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Inscrutable Evil and the Silence of GodDissertation, Syracuse University. 1992.For all we know, theism and evil are compatible. And God need not have created the best possible world He could have. So how does evil render atheistic belief justified? Perhaps, as Hume and Draper argue, the biological role of pain and pleasure make them much less likely on theism than on the hypothesis that they are not the result of the benevolent or malevolent actions of nonhuman persons. But this is very dubious. Perhaps Dostoevski's Ivan Karamozov is right: God would not permit the involun…Read more
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797Trinity MonotheismPhilosophia Christi 5 (2). 2003.Reprinted in Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, Oxford, 2009, eds Michael Rea and Thomas McCall. In this essay, I assess a certain version of ’social Trinitarianism’ put forward by J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, ’trinity monotheism’. I first show how their response to a familiar anti-Trinitarian argument arguably implies polytheism. I then show how they invoke three tenets central to their trinity monotheism in order to avoid that implication. After displaying these ten…Read more
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544Review of David O'Connor, God and Inscrutable Evil (review)Philosophical Review. 2001.This is a critical review of David O'Connor's book, God and Inscrutable Evil.
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566Seeing through CORNEAInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 32 (1). 1992.This essays assesses Steve Wykstra's original CORNEA.
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718BonJour’s ‘Basic Antifoundationalist Argument’ and the Doctrine of the GivenSouthern Journal of Philosophy 36 (2): 163-177. 1998.Laurence BonJour observes that critics of foundationalism tend to argue against it by objecting to "relatively idiosyncratic" versions of it, a strategy which has "proven in the main to be superficial and ultimately ineffective" since answers immune to the objections emerge quickly (1985: 17). He aims to rectify this deficiency. Specifically, he argues that the very soul of foundationalism, "the concept of a basic empirical belief," is incoherent (1985: 30). This is a bold strategy from which we…Read more
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870Schellenberg on Propositional FaithReligious Studies (2): 181-194. 2013.This paper assesses J. L. Schellenberg’s account of propositional faith and, in light of that assessment, sketches an alternative that avoids certain objections and coheres better with Schellenberg’s aims.
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921On an “Unintelligible” Idea: Donald Davidson's Case Against Experiential FoundationalismSouthern Journal of Philosophy 40 (4): 523-555. 2002.Donald Davidson’s epistemology is predicated on, among other things, the rejection of Experiential Foundationalism, which he calls ‘unintelligible’. In this essay, I assess Davidson’s arguments for this conclusion. I conclude that each of them fails on the basis of reasons that foundationalists and antifoundationalists alike can, and should, accept.
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898Divine Openness and Creaturely Non-Resistant Non-BeliefIn Adam Green & Eleonore Stump (eds.), Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief: New Perspectives, Cambridge University Press. 2015.We might be tempted to think that, necessarily, if God unsurpassably loves such created persons as there may be, then for any capable created person S and time t, God is at t open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with S at t, where one is open to relationship with another only if one never does anything (by commission or omission) that would have the result that the other was prevented from being able, just by trying, to participate in that relationship. …Read more
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2Introduction: The Hiddenness of GodIn Daniel Howard-Snyder & Paul K. Moser (eds.), Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, Cambridge University Press. 2002.
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77The Real Problem of No Best WorldFaith and Philosophy 13 (3): 422-425. 1996.This is a reply to William Rowe, "The Problem of No Best World," Faith and Philosophy (1994).
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712God, Knowledge, and Mystery (review)Faith and Philosophy 16 (1): 126-134. 1999.This is a review of Peter van Inwagen's collection of essays. It corrects a typesetter’s deletion of 75% of the review originally published in _Faith and Philosophy_15, 1998: 397-399.
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39The argument from inscrutable evilIn The Evidential Argument From Evil, Indiana University Press. pp. 286--310. 1996.
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166Divine Hiddenness: New EssaysCambridge University Press. 2001.For many people the existence of God is by no means a sufficiently clear feature of reality. This problem, the fact of divine hiddenness, has been a source of existential concern and has sometimes been taken as a rationale for support of atheism or agnosticism. In this collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers of religion explore the question of divine hiddenness in considerable detail. The issue is approached from several perspectives including Jewish, Christian, atheist and a…Read more
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3014The 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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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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624Markan 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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2132Was 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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3231Infallibilism 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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774Two 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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526The 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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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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7BonJour's ‘Basic Antifoundationalist Argument’ and the Doctrine of the GivenSouthern Journal of Philosophy 36 (2): 163-177. 2010.
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2236On 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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834TrinityThe 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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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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536John 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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341Transworld 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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715The 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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Philosophy of Religion |
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