Alexander R. Pruss

The pseudonymous author of this article argues that neither Kierkegaard nor Climacus in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript are claiming that Christian beliefs are nonsense or contradictory, but that it is contrary to universal epistemic norms to believe these beliefs or even to believe they can be believed. In an appendix for which the rest of the article is a preparation the author gives an interpretation of the pseudonymity and form-content contradiction and of how Kierkegaard in a sense agrees with all the assertions made in the Postscript. If Kierkegaard is right, this article could only have been written pseudonymously.

I shall discuss the problem of the definition of lying and the formulation of the duty of truthtelling. I shall argue that the morality of assertion is a special case of the morality of endorsement, and that a criterion of adequacy for an account of lying is that it handles certain cases of dishonest endorsement as well. Standardviews of lying fail to do so. I shall offer an account of the duty of honest endorsement in terms of the intention to avoid falsehood. But, in the end, we may simplyhave reason to go back to the naïve view that lying is saying falsehoods.

Our paper ‘A new cosmological argument’ gave an argument for the existence of God making use of the weak Principle of Sufficient Reason (W-PSR) which states that for every proposition p, if p is true, then it is possible that there is an explanation for p. Recently, Graham Oppy, as well as Kevin Davey and Rob Clifton, have criticized the argument. We reply to these criticisms. The most interesting kind of criticism in both papers alleges that the W-PSR can be justifiably denied by the atheist, and constitutes no improvement on the strong Principle of Sufficient Reason (S-PSR) which claims that every true proposition in fact has an explanation. The criticism is predicated on the fact that it can be shown that the W-PSR entails the S-PSR. We argue that the W-PSR's plausibility remains despite the criticisms. From this it can be seen to follow that the entailment relation between the W-PSR and the S-PSR gives one reason to believe the S-PSR.

A recombinationist like the earlier Armstrong (1989) claims that logically possible worlds are recombinations of items found in the actual world, with some items reduplicated if need be and others deleted. An immediate consequence of this is that if an alien property is a property that could only be defined in terms of fundamental properties that are actually uninstantiated, then it is logically impossible that an alien property be instantiated as no recombination of the items in the actual world can yield a world with an entity having such a property. Recombinationism immediately implies that S5 is false. To see this, suppose for simplicity, as I will throughout this paper, that electric charge is a fundamental property--otherwise, a different example would have to be used. Then, let w be a possible world lacking any charged objects. At w, then, it is true that it is logically impossible that there be a charged particle since no recombination of the entities in w yields a charged particle. Therefore, contrary to S5, what is possible at w differs from what is possible at the actual world, since charged particles are actual and hence logically possible at the actual world. While this argument may make one sceptical of recombinationism, the recombinationist will say that it is not surprising that if we follow out the Aristotelian intuition that possibility is to be grounded in actually existing entities, then what is possible will depend on what is actual. Henceforth I will no longer assume S5, and so logical possibilities will have to be relativized to worlds if recombinationism is true: it is logically possible at the actual world for charged particles to exist, but at a world at which there are no charged particles it is logically impossible for charged particles to exist...

SpinozaÂ’s God is a being with infinite attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence. Does this mean that God has infinitely many attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence, or does God simply have attributes, each of which is infinite and expresses infinite essence? SpinozaÂ’s argumentation in Letter 9 and the Scholium to Prop. I.10 clearly indicates that it is not just each individual attribute that is infinite, but there are in some sense infinitely many of them. This would seem to settle the issue, except that Spinoza never talks of more than two attributes, Extension..

Consider the reasonable axioms of subjunctive conditionals if p → q1 and p → q2 at some world, then p → at that world, and if p1 → q and p2 → q at some world, then → q at that world, where p → q is the subjunctive conditional. I show that a Lewis-style semantics for subjunctive conditionals satisfies these axioms if and only if one makes a certain technical assumption about the closeness relation, an assumption that is probably false. I will then show how Lewisian semantics can be modified so as to assure and even when the technical assumption fails, and in fact in one sense the semantics actually becomes simpler then

Patrick Toner has argued that eternalism, the doctrine that all times are ontologically on par, conflicts with the Catholic view of judgment as based on the state of the soul at death. For, he holds, it is arbitrary that judgment should be based on what happened at some particular time, unless, as presentism holds, that time is the only that really exists. I shall argue that his argument fails because the eternalist can say that judgment is simultaneous with the state of soul that is being judged, and there is nothing arbitrary about judging something at t on the basis of its state at the same time t.

Consider the following three-step dialectics. (1) Even if God (consistently) commanded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong. Therefore Divine Command Metaethics (DCM) is false. (2) No: for it is impossible for God to command torture of the innocent. (3) Even if it is impossible, there is a non-trivially true per impossibile counterfactual that even if God (consistently) com­manded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong, and this counterfac­tual is incompatible with DCM. I shall argue that the last step of this dialectics is flawed because it would rule out every substantive metaethical theory.

The free-will defence (FWD) holds that the value of significant free will is so great that God is justified in creating significantly free creatures even if there is a risk or certainty that these creatures will sin. A difficulty for the FWD, developed carefully by Quentin Smith, is that God is unable to do evil, and yet surely lacks no genuinely valuable kind of freedom. Smith argues that the kind of freedom that God has can be had by creatures, without a risk of creatures doing evil. I shall show that Smith's argument fails – the case of God is disanalogous to the case of creatures precisely because creatures are creatures

It is widely accepted that divine creation of human beings is compatible with evolutionary theory, except perhaps in regard of the human soul, and that neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory provides an explanation of speciation and of complex features of organisms that undercuts Paley-style teleological arguments, whether or not the evolutionary mechanisms are truly random or deterministic. I will argue that a plausible understanding of the doctrine of creation of human beings is either logically or rationally incompatible with full evolutionary theory, even if one does not take souls into account. Consequently, a theist needs to move to a weaker version either of the creation doctrine or of evolutionary theory, or both.

McGrew, McGrew and Vestrup (MMV) have argued that the fine-tuning anthropic principle argument for the existence of God fails because no probabilities can be assigned to the likelihood that physical constants fall in some finite interval. In particular, the fine-tuning argument that, say, some constant must lie in the range (1.000,1.001) in order for intelligent life to be possible is no better than a seemingly absurd coarse-tuning argument based on the need for that constant to lie in the range (0.001, 10000000). The author of this piece defends the coarse tuning argument as a rational piece of reasoning, and, further, argues that the countable additivity assumption in the MMV paper can be dropped in favor of finite additivity

Adhering to the traditional concept of omniscience lands Gale in the incoherence Grim’s Cantorian arguments reveal in talk of “all propositions.” By constructing variants and extensions of Grim’s arguments, I explain why various ways out of the incoherence are unacceptable, why theists would do better to adopt a certain revisionary concept of omniscience, and why the Cantorian troubles are so deep as to be troubles as well for Gale’s Weak PSR. I conclude with some brief reflections on method, suggesting that we pursue the full implications of Gale’s own revisionary remarks and replace his method of analytic argumentation with non-analytic revisionary theory-construction.