Philo

Matt McCormick argues that because a thinking mind must be able to make subject-object distinctions with objects outside of itself, and God is everywhere immediately present to all objects (according to a classical conception of omniscience), he cannot truly make this distinction and therefore cannot think. Here, I probe McCormick’s Kantian notions of psychological representations and metaphysics and explore a version of classical theism that may evade his critique.

Alvin Plantinga notes that if what Christians believe is true, their beliefs are warranted. It follows, he argues, that the only decisive objection to Christian belief is a de facto one: an argument that shows that what Christians believe is false. We disagree. A critic could mount a direct attack on the Christian’s claim to warrant by offering a more plausible account of the causal mechanism giving rise to belief, one that shows that mechanism to be unreliable. This would represent a powerful de jure argument against Christian belief.

The logical threat natural evil poses to theistic belief has been primarily ignored in the literature because Alvin Plantinga’s solution to the logical problem of natural evil is considered by most to be definitive. I will argue that it is not; Plantinga misunderstands the logical problem of natural evil and thus fails utterly in responding to it. This failure is significant because once the problem of natural evil is properly understood, it is clear that no existing solution to any version of the problem of evil can be adapted to solve it. Consequently, more attention needs to be paid by theists to the logical problem of natural evil.

The Many Gods Objection (MGO) is widely viewed as a decisive criticism of Pascal’s Wager. Some have attempted to rebut it by employing criteria drawn from the theological tradition. This paper will offer a different sort of defense of the Wager, one more suited to its apologetic aim as well as to its status as a decision under ignorance. It will be shown that there are characteristics already built into the Wager’s decision theoretic structure that can block many categories of theological hypotheses including MGO’s more outrageous “cooked-up” hypotheses and “philosophers’ fictions.”

John Searle holds that social reality is created by the deontology of institutions, the understanding of which requires an account of prelinguistic-intentionality.A tentative explanation is presented as to how the recognition of rudimentary rights and obligations developed from genetic preparedness and the conditions of survival for minimally-linguistic hominids. Searle’s rationality explanation of why people fulfill their obligations is contrasted with an alternative instrumentalist view. It is suggested that respect for the positive deontic powers of institutions contributes a sense of belonging that increases social cohesiveness and lowers social viscosity.

In his book, The Last Word, Thomas Nagel expresses the hope that there exists no God. Guy Kahane, in his paper ‘Should We Want God to Exist?’, attempts to defend Nagel from an argument that concludes such a hope may be impermissible. In this paper we present a new defense for the hope that God does not exist.

In responding to Matthew Flannagan’s rebuttal to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s argument that ethical naturalism is more plausible than William Lane Craig’s Divine Command Theory of moral obligation (DCT), this author finds Flannagan incorrect on almost every point. Any defense of DCT is fallaciously circular and empirically untestable, whereas neither is the case for ethical naturalism. Accordingly, all four of Armstrong’s objections stand against Flannagan’s attempts to rebut them, and Flannagan’s case is impotent against a properly-formed naturalist metaethic.

Our world is littered with examples of the cannibalisation by secondary authors of the thoughts of original thinkers, rehashed as rule-books and manuals on how to live our lives. No such distortion of an idea has had the lasting success of Saint Paul’s corruption of the life and thoughts of Jesus of Nazareth—man or myth we’ll never know. Nietzsche’s over quoted remark, “God is dead,” belies his frustration that in 2,000 years, Western civilisation has not invented for itself a new god. His project of exposing Paul as a charlatan in his penultimate work, The Anti-Christ, hardly disguises Nietzsche’s belief that he could have done a better job, in his case celebrating everything that Christianity stood against: the lost glories of our ancient past symbolising our ‘natural’ human instincts. This essay reassesses assumptions about Nietzsche and his intentions in writing The Anti-Christ to reveal the philosopher’s deep affinity for the original, pre-Christian sage,who provided the main character and plot for Paul’s fiction.

In many of his addresses and debates, William Lane Craig has defended a Divine Command Theory of moral obligation (DCT). In a recent article and subsequent monograph, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has criticized Craig’s position.1 Armstrong contended that a DCT is subject to several devastating objections and further contended that even if theism is true a particular form of ethical naturalism is a more plausible account of the nature of moral obligations than a DCT is. This paper critiques Armstrong’s argument. I will argue Armstrong’s objections do not refute a DCT and the ethical naturalism he defends is not more plausible than Craig’s ethical supernaturalism.

A perfect being is a being which possesses all perfections essentially. A perfect being is essentially omniscient, essentially omnipotent, essentially perfectly good, and necessarily existing. In his excellent book “The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings” Michael J. Almeida investigates the following tough questions about perfect beings: What would a perfect being create? Which moral requirements would a perfect being (have to) fulfill when deciding what to create? Is there a minimum or a maximum amount of evil a perfect being would allow to occur? Could a perfect being permit any instance of pointless and undeserved suffering of creatures? Does a perfect being have some freedom to choose what to create? Could a perfect being be just in sending some people eternally to heaven and some people eternally to hell? Almeida applies modern theories about vagueness, infinite values, possible world semantics and many universes to these questions. In this way Almeida investigates these questions in more detail and depth than they have been before and substantially advances the discussion of these issues.

I examine what I shall call meta-philosophy: a philosophical examination into what philosophy is, can be, should be, something of what it has been, what the point (if any) of it is and what, if anything, it can contribute to our understanding of and the making sense of our lives, including our lives individually and together, and of the social order in which we live.

R. Scott Smith argues that it is only theism, and not naturalism, that can deliver us knowledge. In this brief essay, I focus on the phenomenon of intentionality as articulated and developed by Smith and explore implications of his thesis for metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophical theology.