Timothy O'Connor

Many physicalists suppose that middle-sized things of many kinds are real in an ontologically significant way that, e.g., mere aggregates are not. They have that status by being ‘weakly emergent’: emergent because they exhibit forms of behavior not characteristic of entities of which they are composed, while only weakly so because their existence and powers asymmetrically wholly depend on those composing entities. Reductionists and nihilists charge that weak emergents (if such there be) are not ontologically significant because they do not make a fundamental difference to the way the world is or unfolds. I will argue that this charge is plausibly true in a world lacking strongly emergent conscious minds, but not otherwise. Weakly emergent entities enjoy a more robust ontological status by virtue of being objects of conscious practical and theoretical thought and action. Furthermore, the range of objects attaining such significance in a minded world depends on the kinds of minds in it: merely animal, human, and/or divine.

Why did the omnipotent, omniscient, unsurpassably, and perfectly good being who is necessary in Himself, and having a supremely rational will, contingently create _ex nihilo_? What motivation could account for such freely undertaken activity, displaying it as neither necessary nor less than fully rational? The chapter considers and criticizes answers recently offered by Mark Johnston and Alex Pruss. It is argued that creation of some contingent reality or other is necessary, and that plausible reflections on the ordered complexity in God’s motivations indicate that the scope of contingency regarding what to create is highly constricted—though not to the point of complete modal collapse. A perfect creator would create either an infinite and richly varied multiverse or an infinitely improving universe realizing a wide array of kinds of goods. Finally, a rebuttal is given to the contention that any element of contingency in a divine choice entails a rational-explanatory deficiency.

This chapter explains the concept of free will and then explores a number of conceptual and empirical puzzles to which it gives rise: Is it compatible with causal determinism, with non-deterministic “chance,” or with the apparent fact that much human action is automated rather than being consciously controlled? Does it admit of degrees? On what basis might we distinguish freedom-diminishing causal influences from neutral or freedom-enhancing influences? And what evidence could establish that we ever exert “top-down” control over the sub-personal neural processes that underlie all human choice and action?

This chapter argues that _well-tuned_ trust, as found in interpersonal relationships as well as communal institutions and enterprises, is an intellectual virtue on the grounds that it is balanced with concern for other, potentially “threatened” virtues, and that it is highly productive of epistemic goods. The form and considerations of this argument are suggestive for religious faith. If faith can be similarly held in check by concerns for intellectual autonomy and caution, and if faith can help us to discover important truths, then a parallel argument for intellectual virtue in faith could be at least partly sustained. However, the ultimate success of such an argument will hinge on empirical questions regarding the form of faith in question: the actual evidence available for its propositional content and the demands it makes on the intellectual conduct (e.g., resilience in belief, deference to communal authority) of its adherents.

This chapter begins by discussing the recent turn toward _virtue_ epistemologies, which emphasize longer-term processes of belief formation (in addition to ‘snapshot’ evidential relations), intellectual traits and dispositions (including affections), and targets of evaluation other than propositional belief (e.g., understanding and experiential acquaintance). The introduction indicates issues and options for theorists developing virtue-based accounts of various epistemic properties and goods. It also discusses the rise of _social_ epistemology, which takes seriously the pervasive social distribution of evidence gathering and the resulting necessary roles of trust, testimony, and intellectual authorities. The chapter then provides a roadmap that connects these general epistemological themes to religious faith and locates recent work on the epistemology of faith on it. Emphasis is given to questions concerning entrenched disagreement and trust.

This chapter argues for an agent-causal libertarian account. According to this account of free will, a person’s free and responsible actions are caused by her as a substance, where causation by a substance is not reducible to, nor composed of, causation by prior events or states. The chapter argues that if we take seriously two metaphysical assumptions made (at least implicitly) by Kane—the view that persons are not immaterial minds and the view that causation is a real, nonreductionist relation—then both of these assumptions suggest, most naturally, an agent-causal libertarian account rather than an event-causal libertarian account favored by Kane. The chapter then develops what he calls a “neo-Aristotelian” account of substance causation, an account he thinks that Kane really ought to be committed to given the two metaphysical assumptions that Kane makes.

On theological determinism, God is the sufficient cause of all natural events and humans lack moral responsibility for their actions. In this chapter, four arguments are advanced for the incompatibility of this thesis with Christian theology: (1) it entails a problematically direct involvement of God in horrendous moral evil, (2) it does not cohere with the practices of confessing and repenting of sin and seeking divine aid in struggling against sin, (3) it undermines divine–human dialogue and engagement, and (4) it threatens the doctrine of Incarnation by diminishing the moral standing of the Incarnate Son of God and forcing an implausible interpretation of the interaction between the Incarnate Son and God the Father.

The argument from consciousness maintains that correlations between brain states and conscious states of persons require explanation but cannot be given an adequate scientific explanation. The chapter then argues that the best explanation of these correlations is that they are the result of the work of a purposeful supernatural agent. The aim is two-fold. First, the chapter considers and rebuts recent attempts in the philosophy of mind to defend a physicalist account of the phenomenal character of experience (accounts which, if successful, would undercut the core premise of the argument from consciousness). It then considers two versions of the argument from consciousness and contend that they are defective, since they overlook a naturalistic form of explanation that is available even on a robustly dualistic account of conscious states. However, it goes on to show that the argument may more plausibly be recast by treating the very form of explanation of conscious states it outlines as a further datum in the fine-tuning version of the design argument.

Response to Swinburne: Richard Swinburne (this volume) extends a form of theodicy which he has defended previously (e.g., 1998). Its central element is the high value it assigns to morally good or bad difference-making resulting from free choices—for the choosers themselves, for those impacted by their choices, and for the world as a whole—and (relatedly) to the ability to form our own character. It proposes that it is permissible for God to create a world like ours that contains a mixture of moral good and evil, including ‘horrendous’ evil, for the sake of enabling us to make a moral difference in the lives of others and to significantly contribute to the shaping of our own moral character. The good of freely participating in the sort of person we become is realized not only by how we choose to act towards others but also in how we choose to respond to the consequences we experience from their actions towards us. In what follows, I will offer brief support for three claims: (1) While it is plausible that the closely connected goods Swinburne identifies are ones that God would be concerned to promote in us, it is also plausible that God would be concerned to promote the good of distinctively human ‘flourishing’ in a wide-ranging sense. If we accept that this is so, we will likely conclude that Swinburne’s central theodical strategy is at best incomplete. (2) Swinburne extends his theodicy in response to an objection that the kind of moral choices we face are unfairly distributed. The extension accords a central role to a pre-heavenly afterlife that is like our present lives. Insofar as this post-mortem hypothesis is advanced to make room for God’s correcting deficiencies in how His plan for us unfolds in the present life, it opens itself to the objection that it implies that what we actually observe disconfirms theism (to some extent). (3) In one respect, Swinburne’s response to the charge of unfairness concedes too much. Fairness does not require that the internal and external obstacles to attaining deification that we each face must be of roughly equal strength. The profound differences in the lives that humans lead over time and space may enrich the post-mortem communion of saints, a collectively-shared good of great value.

An expansive, yet succinct, analysis of the Philosophy of Religion – from metaphysics through theology. Organized into two sections, the text first examines truths concerning what is possible and what is necessary. These chapters lay the foundation for the book’s second part – the search for a metaphysical framework that permits the possibility of an ultimate explanation that is correct and complete. A cutting-edge scholarly work which engages with the traditional metaphysician’s quest for a true ultimate explanation of the most general features of the world we inhabit Develops an original view concerning the epistemology and metaphysics of modality, or truths concerning what is possible or necessary Applies this framework to a re-examination of the cosmological argument for theism Defends a novel version of the Leibnizian cosmological argument.

An expansive, yet succinct, analysis of the Philosophy of Religion – from metaphysics through theology. Organized into two sections, the text first examines truths concerning what is possible and what is necessary. These chapters lay the foundation for the book’s second part – the search for a metaphysical framework that permits the possibility of an ultimate explanation that is correct and complete. A cutting-edge scholarly work which engages with the traditional metaphysician’s quest for a true ultimate explanation of the most general features of the world we inhabit Develops an original view concerning the epistemology and metaphysics of modality, or truths concerning what is possible or necessary Applies this framework to a re-examination of the cosmological argument for theism Defends a novel version of the Leibnizian cosmological argument.