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3046The logical problem of evil: Mackie and PlantingaIn Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 19-33. 2013.J.L. Mackie’s version of the logical problem of evil is a failure, as even he came to recognize. Contrary to current mythology, however, its failure was not established by Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defense. That’s because a defense is successful only if it is not reasonable to refrain from believing any of the claims that constitute it, but it is reasonable to refrain from believing the central claim of Plantinga’s Free Will Defense, namely the claim that, possibly, every essence suffers from …Read more
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625Markan FaithInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (1-2): 31-60. 2017.According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament may seem to favor doxasticism o…Read more
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1076On Whitcomb's Grounding Argument for AtheismFaith and Philosophy 30 (2): 198-204. 2013.Dennis Whitcomb argues that there is no God on the grounds that God is supposed to be omniscient, yet nothing could be omniscient due to the nature of grounding. We give a formally identical argument that concludes that one of the present co-authors does not exist. Since he does exist, Whitcomb’s argument is unsound. But why is it unsound? That is a difficult question. We venture two answers. First, one of the grounding principles that the argument relies on is false. Second, the argument equivo…Read more
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3240Infallibilism and Gettier’s LegacyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (2). 2003.Infallibilism is the view that a belief cannot be at once warranted and false. In this essay we assess three nonpartisan arguments for infallibilism, arguments that do not depend on a prior commitment to some substantive theory of warrant. Three premises, one from each argument, are most significant: (1) if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then the Gettier Problem cannot be solved; (2) if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then its warrant can be transferred to an accidenta…Read more
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2144Was Jesus Mad, Bad, or God?... Or Merely Mistaken?Faith and Philosophy 21 (4): 456-479. 2004.Reprinted in Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology, Volume 1: Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, Oxford 2009, ed. Michael Rea. A popular argument for the divinity of Jesus goes like this. Jesus claimed to be divine, but if his claim was false, then either he was insane (mad) or lying (bad), both of which are very unlikely; so, he was divine. I present two objections to this argument. The first, the dwindling probabilities objection, contends that even if we make generous probability assign…Read more
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528The Problem of Evil (review)The Christian Scholar's Review. 1996.This is a review of Michael Peterson's The Problem of Evil
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775Two Peas in a Single Polytheistic Pod: Richard Swinburne and John HickJournal of Philosophical Research 41 (Supplement): 17-32. 2016.A descriptive polytheist thinks there are at least two gods. John Hick and Richard Swinburne are descriptive polytheists. In this respect, they are like Thomas Aquinas and many other theists. What sets Swinburne and Hick apart from Aquinas, however, is that unlike him they are normative polytheists. That is, Swinburne and Hick think that it is right that we, or at least some of us, worship more than one god. However, the evidence available to me shows that only Swinburne, and not Hick, is a cult…Read more
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7BonJour's ‘Basic Antifoundationalist Argument’ and the Doctrine of the GivenSouthern Journal of Philosophy 36 (2): 163-177. 2010.
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135TheodicyIn Kelly Clark (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, Broadview. 2008.This paper summarizes a version of the argument from evil for atheism and then assesses several theodicies, including those that appeal to punishment, evil as a necessary counterpart for good, free will, natural evil as natural consequence, natural law, higher-order goods, and the conjunctive "Big Reason" including all the above and more beside.
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835TrinityThe Routledge Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.This 9,000+ word entry briefly assesses five models of the Trinity, those espoused by (i) Richard Swinburne, (ii) William Lane Craig, (iii) Brian Leftow, (iv) Jeff Brower and Michael Rea, and (v) Peter van Inwagen.
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2241On Hume's Philosophical Case against MiraclesIn Christopher Bernard (ed.), God Matters: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, Longman Publications. 2003.According to the Christian religion, Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again”. I take it that this rising again—the Resurrection of Jesus, as it’s sometimes called—is, according to the Christian religion, an historical event, just like his crucifixion, death, and burial. And I would have thought that to investigate whether the Resurrection occurred, we would need to do some historical research: we would need to assess the reliab…Read more
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538John Hick on whether God could be an Infinite PersonJournal of Analytic Theology 4 171-179. 2016."Who or what is God?," asks John Hick. A theist might answer: God is an infinite person, or at least an infinite personal being. Hick disagrees: "God cannot be both a person and infinite." Moreover, he says, the distinction between being a person and being a personal being "is a distinction without a difference." Thus, God cannot be an infinite personal being either. In this essay, I assess Hick's reasons for drawing these conclusions. I argue that, even if some other reasons for drawing these c…Read more
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509FoundationalismIn Andrew Cullison (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Epistemology, Continuum. pp. 37. 2012.Foundationalists distinguish basic from nonbasic beliefs. At a first approximation, to say that a belief of a person is basic is to say that it is epistemically justified and it owes its justification to something other than her other beliefs, where “belief” refers to the mental state that goes by that name. To say that a belief of a person is nonbasic is to say that it is epistemically justified and not basic. Two theses constitute Foundationalism: (a) Minimality: There are some basic beliefs,…Read more
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343Transworld sanctity and Plantinga's free will defenseInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 44 (1): 1-21. 1998.A critique of Plantinga's free will defense. For an updated version of this critique, with a reply to objections from William Rowe and Alvin Plantinga, see my "The logical problem of evil: Plantinga and Mackie," in Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 19-33.
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1356Epistemic humility, arguments from evil, and moral skepticismOxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 2 17-57. 2009.Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, Wadsworth, 2013, 6th edition, eds. Michael Rea and Louis Pojman. In this essay, I argue that the moral skepticism objection to what is badly named "skeptical theism" fails.
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720The Christian Theodicist's Appeal to LoveReligious Studies 29 (2). 1993.Many Christian theodicists believe that God's creating us with the capacity to love Him and each other justifies, in large part, God's permitting evil. For example, after reminding us that, according to Christian doctrine, the supreme good for human beings is to enter into a reciprocal love relationship with God, Vincent Brummer recently wrote: In creating human persons in order to love them, God necessarily assumes vulnerability in relation to them. In fact, in this relation, he becomes even mo…Read more
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6137The Power of Logic, 6th editionMcGraw-Hill. 2020.This is a basic logic text for first-time logic students. Custom-made texts from the chapters is an option as well. And there is a website to go with text too.
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423PanmetaphoricismReligious Studies 53 25-49. 2017.Panmetaphoricism is the view that our speech about God can only be metaphorical. In this essay, I do not assess the reasons that have been given for the view. Rather, I assess the view itself. My aim is to develop the most plausible version of panmetaphoricism in order to gain a clear view of the God it offers for our consideration.
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2039Propositional faith: what it is and what it is notAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 50 (4): 357-372. 2013.Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, Wadsworth 2015, 6th edition, eds Michael Rea and Louis Pojman. What is propositional faith? At a first approximation, we might answer that it is the psychological attitude picked out by standard uses of the English locution “S has faith that p,” where p takes declarative sentences as instances, as in “He has faith that they’ll win”. Although correct, this answer is not nearly as informative as we might like. Many people say that there is a more …Read more
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201On a “Fatal Dilemma” for Moderate FoundationalismJournal of Philosophical Research 30 251-259. 2005.Contemporary foundationalists prefer Moderate Foundationalism over Strong Foundationalism. In this paper, we assess two arguments against the former which have been recently defended by Timothy McGrew. Three theses are central to the discussion: that only beliefs can be probabilifying evidence, that justification is internal, in McGrew’s sense of the term, and that only beliefs can be nonarbitrary justifying reasons.
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615In Defense of Naïve UniversalismFaith and Philosophy 20 (3): 345-363. 2003.Michael J. Murray defends the traditional doctrine of hell by arguing directly against its chief competitor, universalism. Universalism, says Murray, comes in “naïve” and “sophisticated” forms. Murray poses two arguments against naïve universalism before focusing on sophisticated universalism, which is his real target. He proceeds in this fashion because he thinks that his arguments against sophisticated universalism are more easily motivated against naïve universalism, and once their force is c…Read more
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655Who or What is God, According to John Hick?Topoi 36 (4): 571-586. 2017.I summarize John Hick’s pluralistic theory of the world’s great religions, largely in his own voice. I then focus on the core posit of his theory, what he calls “the Real,” but which I less tendentiously call “Godhick”. Godhick is supposed to be the ultimate religious reality. As such, it must be both possible and capable of explanatory and religious significance. Unfortunately, Godhick is, by definition, transcategorial, i.e. necessarily, for any creaturely conceivable substantial property F, i…Read more
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352God without the Supernatural: A Defense of Scientific Theism (review)Journal of Religion. 1996.This is a review of Peter Forrest's book.
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1425The Puzzle of Petitionary PrayerEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 (2): 43-68. 2010.The fact that our asking God to do something can make a difference to what he does underwrites the point of petitionary prayer. Here, however, a puzzle arises: Either doing what we ask is the best God can do or it is not. If it is, then our asking won’t make any difference to whether he does it. If it is not, then our asking won’t make any difference to whether he does it. So, our asking won’t make any difference to whether God does it. Our asking is therefore pointless. In this paper, we try to…Read more
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11Czy Jezus był szaleńcem, złoczyńcą czy Bogiem? A może tylko się pomylił?Roczniki Filozoficzne 61 (2): 39-68. 2013.This is a Polish translation of "Was Jesus Mad, Bad, or God?...Or Merely Mistaken?," Faith and Philosophy 21, 2004: 456-479, reprinted in Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology, Volume 1: Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement (Oxford 2009), ed. Michael Rea
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3436Three arguments against foundationalism: arbitrariness, epistemic regress, and existential supportCanadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (4): 535-564. 2006.Foundationalism is false; after all, foundational beliefs are arbitrary, they do not solve the epistemic regress problem, and they cannot exist withoutother (justified) beliefs. Or so some people say. In this essay, we assess some arguments based on such claims, arguments suggested in recent work by Peter Klein and Ernest Sosa.
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174The Evidential Argument from EvilIndiana University Press. 1996.Is evil evidence against the existence of God? Even if God and evil are compatible, it remains hotly contested whether evil renders belief in God unreasonable. The Evidential Argument from Evil presents five classic statements on this issue by eminent philosophers and theologians and places them in dialogue with eleven original essays reflecting new thinking by these and other scholars. The volume focuses on two versions of the argument. The first affirms that there is no reason for God to permi…Read more
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102On Rowe's Argument from Particular HorrorsIn Kelly Clark (ed.), Readings in Philosophy of Religion, Broadview. 2005.This article assesses Bill Rowe's 1979 version of the evidential argument from evil.
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