Alexander R. Pruss

“We are always already thrown into concrete factual circumstances, facing possibilities that we need to come to grips with. By choosing some we exclude others, thus making them no longer possible. What we are thrown into is the past and present, and the possibilities loom ahead of us, though we may try to turn our back on them. The future is the home of the possibilities while the present and past define the circumstances in which we make our choices, circumstances we can no longer affect.” Or so we might say, and there is something right about this way of talking. Our basic conception of ourselves as agents is radically temporally asymmetric. And so we adopt asymmetric metaphors for time: we talk of time having a direction, as flowing from the future, through the present, to the past, closing possibilities that once were open; or perhaps we think of time as a measure of our own movement from the past to the future. Such metaphors are of very limited value. To think of time as having a direction spatializes time; to think of time as flowing or of ourselves as moving in time is to invite the question of how fast it is flowing or how fast we are moving (at one second per second, perhaps, one might quip, thereby inviting the question of why it cannot flow at two seconds per second instead).             Although the metaphors are flawed, we need to come to grips with an inextricable asymmetry between past and future in them. As agents, we deliberate about the future, while the past we can only bewail or rejoice over. We know the future not only through theoretical knowledge, but also through the intentional knowledge that the agent has of the effects she intends to produce. We think a life that started in years of sorrow but ended in great joy is preferable to one that started with a great joy and ended in years of sorrow..

Our new cosmological argument for the existence of God weakens the usual Principle of Sufficient Reason premise that every contingent true proposition has an explanation to a weaker principle (WPSR) that every such proposition could have an explanation. Almeida and Judisch have criticized the premises of our argument for leading to a contradiction. We show that their argument fails, but along the way we are led to clarify the nature of the conclusion of our argument. Moreover, we discuss an argument against us based on a principle of alternate explanation incompatible with our WPSR, and show that his argument fails.

Plural quantification, often used to evade Russell paradoxes, will lead back to them, given certain assumptions about propositions. This chapter provides a more generalized version of the path to paradox by showing that any theory that makes possible the construction of an appropriate packaging relation falls prey to a Russell paradox. It gives examples of widely-held metaphysical theories that require such a relation. It shows that the paradoxes that can result from plural quantification are more widely damaging, and harder to tame, than has been recognized. It also displays formal requirements that any metaphysical framework with a packaging relation must meet if it is to have a chance of escaping self-contradiction. The chapter first gives the general paradox-generating setup, and then shows how three families of metaphysical assumptions allow one to instantiate it. It concludes by assessing the aftermath of the arguments presented.

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

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.

In the first chapter of Romans, Paul tells us that the power and deity of God are evident from what he has created. One reading of this is that there is an argument from the content of what has been created. Thus, the Book of Wisdom, which may well have been the source of Paul’s ideas here, says that “from the greatness and beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (13:5, NAB). This is a kind of teleological or design argument. But one might also argue instead from general features of the universe, such as the fact that there is a universe at all, or that there are contingent states of affairs, or that there is motion. Alternately, one might argue from something extremely specific, but where the details do not matter, such as the conjunction of all contingent facts. The general strategy of cosmological arguments is to take a grand feature of the world, and then argue, abstracting from much of its specific content, that the best or only possible explanation is a First Cause, an entity that stands at the head of a causal chain leading to the occurrence of the existential feature. Typically, the grand feature is something the opponent will not challenge. Instead, opponents tend to ask: 1. Does the grand feature actually have an explanation? 2. Can there be an explanation not involving a First Cause? 3. Need the First Cause be God? Recent discussion has particularly focused on the first two questions, and I wish to primarily focus on the first question myself in this talk. But first a few words about progress on the second and third question, in reverse order.

As Mark Murphy has recently shown, standard justifications of universal divine authority are insufficient. [1] By “divine authority” I shall mean the doctrine that obedience is morally owed to God by all. God would not give us a command that we did not have a reason to act in accordance with, Murphy argues, but it does not follow that we would be obliged, much less morally obliged, to have the fact of God’s having commanded the action be among our practical reasons for the action. We might, for instance, think that what God has commanded us is prudentially the best policy for us or that it is the best possible evidence for what is on independent grounds morally obligatory.