Bruce Reichenbach

Treatments of God's goodness almost always appeal to the traditional Christian doctrine that God is necessarily good, but this introduces the question whether God's goodness properly can be understood as necessary. After considering an ontological conception of God's goodness, I propose that God's goodness is better understood as satisfying six criteria involving moral virtue, intellectual virtue, right actions, right motives, freedom of choice, and freedom of choice with respect to the rightness of the action. I defend the result -- that God's goodness must be understood contingently, not necessarily -- against recent critics of this view.

In his "Death and Eternal Life" John Hick criticizes H.H. Price's view of disembodied existence after death on the grounds that (1) Price cannot consistently hold that this world is a public or semi-public world, the joint product of a group of telepathically-interacting minds, and that this world is formed by the power of individual desire, and (2) in a world that is the product of the individual's desires, moral progress is impossible. I argue that there is no contradiction in (1), and that in the world envisioned by Price greater moral progress is possible in that one can no longer be deceived about one's motives or by the ambiguity of actions.

Traditionally, when persons were viewed as a psycho-physical unity, life after death was deemed quite impossible, particularly in the face of universal human mortality and inevitable bodily corruption. However, some modern anthropologically monistic philosophers, including most notably John Hick, have argued that life after death is possible Two objections have been raised against the re-creationist thesis that the individual human person can be re-created after death. The objection that the re-created person would not be the same person as the deceased because the person would lack spatial-temporal continuity I answer by showing that spatial-temporal continuity is not a necessary condition for all cases of personal identity. To the objection that the decision to call the re-created individual the same as the deceased either uses criteria like memory which themselves presuppose bodily continuity or is merely an unjustified convention, I show that these criteria do not presuppose continuity, and though an identity decision is called for, it is not an unjustifiable or arbitrary decision.

If, as I argue, the law of karma is a special application of the causal law to moral causation, then one has to account for the differences between the two laws. One possibility is to distinguish between "phalas" (immediate effects actions produce in the world) and "samskaras" (invisible dispositions or tendencies to act or think), and to suggest that karma produces the latter but not the former. This subjectivist account, however, raises questions concerning the relation between a person's "samskaras" and the environmental conditions that cause him pleasure and pain.

Generally the theist's defense against the argument from evil invokes the libertarian ideal. But this route is not open to compatibilist Reformed theologians. They must show either that God's possibly creating humans with a more perfect nature is either an impossibility or that his doing so violates some fundamental principle of value. I argue that the compatibilist Reformed theologian is unsuccessful in both. Specifically, in the latter case, there is no ground for thinking that redemption and its associated evil (as found in the concept of a fortunate fall) are superior to persistent innocence.

Interreligious dialogue presupposes that discourse functions the same for both parties. I argue that what makes Christian-Buddhist dialogue so difficult is that whereas Christians have a realist view of theoretical concepts, Buddhists generally do not. The evidence for this is varied, including the Buddha's own refusal to respond to metaphysical questions and the Buddhist constructionist view of reality. I reply to two objections, that Buddhists do conduct metaphysical debate, and that the Buddha adopted a correspondence rather than a pragmatic theory of truth. In the end I develop the implications of this realist/nonrealist dichotomy for commencing and conducting interreligious dialogue.

I explore two positions on divine goodness: God is good because of his nature or is good because of his acts. The first is advanced by Thomas Aquinas through two basic arguments: that God is good because of his being as pure act, and that God is good because of God's desirableness. Goodness predicated because of being runs into conflict with divine freedom. The second leads to the view that God freely wills to do the good and as such could, if he so chose, do evil. But though doing evil is a logical possibility, for God it is a moral impossibility, given his character and dispositions. I conclude by replying to four objections to this position. (1) If God deviated from the moral law, he would not be God. Hence, it is logically impossible for God to do wrong. (2) This view implies a standard of good independent of God. (3) We cannot term God as praiseworthy, for God is goodness itself. (4) That God is logically contingently good diminishes God's holiness.

I first discuss the Buddhist concept of the self as lying between nihilism and substantialism, understood in terms of sets of skandhas and later momentariness. I then discuss the role of karma as a causal nexus that brings the skandhas into a state of co-ordination and whether this role is subjective or objective. Finally, I discuss the import of this view that there is no substantial self but only momentary events of various discrete sorts on the meaning and possibility of life after death and the rootedness of the law of karma in justice. Finally, I consider the implications of this for rebirth and nirvana.