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.

This paper aims to show how philosophical debates about the nature of music as an art can throw light on one of the problems raised by Plato’s Euthryphro—how can human beings serve the gods?—and applies this to the use of music in worship. The paper gives a broad overview of expressivist, representationalist and formalist philosophies of music. Drawing in part on Hanslick, Nietzsche and Schleiermacher, it argues that formalism as a philosophy of sacred music can generate an answer to Plato’s problem.

Perfect being theology is the attempt to decide questions about the nature of God by employing the Anselmian formula that God is the greatest possible being. One form of perfect being theology—recently defended by Brian Leftow in God and Necessity—holds that we can decide between incompatible claims that God is F and that God is not F by asking which claim would confer more greatness on God, and then using the formula that God is the greatest possible being to rule out the one which confers less greatness on God. This paper argues that this form of argument, while intuitively quite plausible, does not work.

The most important and common solution to the Pyrrhonian skeptic’s regress problem is foundationalism. Reason-giving must stop somewhere, argues the foundationalist, and the fact that it does stop (at foundational, basic, non-inferentially justified beliefs) does not threaten knowledge or justification. The foundationalist has a problem, though; while foundationalism might adequately answer skepticism, it does not allow for a satisfying reply to the skeptic. The feature that makes a belief foundationally justified is not the sort of thing that can be given to another as a reason. Thus, if foundationalism is true, we can only fall silent in the face of a challenge to our epistemically basic beliefs. Call this the practical or existential problem of foundationalism. Thomas Reid offers a rather stunning solution to this problem. Humor (“ridicule”), he thinks, can be used to defend basic beliefs which cannot be defended by argument. We develop and defend an account on which Reid is correct and emotions such as rueful amusement can be invoked to rationally persuade the skeptic to accept foundationally justified beliefs. Then, inspired by Kierkegaard, we extend the account to foundational moral and religious beliefs.

The problem of divine hiddenness has become one of the most prominent arguments for atheism in contemporary philosophy of religion. The basic idea: we have good reason to think that God, if He existed, would make Himself known to us such that His existence could not be rationally doubted (or at least He would make Himself known among those who are willing to believe). And since He hasn’t done so, we can be confident that He does not actually exist. One line of response that has received relatively little attention is the argument that God justly refrains from granting us all a rationally indubitable belief in Him because we are unworthy of such belief, and in fact deserve exclusion from communion with God. John Schellenberg dubs this the “Just Deserts Argument.” Here I consider several possible versions of the argument and subject one of them to further development and defense.

This paper aims to neutralize Draper-style evidential arguments from evil by defending five theses: (1) that, when those who advance these arguments use the word “evil,” they are referring, at least in large part, to ill-being; (2) that well-being and ill-being come as a pair (i.e., are essentially related); (3) that well-being and ill-being are best understood in an at least partly objectivist way; (4) that (even partial) objectivism about well-being and ill-being is best understood as implying non-naturalism about well-being and ill-being; and (5) that the truth of non-naturalism about well-being and ill-being does not fit cleanly with naturalism and, in fact, fits at least as well with theism as it does with naturalism.

The aim of this paper is to show that the supposed close connection between fiction and false discourse is in fact not strong at all. In wondering whether the Bible is fiction, people quite often tend to think that if you say it is fiction, you imply it is false. In order to argue for our conclusion, Freud’s notion of illusion is analyzed, as well as work by Spinoza and Searle. From the latter, the pragmatic perspective of fiction is borrowed: contrary to the semantic perspective, the pragmatic perspective is independent of the semantic notions of truth and falsity. With the aid of this perspective, the connection between being fiction and falsity is called into question.