Keith DeRose

I should be clear at the outset about what I'll mean -- and won't mean -- by "universalism." As I'll use it, "universalism" refers to the position that eventually all human beings will be saved and will enjoy everlasting life with Christ. This is compatible with the view that God will punish many people after death, and many universalists accept that there will be divine retribution, although some may not. What universalism does commit one to is that such punishment won't last forever. Universalism is also incompatible with various views according to which some will be annihilated (after or without first receiving punishment). These views can agree with universalism in that, according to them, punishment isn't everlasting, but they diverge from universalism in that they believe some will be denied everlasting life. Some universalists intend their position to apply animals, and some to fallen angels or even to Satan himself, but in my hands, it will be intended to apply only to human beings. In short, then, it's the position that every human being will, eventually at least, make it to the party.

Virtually all monotheistic religions profess that there is a divine being who is extremely powerful, knowledgeable, and good. The evils of this world present various challenges for such religions. The starkest challenge is directed toward views that posit a being whose power, knowledge, and goodness are not just immense, but are as great as can be: an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being (for short, an oopg being). For it would seem that such a being would have the power, the knowledge, and the moral disposition to prevent any evil whatsoever, and from this one might readily conclude that if there were such a being, there would be no evil at all. On one version of this challenge, the coexistence of evil with a God defined in this way is claimed to be logically impossible. This has come to be called the logical problem of evil. Another is that the existence of such a God is improbable given the evils of this world, or at least that the existence of these evils significantly lowers the probability that such an oopg God exists. The concern expressed is that these evils provide good evidence against the existence of such a God. This version is known as the evidential problem of evil.

The key test cases for deciding between my brand of contextualism and Jennifer Nagel’s brand of invariantism are the third-person examples. As matters currently stand, first-person cases, like my original Bank cases (pp. 1-2), are pretty useless here. Nagel can agree that the speaker’s claim to “know” in Case A and his admission that he doesn’t “know” in Case B are both true; she just accepts a different account of why it is that both assertions can be, and are, true, according to which it is because in B the speaker doesn’t meet the attitude requirement for knowledge, while he does meet that requirement in A. Perhaps not at all unexpectedly, I find my proposed explanation more plausible; presumably, Nagel sees things differently. We can try to hash this out, but extremely tricky questions, and no stable enough answers, about how to understand the attitude needed for knowledge derail this attempt to decide between accounts. But no worries: Without having to first decide these issues, third-person cases provide the natural test cases to decide between the views. We can use them to decide between theories, and then go back to the first-person cases and apply what we’ve learned from the third-person cases to guide our handling of the trickier firstperson cases