Marek A. Pepliński

Alvin Plantinga claims that Christian believer can rationally disbelieve in some elements of the theory of evolution: the Common Ancestry Thesis; Darwinism, taken as explanation of origin of life by the mechanism of natural selection operating on random genetic mutation, and Naturalistic Origins Thesis - the view that present life itself developed from nonliving matter without special activity of God. After the justification of the possibility of conflicts between faith and science, Plantinga's arguments are examined and assessed as successful, with a few exceptions. The main thesis of this paper is that Plantinga is right claiming that rational disbelieving in evolution is possible, but his arguments are not enough to justify special creationism as theistic knowledge, supposing that knowledge warrants the truth

I present argument for different than traditional continental classification of epistemological issues. Paper has two parts, first concerned with K. Ajdukiewicz and J. Woleński conception of epistemology and its branches and with different methods of epistemological inquiry based on different task posed for epistemology. Second part discuss main important topics of current postgettieral analytic epistemology like virtue epistemology, ethics of belief, problems of epistemic value, epistemic value monism and pluralism, metaepistemology and concludes that in traditional continental classification the issues of a truth and the issues of nature of knowledge should be united in broaden set of topics concerned with valuable cognition and knowledge, which has descriptive, normative, and regulative subparts.

The paper presents some historical (Plato, Aristotle, Plotin, Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas) and main contemporary topics about different accounts of goodness of God understood as ontological goodness, perfection and as ethical goodness - impeccability and benevolence. The arguments for goodness of God are presented, mainly from stance of Thomas Aquinas classical theism as well as arguments against compatibility of essential goodness and omnipotence (N. Pike) and being an moral agent. The article draws perspective of different philosophical issues connected with goodness of God, like a problem of evil, the Euthyphro dilemma, divine command ethics and divine motivation theory.

There are three chief aims of the paper. First, it presents in short the beginning of the analytic philosophy of religion, its development, issues, and methods. Second, it puts forward a hypothesis that in the last five decades analytic philosophy of religion has been dominated by the epistemological paradigm, i.e. in most cases, any problem in question has been studied as part of the general problem of rationality of religious belief. That situation is changing slowly towards achieving more balance between the issues of epistemology of religion and those concerned with philosophical theology. Third, the paper provides criteria for the classification of the different ways to understand the rationality of religious belief: the rationalistic and evidentialist approach, the natural theology approach, the Wittgensteinian fideism and Reformed epistemology approaches. A brief description of each of those four positions in epistemology of religion is included.

Marek Pepliński Editorial. On God’s Knowledge, Omnipotence, and Human FreedomAncient and mediaeval encounters between religious monotheistic faith and philosophical reason brings philosophers and theologians to task how to add up facts perceived from philosophical, natural and religious perspectives. There are several important points in which reason and faith seems to be in disagreement. One of them is the group of problems connected to the topics of coherence of divine attributes, particularly omniscience, foreknowledge and omnipotence, on the one hand, and the human freedom, on the another. This editorial shows how are different angles of problems of human freedom, foreknowledge, middle knowledge, eternity, fatalism and open theism connected in papers of this volume of Filo-sofija journal. Keywords: omniscience; foreknowledge; omnipotence; coherence of faith and reason; open theism, immutability of God’s knowledge, libertarian account of freedom; eternal life; fourteenth-century theology.