Evan Fales

It has become something of a leitmotif among evangelical apologetes to argue that morality can have no objective foundation if there is no God. Using a strategy that appeals to many people's strong intuitions that there are objective rights and wrongs, they claim seek to convict atheists of being intellectually committed to moral relativism, subjectivism, or nihilism. Those are, of course, ethical positions that have been advocated by some atheists. But others share the intuition that there are objective moral norms, and also that we can, on the whole, come to know what they are.

This critical study of the third book of Plantinga's trilogy on proper-function epistemology begins by denying that classical foundationalism proposes a deontic conception of justification. Nor is it subject to Gettier counterexamples, as, I show, Plantinga's fallibilism is and must be. Plantinga's central thesis is that there's no way of attacking the rationality of central Christian beliefs without attacking their truth. That, I argue, is not so on several grounds, e.g., because one can demand independent evidence for the existence of the _sensus divinitatis and Holy Spirit, because of doctrinal disagreements, and because of the morally checkered character of "saved" Christians

Philosophical logic has its problem-children; and among these the Principle of Substitutivity of codesignating expressions — the linguistic spawn of Leibniz's law—has achieved a place of prominence. It has become increasingly apparent that a certain style of linguistic analysis, which seeks to impose formal regimentation ruled by the constraints of classical quantification theory, does not yield results with the kind of uniformity and elegance one should hope for from a satisfyi.ng theory. The root of the difficulty, I believe, bears upon the answers to fundamental questions concerning the nature of cognitive agents and the purposes which their use of language is designed to further. If this is the case, one might expect to find some of the trouble surfacing at precisely those points where the language is used to convey information about the cognitive activities associated with the use of language by such agents. So it is.The central problem of this essay is the interpretation of referential expressions in statements involving propositional attitudes, with the focus on belief contexts. But I shall begin by placing the discussion within a broader theoretical framework.

Theoretical simplicity is difficult to characterize, and evidently can depend upon a number of distinct factors. One such desirable characteristic is that the laws of a theory have relatively few "counterinstances" whose accommodation requires the invocation of a ceteris paribus condition and ancillary explanation. It is argued that, when one theory is reduced to another, such that the laws of the second govern the behavior of the parts of the entities in the domain of the first, there is a characteristic gain in simplicity of the sort mentioned: while I see no way of quantitatively measuring the "amount" of defeasibility of the laws of a theory, microreduction can be shown to decrease that "amount."

This study is a new look at the question of how God can act upon the world, and whether the world can affect God, examining contemporary work on the metaphysics of causation and laws of nature, and current work in the theory of knowledge and mysticism. It has been traditional to address such questions by appealing to God’s omnipotence and omniscience, but this book claims that this is useless unless it can be shown how these two powers "work." Instead of treating the familiar problems associated with omnipotence and omniscience, this book asks directly whether, and how, causal interactions between God and His world could occur: both between God and the physical world and between God and other minds, as well as between the world and God. Fales examines current thinking about the very nature of causation, laws of nature, and agency.

In Part I of this paper, I argued that the mystical experiences of Teresa of Avila are well explained by the anthropological theory of I. M. Lewis. In Part II, I discuss how the causal gap between the social circumstances identified by Lewis and individual phenomenology can be filled in. I then show that Lewis's theory, thus supplemented, is a genuine competitor to the theistic understanding of mystical experience, and that it is much more strongly confirmed by the available evidence than the latter view. If that is right, then Alston and Wainwright, among others, are mistaken in claiming that science cannot offer serious competition to theism in this arena

It has been nearly a decade and a half since Fred Dretske, David Armstrong and Michael Tooley, having each rejected the Regularity theory, independently proposed that natural laws are grounded in a second-order relation that somehow binds together universals.' (l shall call this the ‘DTA theory’). In this way they sought to overcome the major - and notorious — shortcomings of every version of the Regularity theory: how to provide truth conditions for laws that lack instances; how to distinguish laws from accidental generalizations; how to provide truth conditions for the counterfactuals and disposition statements that laws apparently ‘support’; how to justify inductive inferences from past events to laws and future events. For each of these puzzles, an apparently key element in the solution seems to be missing from Regularity theories. That missing element is a genuine connection, a relation with more than merely spatial and/or temporal content, linking the antecedent of a law to its consequent. Once such an additional objective element - however understood — is admitted to be essential to the analysis of laws, one is forced to give up the idea that the logical form of laws can be given in terms of quantifiers ranging over events or states of alfairs, and truth-functions.

The “doctrine of the given” that Fales defends holds that there are certain experiences such that we can have justified beliefs about their “contents” that are not based on any other beliefs, and that the rest of our justified empirical beliefs rest on those “basic beliefs.” The features of experience basic beliefs are about are said to be “given.” Fales holds that some basic beliefs are infallible, having a kind of clarity that guarantees their truth to the believer. In addition, some basic beliefs are fallible, typically due to failure to devote full attention to one’s experience.

In “Justification Without Awareness”, Michael Bergmann divides internalist epistemologies into those with a strong awareness requirement and those with a weak awareness requirement; he presents a dilemma, hoisting the “strongs” on one horn, and the “weaks” on the other. Here I reply on behalf of the strong-awareness view, presenting what I take to be a more satisfactory, and more fundamental, reply to Bergmann than I believe has been offered by his other critics, and in particular by Rogers and Matheson in their “Bergmann’s dilemma: exit strategies for internalists,” with which I am in partial agreement

A popular proof for the existence of God assumes that there are objective moral duties, arguing that this can only be explained by there being a supreme law-giver, namely God. The upshot is either a Divine command theory (DCT) -- or something similar -- or a natural-law theory. I discuss two prominent theories, Robert Adams’s DCT and Stephen Evans’s hybrid DCT/natural-law theory. I argue that they suffer from fatal difficulties. Natural-law theories are plausible, if God exists, but can’t be used to prove His existence; and are less plausible, on the evidence, than a naturalistic natural-law theory, which has the best prospects for providing an objective foundation for morality

Some philosophers deny that science can investigate the supernatural - specifically, the nature and actions of God. If a divine being is atemporal, then, indeed, this seems plausible - but only, I shall argue, because such a being could not causally interact with anything. Here I discuss in detail two major attempts, those of Stump and Kretzmann, and of Leftow, to make sense of theophysical causation on the supposition that God is eternal. These views are carefully worked out, and their failures are instructive for any attempt to reconcileeternality with causal efficacy. I conclude by arguing that if knowledge of God is possible, in virtue of His effects upon the world, then it is science that must play the preeminent role in producing that knowledge.

In Part I of this paper, I took up a challenge posed by Alston , Wainwright , Yandell , and other theists who hold the rather natural view that mystical experiences provide perceptual contact with God, roughly on a par with the access sense experience affords to the natural world. These theists recognize, at the same time, that the plausibility of this view would be significantly compromised by the possibility of scientifically explaining mystical experiences – especially if a scientific explanation were incompatible with, ruled out, or made unlikely the supposition that God has anything special to do with the occurrences of these experiences

Theories of how organisms learn about cause-effect relations have a history dating back at least to the associationist/mechanistic hypothesis of David Hume. Some contemporary theories of causal learning are descendants of Hume's mechanistic models of conditioning, but others impute principled, rule-based reasoning. Since even primitive animals are conditionable, it is clear that there are built-in mechanical algorithms that respond to cause/effect relations. The evidence suggests that humans retain the use of such algorithms, which are surely adaptive when causal judgments must be rapidly made. But we know very little about what these algorithms are and about when and with what ratiocinative procedures they are sometimes replaced. Nor do we know how the concept of causation originates in humans. To clarify some of these issues, this paper surveys the literature and explores the behavioral predictions made by two contrasting theories of causal learning: the mechanical Rescorla-Wagner model and the sophisticated reasoning codified in Bayes' Theorem