Faith and Philosophy

Most work in religious epistemology has concerned itself with propositional knowledge of God. In this essay, I explore the role of knowing how to engage God in the religious life. Specifically, I explore the role of knowing how to engage God in the context of ritualized liturgical activity, exploring the contribution that knowing how to perform liturgical rites of various sorts can make to knowing God. The thesis I defend is that the liturgy provides both activities of certain kinds and conceptions of God such that knowing how to perform those activities under those conceptions is a species of what I call ritual knowledge.

I propose a new argument for the existence of God. God is defined as a conscious being that is the first cause of reality. In its simplified initial form, the argument has two premises: (1) all possible truths are knowable, and (2) it is impossible to know that the proposition that God does not exist is true. From (1) and (2) it follows that the proposition that God exists is necessarily true. After introducing the argument in its crude initial form and laying out the core intuitions behind its premises, I point to two difficulties that this simplified version faces. I then go on to show how the argument can be revised to handle these difficulties. I defend the revised argument from various objections.

We introduce three arguments for the thesis that time cannot exist prior to an original creation event. In the first argument, we seek to show that if time doesn’t depend upon creation, then time is infinite in the backwards direction, which is incompatible with arguments for a finite past. In the second and third arguments, we allow for the possibility of backwards-infinite time but argue that God could not have a sufficiently good reason to refrain from creating for infinitely many moments—either in a world void of created things (argument two) or in the actual world prior to creation (argument three). Our end goal is to help clarify connections between time and divine action.

This essay offers a defense of Axiarchism’s answer to the question, “Why does the world exist?” against prominent objections leveled against it by Derek Parfit. Parfit rejects the Axiarchist answer while abstracting from it his own Selector strategy. I argue that the abstraction fails, and that even if we were to regard Axiarchism as an instance of a Selector hypothesis, we should regard it as the only viable one. I also argue that Parfit’s abstraction leads him to mistake the nature and, thereby, the force of Axiarchism’s claim to being an ultimate explanation. Finally, I defend the Axiarchist’s claim that the good could not fail to rule.

In this paper I will investigate one way of resolving the apparent tension between the following three propositions, endorsed by some theists: (1) Every worldly event is a consequence guaranteed by God’s unimpedible causal activity, (2) People sin, (3) God is not the cause of sin. In particular, I will examine what I will call the unadorned privation defense, which has roots in Aquinas and continues to find defenders. I will argue that although defenders of this view successfully rebut certain criticisms, their defense ultimately fails to reconcile these three propositions.

My God and Necessity offers a theist a theory of modal truth. Two recent articles criticize the theory’s motivation and main features. I reply to these criticisms.

Divine Simplicity has it that God is absolutely simple. God exhibits no metaphysical complexity; he has neither proper parts nor distinct intrinsic properties. Recently, Jeffrey Brower has put forward an account of divine simplicity that has it that God is the truthmaker for all intrinsic essential predications about him. This allows Brower to preserve the intuitive thought that God is not a property but a concrete being. In this paper, I provide two objections to Brower’s account that are meant to show that whatever merits this account of divine simplicity has, plausibility is not one of them.

This paper argues against a version of open theism defended by Gregory Boyd, which we call “limited risk,” according to which God could guarantee at creation at least the fulfillment of His most central purpose for the world: that of having a “people for himself.” We show that such a view depends on the assumption that free human decisions can be “statistically determined” within certain percentage ranges, and that this assumption is inconsistent with open theists’ commitment to a libertarian conception of human freedom.