Stephen Maitzen

Although religion is characteristically concerned with the ultimate, this chapter argues that ultimacy, in any sense relevant to religion, is impossible. The arguments of this chapter challenge the possibility of anything ultimate in regard to ontology (ultimate reality), axiology (ultimate value), or teleology (ultimate purpose). If the arguments are sound, then religious concern with ultimacy in any of those senses rests on a false presupposition, as does any philosophy of religion that endorses such a concern. The chapter concludes that philosophy itself achieves three of the goals characteristically sought by religion—namely, metaphysical, axiological, and soteriological transcendence—and raises the question of what religion and philosophy of religion ought to become if its criticisms of ultimacy are correct.

This book offers new arguments for determinism. It draws novel and surprising consequences from determinism for our attitudes toward such things as death, regret, grief, and the meaning of life. The book argues that rationalism is the right attitude to take toward reality. It then shows that rationalism implies determinism and that determinism has surprising and far-reaching consequences. The author contends that the existence of all of humanity almost certainly depends on the precise time and manner of your death and mine; that purely retrospective regret, relief, gratitude, and grief are irrational for all but those who hold extreme values; and that everyone’s life has an unending impact on the future and thereby achieves the strongest kind of meaning that it makes sense to desire. Written in a direct and accessible style, this book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and value theory, as well as general readers with a serious interest in these topics.

Since antiquity, philosophers have struggled to describe the instant of change in continuous time in a way that is both consistent with classical logic and also objective rather than arbitrary. A particularly important version of this problem arises, I argue, for substantial change, that is, any case in which a metaphysical substance comes into or goes out of existence. I then offer and defend an analysis of the instant of substantial change in continuous time that is consistent with classical logic and objective rather than arbitrary. My key assumption is that, necessarily, every substance ages at every instant at which it exists, from which I conclude that no substance has a first or a last instant of its existence if time is continuous. I also suggest that my solution offers some support for endurantism about substances.

This essay in epistemology focuses on issues associated with belief in God, understood as belief in the existence of the God of orthodox monotheism and in the truth of related theistic claims. What type of belief is belief in God, and under what general conditions is such belief epistemically justified? I consider various answers to these questions, I offer some answers of my own, and I suggest some consequences of the latter for several important issues in the epistemology of religion. ;I defend a version of evidentialism about belief in God. I argue that theism is in essential respects a theory, making theistic belief what I call a "theoretical" belief, one sort of belief whose epistemic justification depends on the existence of evidence for the truth of the belief. This fact about theism has important consequences for, among other things: the thesis of so-called "Reformed epistemology" ; the function of epistemic probability in the acceptance of religious creeds; and the place of subjective certainty in theistic belief. I conclude by briefly discussing the epistemic impact of some important kinds of theistic and anti-theistic evidence, and I offer some further speculations about the role of religious faith in supplementing, rather than supplanting, reason

People in many parts of the world link morality with God and see good ethical values as an important benefit of theistic belief. A recent survey showed that Americans, for example, distrust atheists more than any other group listed in the survey, this distrust stemming mainly from the conviction that only believers in God can be counted on to respect morality. I argue against this widespread tendency to see theism as the friend of morality. I argue that our most serious moral obligations -- the foundations of what can be called “ordinary morality ” -- remain in place only if God doesn’t exist. In recent years, some atheists have reacted to society’s distrust of them by claiming that atheism accommodates ordinary morality just as well as theism does. The truth is even stronger: only atheism accommodates ordinary morality. Logically speaking, morality is not common ground between theists and atheists. Morality depends on atheism

Why is there something rather than nothing? Apparently many people regard that question as a challenge to naturalism because they think it’s too fundamental or too sweeping for natural science to answer, even in principle. I argue, on the contrary, that the question has a simple and adequate naturalistic answer: ‘Because there are penguins.’ I then diagnose various confusions underlying the suspicion that the question can’t have such an answer and, more generally, that the question, or else some variant of it, can’t have a naturalistic answer at all.

On the basis of Chapter 15 of Anselm's Proslogion, I develop an argument that confronts theology with a trilemma: atheism, utter mysticism, or radical anti-Anselmianism. The argument establishes a disjunction of claims that Anselmians in particular, but not only they, will find disturbing: (a) God does not exist, (b) no human being can have even the slightest conception of God, or (c) the Anselmian requirement of maximal greatness in God is wrong. My own view, for which I argue briefly, is that (b) is false on any correct reading of what conceiving of requires and that (c) is false on any correct reading of the concept of God. Thus, my own view is that the argument establishes atheism. In any case, one consequence of the argument is that Anselmian theology is possible for human beings only if it lacks a genuine object of study

According to global skepticism, we know nothing. According to local skepticism, we know nothing in some particular area or domain of discourse. Unlike their global counterparts, local skeptics think they can contain our invincible ignorance within limited bounds. I argue that they are mistaken. Local skepticism, particularly the kinds that most often get defended, cannot stay local: if there are domains whose truths we cannot know, then there must be claims outside those domains that we cannot know even if they are true. My argument focuses on one popular form of local skepticism, ethical skepticism, but I believe that the argument generalizes to cover other forms as well.

Skeptical theism combines theism with skepticism about our capacity to discern God’s morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil. Proponents have claimed that skeptical theism defeats the evidential argument from evil. Many opponents have objected that it implies untenable moral skepticism, induces appalling moral paralysis, and the like. Recently Daniel Howard-Snyder has tried to rebut this prevalent objection to skeptical theism by rebutting it as an objection to the skeptical part of skeptical theism, which part he labels “Agnosticism” (with an intentionally capital “A”). I argue that his rebuttal fails as a defense of Agnosticism against the objection and even more so as a defense of skeptical theism.

Newcomb's problem supposedly involves your choosing one or else two boxes in circumstances in which a predictor has made a prediction of how many boxes you will choose. We argue that the circumstances which allegedly define Newcomb's problem generate a previously unnoticed regress which shows that Newcomb's problem is insoluble because it is ill-formed. Those who favor, as we do, a ``no-box'' reply to Newcomb's problem typically claim either that the problem's solution is underdetermined or else that it is overdetermined. We are no-boxers of the first kind, but the underdetermination we identify is more radical than any previously identified: it blocks the very set-up of the problem and not just potential solutions to the problem once it has been set up. The defect is subtle, but it cripples every genuine version of the problem, regardless of variations in such things as the predictor's degree of reliability, the basis on which the prediction is made, or the amount of money in each box. The regress shows that, surprisingly enough, no one can understand Newcomb's problem, and so no one can possibly solve it

In a dense and fascinating article of some ten years ago, Toomas Karmo adds his voice to the chorus of philosophers who deny the possibility of soundly deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is.’ According to Karmo, no derivation containing an ethical conclusion and only non-ethical premises can possibly be sound, where ‘sound’ describes a deductively valid derivation all of whose premises are true. He also suggests that the only valid derivations of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ will be trivial ones. His argument has, to my knowledge, gone unrebutted; on the contrary, it has won recent endorsements, some philosophers evidently believing that he has finally put to rest the issue of the logical autonomy of ethics. Against that trend, I intend to rebut his argument, both by falsifying the taxonomy on which his argument relies and by offering a nontrivial and potentially sound ‘is’-‘ought’ derivation of my own.

Skeptical theism claims that the probability of a perfect God’s existence isn’t at all reduced by our failure to see how such a God could allow the horrific suffering that occurs in our world. Given our finite grasp of the realm of value, skeptical theists argue, it shouldn’t surprise us that we fail to see the reasons that justify God in allowing such suffering, and thus our failure to see those reasons is no evidence against God’s existence or perfection. Critics object that skeptical theism implies a degree of moral skepticism that even skeptical theists will find objectionable and that it undermines moral obligations that even skeptical theists will want to preserve. I discuss a version of the first objection and defend a version of the second.

Unfortunately, the book's weaknesses outweigh its strengths. Chief among the weaknesses is its spotty attention to relevant and important literature, both historical and contemporary. Even though Helm writes at length about assent, and even though he discusses Augustine, he completely ignores John Henry Newman, whose Grammar of Assent deserves at least a mention. Helm devotes more than a chapter to the relation between belief and the will and another chapter to fideism, yet he never mentions Louis Pojman's arguments in Religious Belief and the Will, an analytic-philosophical treatment of exactly those issues. He attacks evidentialism without confronting the most important defenses of that view, such as those offered in Feldman and Conee's "Evidentialism." He asserts the possibility of self-contradictory beliefs without considering the reasons offered by possible-worlds theorists and others for denying that a self-contradictory proposition can be a relatum in the belief relation. He simply asserts that "[n]o obligations follow logically from facts", without any indication that such a claim is both highly controversial and the focus of an enormous, decades-old literature.

The Knower Paradox has had a brief but eventful history, and principles of epistemic closure (which say that a subject automatically knows any proposition she knows to be materially implied, or logically entailed, by a proposition she already knows) have been the subject of tremendous debate in epistemic logic and epistemology more generally, especially because the fate of standard arguments for and against skepticism seems to turn on the fate of closure. As far as I can tell, however, no one working in either area has emphasized the result I emphasize in this paper: the Knower Paradox just falsifies even the most widely accepted general principles of epistemic closure. After establishing that result, I discuss five of its more important consequences.