John Alton Christmann

This paper develops an argument for classical theism from what I call recursive intelligibility, which is the open-ended, convergently unifying, and domain transcendent applicability of mathematics to the structure of physical reality. The argument first distinguishes local intelligibility, or the cognitive-reality alignment that evolutionary selection plausibly explains, from the global and recursive intelligibility at issue, namely the continuing success of abstract mathematical structures in domains maximally remote from evolutionary relevance. Cases such as the later physical applicability of Riemannian geometry, complex analysis, and Lie group theory exhibit a form of intelligibility that extends well beyond what the evolutionary byproduct story straightforwardly predicts. I argue that classical theism, specifically the logos tradition on which reality reflects a rational source, generates a genuine expectation of recursive intelligibility, whereas evolutionary naturalism predicts only local intelligibility and faces explanatory difficulties with domain-transcendence, convergent unification, and the apparent absence of an intelligibility horizon. I distinguish the position from fine-tuning arguments, Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, and from standard formulations of the argument from reason, and answer objections from anthropic reasoning, instrumentalist accounts of mathematics, the missing base rate of applicable mathematics, and Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis. My conclusion is that recursive intelligibility is more probable given classical theism than given evolutionary naturalism.

Internalists who argue against reliabilism usually construct thought experiments designed to show how reliability is not necessary or sufficient for justification. Defenders of reliabilism have responded with debunking explanations of the intuitions that people are expected to have when considering anti-reliabilist thought experiments. One defender is Jennifer Nagel, who argues that internalist counterexamples to reliabilism play off of a shift between belief-formation processes that are unconscious and those that involve self-reflection on the contents of one’s conscious states. Nagel aims to show how thought experiments commonly appealed to by internalists rest on a mistake by carefully examining some of the most well-known examples in the literature. However, Nagel’s analysis does not apply on certain counterexamples to reliabilism, such as Cohen’s New Evil Demon. In this paper, I will show that when applied to NED-intuitions, Nagel’s analysis fails, so her argument does not extend to all anti-reliabilist counterexamples.

Lambert (2022) argues that theism and moral error theory are compatible. He does so by rejecting what he takes to be the best argument for incompatibility, the divine goodness argument, on the grounds that its key premise, that theism entails God instantiates the moral property of being good, can be rejected. I argue that Lambert's case for rejecting this premise fails. The failure reflects a systematic difficulty with the stripping operation his argument requires, the separation of God's descriptive properties from moral ones. I argue for this in four stages. First, I argue that Lambert's central thought experiment smuggles in moral content through thick ethical concepts like benevolence and concern for wellbeing, compromising the intuition the thought experiment is meant to generate. Second, I develop an intuition pump that takes Lambert's amorality stipulation seriously and shows that a genuinely amoral God would not be recognizable as God or worthy of worship. Third, I argue that Lambert's claim that worship-worthiness is normative but not moral rests on a normative/moral distinction that is unstable. Fourth, I argue that Lambert misreads the method of perfect being theology, which, properly understood, entails that moral goodness is an essential divine attribute. Taken together, these four arguments show that Lambert has not established the compatibility of theism and moral error theory.

Bart Streumer thinks that we cannot believe the global normative error theory. Streumer's argument presupposes a Cartesian theory of belief fixation. The Cartesian theory entails that we can understand a proposition without believing it. But the Cartesian theory of belief fixation is false, and the Spinozan theory is true. The Spinozan theory of belief fixation entails that we cannot understand a proposition without believing it. The present paper argues that Streumer's claim is false, and we can believe the global normative error theory because the Spinozan theory is correct. The paper then applies the Spinozan theory of belief fixation to the “Now what?” problem for global normative error theory and responds to objections.