Faith and Philosophy

I present and defend an “indexical” version of the Fine-Tuning Argument. I begin by outlining the dialectic between the Fine-Tuning Argument, the Multiverse Objection, and the This-Universe Reply. Next, I sketch an indexical fine-tuning argument and defend it from two new objections. Then, I show that such an argument is immune to the Multiverse Objection. I explain how a further augmentation to the argument allows it to avoid an objection I call the “Indifference Objection.” I conclude that my indexical version of the Fine-Tuning Argument is no less cogent than the standard version, and yet it is immune to the Multiverse Objection.

In this paper, I introduce a problem to the philosophy of religion—the problem of divine moral standing—and explain how this problem is distinct from (albeit related to) the more familiar problem of evil (with which it is often conflated). In short, the problem is this: given how God would be (or, on some conceptions, is) “involved in” our actions, how is it that God has the moral standing to blame us for performing those very actions? In light of the recent literature on “moral standing,” I consider God’s moral standing to blame on two models of “divine providence”: open theism and theological determinism. I contend that God may have standing on open theism, and—perhaps surprisingly—may also have standing even on theological determinism, given the truth of compatibilism. The topic of this paper thus sheds considerable light on the traditional philosophical debate about the conditions of moral responsibility.

Resolving religious disagreements is difficult, for beliefs about religion tend to come with strong biases against other views and the people who hold them. Evidence can help, but there is no agreed-upon policy for weighting it, and moreover bias affects the content of our evidence itself. Another complicating factor is that some biases are reliable and others unreliable. What we need is an evidence-weighting policy geared toward negotiating the effects of bias. I consider three evidence-weighting policies in the philosophy of religion and advocate one of them as the best for promoting the resolution of religious disagreements.

There is a concern about the effectiveness of petitionary prayer. If I pray for something good, wouldn’t God give it to me anyway? And if I pray for something bad, won’t God refrain from giving it to me even though I’ve asked? This problem has received significant attention. The typical solutions suggest that the prayer itself can alter whether something is good or bad. I will argue that this is insufficient to fully address the problem, but also that the problem requires another assumption which can be doubted, thereby opening up a new way to solve the problem.

Some claim that cognitive science of religion (CSR) either completely “explains religion away,” or at the very least calls the epistemic status of religious belief into question. Others claim that religious beliefs are the cognitive outputs of systems that seem highly reliable in other contexts, and thus CSR provides positive epistemic support for religious belief. I argue that (i) CSR does not provide evidence for atheism, but (ii) if one is an atheist, CSR lends “intellectual aid and comfort,” (iii) CSR does not provide evidence for theism, but (iv) if one is a theist, CSR provides qualified support for Reformed Epistemology.

Scott Davison has raised an epistemic challenge to the doctrine of petitionary prayer. Roughly, the challenge is that we cannot know or have reason to believe that a prayer has been answered. Davison argues that the epistemic challenge undermines all the extant defenses of petitionary prayer. I argue that it does not.