Michael Tooley

Abstract: Michael Tooley’s Comments on James Sterba’s Book, Is a Good God Logically Possible? My comments on Jim Sterba’s book, Is a Good God Logically Possible?, were divided into the following sections. In the first section, I listed some of the attractive features of Sterba’s discussion. These included, first of all, his use of the ideas of “morally constrained freedom” and “constrained intervention by God” to show the moral evils in our world cannot be justified by an appeal to the idea of free will. Then secondly, there is his response to the claim that if God intervened to prevent horrendous evils, one would have a world without regularities. Thirdly, there are his responses to certain important religiously based attempts to answer arguments from evil, namely, those that appeal to either Christian or Jewish views that we have wronged God, and stand in need of redemption, along with his discussion, and criticism of, certain specific, central Christian doctrines. Fourthly, there are his criticisms, first, of the four solutions that Michael Murray offers for the problem posed by the suffering of non-human animals, and then, secondly, of Trent Dougherty’s use of “a version of John Hick’s theodicy of soul-making in an attempt to provide a God-justifying account of animal suffering” (Dougherty, The Problem of Animal Pain: A Theodicy For All Creatures Great And Small, 2014). I then went on to offer critical comments on various aspects of Sterba’s discussion, where I discussed: (1) his negative view of the relevance of probabilistic epistemology to the problem of evil; (2) his failure, in attempting to rule out logical connections between goods and evil, to consider evils that are not moral evils, such as Peter van Inwagen’s claim that “Being massively irregular is a defect in a world, a defect at least as great as the defect of containing patterns of suffering mentally equivalent to those found in the actual world”; (3) his failure, in discussing Michael Bergmann’s skeptical theism, to point out the central weakness in the principles that Bergmann advances, namely, that they entail not only moral skepticism, but inductive skepticism as well; (4) his treatment of natural evils, where he mistakenly claims that, in contrast to the case of horrendous moral evils, all of which God could prevent, God could not eliminate all horrendous natural evils, and where he says noting about either the horrendous evils due to bacteria and viruses or those due to natural disasters, all of which could be prevented by an omnipotent and omniscient deity without our ever being aware that this was happening. Finally, I concluded by raising the question of what the strongest way is of formulating a logical incompatibility argument from evil, and I argued that it should take the form of the argument I set out in The Problem of Evil (2019) so that first, it should be based on natural evils rather than on moral evils; secondly, that it should focus on the case of suffering endured by sentient non-persons; and thirdly, that a crucial part must be an argument restricting the logical connections between goods and evils, an argument based on the proposition that the only goods and evils that can exist involve properties of, and relations between, conscious beings.

A number of philosophers have maintained that traditional ways of thinking about time involve metaphysical presuppositions. Jacques Derrida, however, has gone further, and has argued that the very concept of time is itself essentially metaphysical, and thus that there is no possibility of a nonmetaphysical conception of time. It is this latter claim that David Wood wishes to challenge. Thus, while he agrees that traditional conceptions of time have involved metaphysical presuppositions, he contends that it is possible to develop an alternative conceptual framework where this is not the case.

In the debate volume, ’Knowledge of God’, co-authored with Alvin Plantinga, I argued that there is an inductively sound version of the argument from evil, and recently, several popular books criticizing religious belief have appeared, often focusing on that issue of the existence of God. In the present essay I argue, however, that to help ordinary people think more critically about religious beliefs, it is better to focus on beliefs associated with specific religions, such as Christianity. I then go on to look briefly at Jesus, and I offer reasons for concluding that Jesus was neither wise nor morally admirable

In her book, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, Linda Zagzebski suggests that among the strongest ways of supporting the thesis that libertarian free will is incompatible with divine foreknowledge is what she refers to as the Accidental Necessity argument. Zagzebski contends, however, that at least three satisfactory responses to that argument are available.I argue that two of the proposed solutions are open to strong objections, and that the third, although it may very well handle the specific versions of the Accidental Necessity argument that Zagzebski considers, fails when confronted with a stronger version of the Accidental Necessity line of argument.

In this paper, I have attempted to do two main things. First, I argue that Alvin Plantinga’s new argument against materialism, though interesting, shares the fate of his earlier arguments in that it is, in the end, unsuccessful. Secondly, I then argue, contrary to Plantinga’s view that there is no strong argument for materialism, that there is in fact very strong scientific support that can be offered against the hypothesis that the human mind is an immaterial substance, and hence in support of the conclusion that some form of materialism is true.

In her book, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, Linda Zagzebski suggests that among the strongest ways of supporting the thesis that libertarian free will is incompatible with divine foreknowledge is what she refers to as the Accidental Necessity argument. Zagzebski contends, however, that at least three satisfactory responses to that argument are available.I argue that two of the proposed solutions are open to strong objections, and that the third, although it may very well handle the specific versions of the Accidental Necessity argument that Zagzebski considers, fails when confronted with a stronger version of the Accidental Necessity line of argument.