Peter Richard Forrest

Enlightenment critics of religion were like those zealous gardeners who prune trees to stumps. My title references the zeal of Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, and of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. Avoiding these excesses, I seek the synthesis of Catholicism and the Enlightenment. This book is intended as the second part of a trilogy, following Intellectual, Humanist and Religious Commitment (Forrest 2019). The third part, Divine Presence is intended as a work of speculative theology with the aim of showing that the Catholic doctrines are not so extravagant intellectually as to exclude the commitment urged at the end of this book.1 The three books address different, although overlapping, audiences. The first two assume a loss of epistemic innocence, by which I mean the normal human condition of belief in all sorts of things without questioning—about religion in particular. Epistemic innocence is not the same as accepting things on authority. The relation is that there is widespread innocent acceptance of authority, despite autonomy being one of the myths of our civilization. One important difference is that having read Linda Zagzebski (2012), say, we might come to accept some authorities even after losing any epistemically innocent trust in them.2 Chapter 5 presents a case for Catholicism from the authority of tradition. I do not seek to undermine epistemic innocence. For I share many beliefs with the innocent, and we should not sacrifice truth to reason—the latter is merely the means to achieving the former. My audience in this work consists, however, of those who have either lost or never had innocent religious beliefs. Divine Presence will be directed at another audience, those who appreciate speculative metaphysics. My retort to those not interested in such speculation is, “Take my word for it that there is some intellectual cost in holding Catholic doctrines, but not so much as to exclude reasonable commitment.” I am making a case for Catholicism, by which I mean Generic, or as I now prefer to call it, Essential Catholicism.3 This case is within the scope of reason, that is normal human reasoning. More controversially, it is also within the scope of humanism, by which I mean an appreciation of the actual or potential grandeur of human beings, who are endowed with reason and free will.4 Humanity and divinity are two species of the same genus.5 To be sure, we are much less powerful and knowledgeable, but neither power nor knowledge confer greater worth. What does show God to be greater than us is our moral failure, both individually and collectively: there is much human goodness but also much human depravity. The most significant difference between myself and God is that God is holy, I am not. The most significant difference between ourselves collectively and God is that God is holy, we are not.6 This humanist thesis supports a literal understanding of the Eastern Orthodox idea of theosis that the holy, especially saints such as Mary, are divinized (see O’Carroll 1987). They are parts of God although not in the same way as the three divine Persons. Hence moderate devotion to Mary and other saints does not detract from the worship of God. Humanism enables us to reply to the objection that theosis is a mere metaphor because we differ in kind from divine Persons.

THE ARTICLE IS AN ATTACK ON THE MYSTERY OR REDUCTION DILEMMA FOR SUPERVENIENCE. THIS IS THE DILEMMA THAT EITHER SUPERVENIENCE IS MYSTERIOUS OR THE SUPERVENIENT IS REDUCIBLE TO THE SUBVENIENT. A NONMYSTERIOUS, NONREDUCTIVE ACCOUNT OF SUPERVENIENCE IS PROPOSED, BASED ON THE METAPHYSICAL SPECULATION THAT SUPERVENIENT TERMS AND PHRASES APPLY TO OBJECTS WHOSE INTRINSIC NATURES THEMSELVES HAVE AN APPROPRIATE PROPERTY. SINCE THIS IS A PROPERTY OF A NATURE IT IS A PROPERTY OF A PROPERTY, THAT IS, A GRAND-PROPERTY. SUPERVENIENCE FOLLOWS FROM THIS HYPOTHESIS QUITE NONMYSTERIOUSLY, BY APPEAL TO THE INDISCERNIBILITY OF IDENTICALS. THE METAPHYSICAL SPECULATIONS REQUIRED MIGHT SEEM EXTRAVAGANT. A LARGE PART OF THE PAPER IS DESIGNED TO SHOW THAT THEY ARE NOT EXTRAVAGANT.

As part of his Constructive Empiricism, Van Fraassen commends agnosticism about the existence of the unobservable entities posited by the physical sciences. This position of Scientific Agnosticism is compatible with the acceptance, in his sense, of Science. For to accept Science is, he says, to accept it as empirically adequate, but to refrain from deciding between the realistically interpreted theory and the as-if variant, according to which the observations are as if the theory is correct but the theory is not correct. My purpose in this paper is to argue, against van Fraassen, that we—or at least most of us—should embrace Scientific Realism not Scientific Agnosticism.

If persons persist from one time to another they do so, I claim, by perduring, that is by having temporal parts. First I argue that if persons endure, that is persist without having temporal parts, then they have time-dependent properties. Next, I argue that if enduring persons change by having time-dependent properties, then fatalism, or, more accurately, ontological determinism, holds. Hence those of us who consider that ontological determinism is incompatible with our own experience of responsibility have reason to reject the thesis that persons endure. This is significant because endurance might otherwise be thought to cohere better with belief in responsibility than perdurance.

The book is drawn from the Tarner lectures, delivered in Cambridge in 1993. It is concerned with the ultimate nature of reality, and how this is revealed by modern physical theories such as relativity and quantum theory. The objectivity and rationality of science are defended against the views of relativists and social constructionists. It is claimed that modern physics gives us a tentative and fallible, but nevertheless rational, approach to the nature of physical reality. The role of subjectivity in science is examined in the fields of relativity theory, statistical mechanics and quantum theory, and recent claims of an essential role for human consciousness in physics are rejected. Prospects for a 'Theory of Everything' are considered, and the related question of how to assess scientific progress is carefully examined.

My enquiry will be within the scope of two suppositions. The first is that Space is continuous, not discrete. The second is that we are to adopt realism about either points or regions or both. That does not, however, preclude a choice of categories—substance or property—for these entities. Thus we could think of either regions or points as properties of the things in those regions or at those points. Alternatively, we could think of regions or points as substances which themselves have properties.

The book comprises an enquiry into what quantum theory shows us about the world. Its aim is to sort out which metaphysical speculations are tenable and which are not. After an initial discussion of realism, the author provides a non-technical exposition of quantum theory and a criticism of the proposal that quantum theory should make us revise our beliefs about logic. He then discusses the various problems and puzzles which make quantum theory both interesting and perplexing. The text defends three markedly different speculations. The first of them, the "determinate particle speculation", is shown to involve both a view which proposes determinate locations and velocities for particles and the opposite. With the "wave speculation" particles are seen as different again: here the professor proposes a radically original view of particles as polywaves. In the final chapter, he compares the competing particle theories and shows that two ostensibly opposing views are in fact compatible. He goes on to discuss the implications of quantum theory for our understanding of persons. The work assumes no prior knowledge of quantum theory and confines the necessary mathematical details to end-notes.

In this book Timothy O’Connor combines an investigation of modal epistemology with a fresh look at the traditional contingency version of the cosmological argument. The connection between the two parts is that he defends the practice of hypothesizing necessities for explanatory purposes, resisting those accounts that link possibility too closely to conceivability. This provides the context in which he asks the existence question, ‘Why do the particular contingent objects there are exist and undergo the events they do?’. Wisely avoiding the Principle of Sufficient Reason he argues that the existence question is answered by, and only by, positing a necessary being that is a se in the sense of not depending on any other being.Another important feature of O’Connor's treatment is that he does not accept the difficult scholastic doctrine of divine simplicity, instead relying on the weaker thesis that the essential divine attributes are mutually entailing. Yet again he resists the thesis of the immutability of God, allowing that a necessary being can have accidental attributes and hence can change by acquiring knowledge of the free acts and/or random events that occur. In addition he combines the cosmological argument with the argument from fine-tuning so that the latter is used to support the thesis that the …

This paper explores the mereology of structural universals, using the structural richness of a non-classical mereology without unique fusions. The paper focuses on a problem posed by David Lewis, who using the example of methane, and assuming classical mereology, argues against any purely mereological theory of structural universals. The problem is that being a methane molecule would have to contain being a hydrogen atom four times over, but mereology does not have the concept of the same part occurring several times. This paper takes up the challenge by providing mereological analysis of three operations sufficient for a theory of structural universals: Reflexive binding, i.e. identifying two of the places of a universal; Existential binding, i.e. the language-independent correlate of an existential quantification; and Conjunction.

This paper concerns the structure of appearances. I argue that to be appeared to in a certain way is to be aware of one or more universals. Universals therefore function like the sense‐data, once highly favoured but now out of fashion. For instance, to be appeared to treely, in a visual way, is to be aware of the complex relation, being tree‐shaped and tree‐coloured and being in front of, a relation of a kind which could be instantiated by a material object and a perceiver, which is thus instantiated in the veridical case but not in the non‐veridical.

In "How Do We Know It Is Now Now?" David Braddon-Mitchell (Analysis 2004) develops an objection to the thesis that the past is real but the future is not. He notes my response to this, namely that the past, although real, is lifeless and (a fortiori?) lacking in sentience. He argues, however, that this response, which I call 'the past is dead hypothesis', is not tenable if combined with 'special relativity'. My purpose in this reply is to argue that, on the contrary, 'special relativity' supports the thesis that the future is unreal

In his recent paper in Sophia , ‘Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil, or Part of the Problem?’ Nick Trakakis endorses the position that theodicy, whether intellectually successful or not, is a morally obnoxious enterprise. My aim in this paper is to defend theodicy from this accusation. I concede that God the Creator is a moral monster by human standards and neither to be likened to a loving parent nor imitated. Nonetheless, God is morally perfect. What is abhorrent is not tough-minded theodicy but the hubris of imitating God. I further claim that it is no accident that the same sort of objection is made to act utilitarianism as to tough-minded theodicy if the latter is misinterpreted as implying a guide for human action.

Contemporary epistemology of religion may conveniently be treated as adebate over whether evidentialism applies to thebelief-component of religious faith, or whether we should insteadadopt a more permissive epistemology. Here evidentialism is theinitially plausible position that a belief is justified only if``it is proportioned to the evidence''. For example, supposea local weather forecaster has noticed that over the two hundred yearssince records began a wetter than average Winter is followed in 85% ofcases by a hotter than average Summer. Then, assuming for simplicitythat the records are reliable, the forecaster is justified in believingwith less than full confidence that this Winter, which is wetter thanaverage, will be followed by a hotter than average Summer. Butevidentialism implies that it would not be justified to have fullbelief, that is belief with 100% confidence. Again, consider someonewho has a hunch that this Summer will be hotter than averagebut cannot justify that hunch further. Hunches are not consideredevidence, so the belief is not considered justified. If, however, thehuncher can cite a good track record of hunches about the weather thathave turned out correct then the belief would be consideredjustified. For although hunches are not considered evidence, memoriesabout past hunches are, as are the observations that corroborated thepast hunches

In this book I investigate the necessary structure of the aether the stuff that fills the whole universe. Some of my conclusions are. 1. There is an enormous variety of structures that the aether might, for all we know, have. 2. Probably the aether is point-free. 3. In that case, it should be distinguished from Space-time, which is either a fiction or a construct. 4. Even if the aether has points, we should reject the orthodoxy that all regions are grounded in points by summation. 5. If the aether is point-free but not continuous, its most likely structure has extended atoms that are not simples. 6. Space-time is symmetric if and only if the aether is continuous. 7. If the aether is continuous, we should reject the standard interpretation of General Relativity, in which geometry determines gravity. 8. Contemporary physics undermines an objection to discrete aether based on scale invariance, but does not offer much positive support."