Philo

Christian orthodoxy essentially involves the acceptance of the New Testament as authoritative in matters of faith and conduct. However, the New Testament instructs slaves and women to accept a subordinate status that denies their equality with other human beings. To accept such a status is to have the vice of servility, which involves denying the equality of all human beings. Therefore the New Testament asserts that slaves and women should deny their equality with other human beings. This is false. Moreover, these same passages in the New Testament implicitly assert that slavery and the subordination of women are morally permissible. This isalso false. Therefore orthodox Christianity is false.

In this paper I argue that Richard Swinburne fails to adequately support his Principle of Credulity in favor of the validity of alleged experiences of God. I then formulate an alternative, analogical argument for the validity of alleged experiences of God from the validity of sense-perceptual experiences, and defend it against objections of Gale and Fales. But then I argue against trying to establish the validity of alleged experiences of God by analogy.

The evidential argument from evil against theism requires a background of assumptions which, if correct, would appear to pose at least as great an evidential threat to naturalism as extensive pain and suffering pose to theism. In this paper, I argue that the conscious suffering and objective moral judgments required to construct evidential arguments from evil form the basis of powerful prima facie arguments against naturalism that are similar in force and structure to recent versions of the evidential argument from evil.

The term “wise” applied to judgments is honorific, suggesting special epistemic achievement. That achievement consists in making ajudgment on the basis of an aspect of inner experience I call seeing through illusion. I analyze the inner experience of seeing through illusion, then use it to develop a moderate internalist theory of wise judgment. The theory illuminates examples of wise judgment, explains ordinary intuitions we have about it, and can be defended against objections. This suggests that an epistemology of wise judgment can be developed in terms of existing epistemological concepts.

Analogies are offered to guide our explanatory responses to the fine-tuning of the universe. Situations that prompt us to reject an explanation involving a single chance event are presented as analogous to the fine-tuning. Thus, by analogy, we are prompted to reject an explanation of the fine-tuning involving a single universe fine-tuned by chance. But if the alleged analogues are not analogous they misguide us. I argue that the alleged analogues are not analogous and hence they do misguide our explanatory responses to the fine-tuning. I use William Dembski’s work on eliminating chance explanations for “specified” events of small probability to illustrate the misguiding nature of the analogies.

James Beilby’s Epistemology as Theology is the first monograph to address Alvin Plantinga’s completed Warrant Trilogy. The book provides a thorough introduction to Plantinga’s current religious epistemology, but readers hoping for a critical treatment of Plantinga will be largely disappointed: while Beilby does level criticisms against Plantinga, he often underestimates their significance. One of Beilby’s main goals is to sketch out how a version of Reformed epistemology, even if not exactly Plantinga’s version, can withstand its critics. I provide a chapter-by-chapter examination of Beilby’s book, and argue his defense of Reformed epistemology is not obviously a significant improvement over Plantinga’s.