxonomy of possible solutions to the problem.

The doctrine of the Trinity maintains that there are exactly three divine Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) but only one God. The philosophical problem raised by this doctrine is well known. On the one hand, the doctrine seems clearly to imply that the divine Persons are numerically distinct. How else could they be ’three’ rather than one? On the other hand, it seems to imply that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are identical. If each Person is divine, how else could there be exactly ’one’ God? But the divine Persons can’t be both distinct and identical. Thus, the doctrine appears to be incoherent. Some try to solve this problem by appeal to the view that identity is sortal-relative. In this paper, I argue that this strategy is unsuccessful as a stand-alone solution to the problem of the Trinity.

In World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism, I argued that there is an important sense in which naturalism’s current status as methodological orthodoxy is without rational foundation, and I argued that naturalists must give up two views that many of them are inclined to hold dear—realism about material objects and materialism. In a review recently published in Faith and Philosophy, Dale Jacquette alleges that my arguments in World Without Design are directed mainly against strawmen and that I have neglected to discuss at least one formulation of naturalism that straightforwardly addresses my main objections. In this reply, I show that these and other objections raised by Jacquette are unsound and, in fact, rest on egregious misrepresentations of the book.

The question raised by this volume is “How successful is naturalism?” The question presupposes that we already know what naturalism is and what counts as success. But, as anyone familiar with the literature on naturalism knows, both suppositions are suspect. To answer the question, then, we must first say what we mean in this context by both ‘naturalism’ and ‘success’. I’ll start with ‘success’. I will then argue that, by the standard of measurement that I shall identify here, naturalism is an utter failure.

In this paper I provide a metaphysical account of the incarnation that starts from substantive assumptions about the nature of natures and about the metaphysics of the Trinity and develops in light of these a story about the relations among the elements involved in the incarnation. Central to the view I will describe are two features of Aristotle's metaphysics, though I do not claim that my own development of these ideas is anything of which Aristotle himself would have approved: (i) a hylomorphic understanding of material objects; (ii) a doctrine of numerical sameness without identity; and (iii) the view that the nature of a thing can appropriately be identified with its form. These ideas, along with other important aspects of the metaphysical framework with which I shall be working, are laid out in the first five sections below, followed in the sixth section by a brief sketch of the account of the Trinity that Jeff Brower and I have presented in detail elsewhere. In the final section, I present my account of the incarnation.