Literal-minded Christians are enjoying resurgent respectability in intellectual circles. Darwin isn’t the only target: also under attack is the application of modern historiography to Scripture According to Reformed epistemologists, ordinary Christians can directly know that, e.g., Jesus rose from the dead, and evidential concerns can be dismissed. This reversion to a sixteenth century hermeneutic deserves response.

In this paper, I review evidence which strongly supports the claim that life will eventually be extinguished from the universe. I then examine the ethical implications of this evidence, focusing, in particular, on the question whether it is a bad thing that life will eventually die out.

A recent slew of arguments, if sound, would demonstrate that realism about value involves a kind of paradox-I call it the BAD paradox.More precisely, they show that if there are genuine propositions about the good, then one could maintain harmony between one’s desires and one’s beliefs about the good only on pain of violating fundamental principles of decision theory. I show. however, the BAD paradox turns out to be a version of Newcomb’s problem, and that the cognitivist about value can avoid the paradox by embracing casual decision theory.

The metaphilosophy of naturalism is about the nature and goals of naturalist philosophy. A real or hypothetical person who knows the nature, goals and consequences of naturalist philosophy may be called an “informed naturalist.” An informed naturalist is justified indrawing certain conclusions about the current state of naturalism and the research program that naturalist philosophers ought to undertake. One conclusion is that the great majority of naturalist philosophers have an unjustified belief that naturalism is true and an unjustified belief that theism (or supernaturalism) is false. I explain this epistemic situation in this paper. I also articulate the goals an informed naturalist would recommend to remedy this situation. These goals, for the most part, have as their consequence the restoring of naturalism to its original state (approximately, to a certain degree, given the great difference in the specific theories), which is the state it possessed in Greco-Roman philosophy before naturalism was “overwhelmed” in the Middle Ages, beginning with Augustine (naturalism had critics as far back as Xenophanes, sixth century B.C.E., but it was not “overwhelmed” until much later). Contemporary naturalists still accept, unwittingly, the redefinition of naturalism that began to be constructed by theists in the fifth century C.E. and that underpins our basic world-view today.

In Warranted Christian Belief, Alvin Plantinga makes use of his earlier two books, Warrant: the Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function, to show how it is possible for someone to have a warranted belief that God exists and that all of the great things of the Christian Gospel are true even if the believer is unable to give any argument to support these beliefs. Three objections are lodged against Plantinga’s position. First, the alleged sensus divinitatis and the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit are crucially disanalogous to the cognitive faculties, such as memory and perception, in the standard package, thereby destroying his argument based on an analogy between the former and the latter. Second, in order to defeat defeaters for these beliefs one must give arguments, thus merely relocating the point at which the believer must produce argumentative support for her belief. Third, there are moral defeaters for exclusivist basic theistic and Christian beliefs based on the undesirable consequences of such beliefs.

The soul has played many different roles in philosophy and religion. Two of the primary functions of the soul are the bearer of personal identity and the foundation of immortality. In this paper I shall consider different interpretations of what the soul has been taken to be and argue that however we interpret the soul we cannot consistently maintain the soul is both what we are and what continues after our bodily death.

Alleged counter-examples based on conceptual thought experiments, including those involving sense or content, have no force against physicalist supervenience theses properly construed. This is largely because of their epistemological status and their modal status. Still, there are empirical examples that do contradict Kim-style theses, due to the latter’s individualism. By contrast, non-individualist supervenience, such as “global” supervenience, remains unscathed, a possibility overlooked by Lynne Baker, as is dear from a physicalist account of sense in the case of non-human biological adaptations that are for producing things about affairs in the world.

In this article, two of Theodore Drange’s atheological arguments against the God of Christianity are refuted by what I call the “Expectations Defense.” By means of this defense, it is shown that, despite what Drange argues, the existence of evil and unbelief cannot be used as evidence against the existence of the God of the Bible. The fact that biblical history describes God as allowing there to be vast amounts of evil and unbelief prevents us from citing the existence of those things as evidence against the existence of the biblical God. Quite simply, we should expect there to be great amounts of suffering and doubt if the God of the Bible exists. As a result of this, it follows that Drange’s arguments are unsound, and should be rejected by rational people.

Locke’s critique of enthusiastic religion is an attempt to undermine a form of supernaturalist belief. In this paper, I argue for a novel interpretation of that critique. By opening up a middle path between the views of John Passmore and Michael Ayers, I show that Locke is accusing the enthusiast of being a self-deceived believer. First, I demonstrate the manner in which a theory of self-deception squares with Locke’s intellectualist epistemology. Second, I argue that Locke thinks he can show that the enthusiasts’ most cherished beliefs are in fact contrary to manifest evidence. In “matters of ultimate concern” to us---i.e., our religious beliefs---the critique is thus meant tobuttress Locke’s commitment to a naturalistic ethics of belief

The characteristic claim of Christianity, as codified at Chalcedon, is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, is numerically the same person as Jesus of Nazareth. This article raises three questions that appear to threaten the coherence of orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalism. First, how can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible natures? Second, how can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible non-nature properties? Third, how can there be one person if the concept of incarnation implies that one person incarnates himself as another person? The attempts of C. S. Lewis and T. V. Morris to deal with these difficulties are examined and found inconclusive.

This article vindicates human rights, not as natural rights holding wherever human beings are, but as reducible to one historically constructed right to freedom of thought and its universal modes. Universal morality is elicited from international human rights law. To be moral is first to help engender everywhere either mere inner recognition of the validity of rights or mere outer compliance with their requirements; and to engender finally inner recognition expressed in a duty of outer observance. Human rights ethics replaces the rights consciousness common in the West with a duty consciousness. This universal rational morality supersedes utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other rational theories. Yet moralities making no rational claim on all (e.g., Christian, Buddhist) may flourish within human rights ethics as the universal ethical minimum.

This paper begins with a fairly careful and detailed discussion of the conditions under which someone who presents an argument ought to be prepared to concede that the argument is unsuccessful. The conclusions reached in this discussion are then applied to William Lane Craig’s defense of what he calls “the kalam cosmological argument.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chief contention of the paper is that Craig ought to be prepared to concede that “the kalam cosmological argument” is not a successful argument. The paper pays particular attention to Craig’s recent criticisms of Adolf Grünbaum’s contention that “the kalam cosmological argument” presupposes “the normalcy of nothingness”; and it also addresses some methodological issues raised by Craig’s response to my previous criticisms of his replies to critiques of “the kalam cosmological argument” provided by Grünbaum, Hawking, and Davies.

William Lane Craig claims that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is strongly supported by the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. In the present paper, I critically examine Craig’s arguments for this claim. I conclude that they are unsuccessful, and that the Big Bang theory provides no support for the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Even if it is granted that the universe had a “first cause,” there is no reason to think that this cause created the universe out of nothing. As far as the Big Bang theory is concerned, the cause of the universe might have been what Adolf Grünbaum has called a “transformative cause”---a cause that shaped something that was “already there.”

New definitions of theism and of faith are offered that are consistent with low degrees of belief in a god. Theism and atheism are as much differences of desire as of belief. The argument depends on a new conception of knowledge. I use decision theory to reconstruct the Kantian distinction between speculative reason and practical reason, but I make the distinction in a non-Kantian way. The former, which is knowledge, is characterized in terms of an effect in probability theory---what I call diachronic bootstrapping---which distinguishes our knowledge from the corpus of beliefs that guide our actions. The latter can include theism, even when the former does not.

In his recent book Warranted Christian Belief (2000), Alvin Plantinga argues that the defender of naturalistic evolution is faced with adefeater for his position: as products of naturalistic evolution, we have no way of knowing if our cognitive faculties are in fact reliably aimed at the truth. This defeater is successfully avoided by the theist in that, given theism, we can be reasonably secure that out cognitive faculties are indeed reliable. I argue that Plantinga’s argument is ultimately based on a faulty comparison, that he is comparing naturalistic evolution generally to one particular model of theism. In light of this analysis, the two models either stand or fall together with respect to the defeater that Plantinga offers.

The main aim of this paper is to examine an almost universal assumption concerning the structure of Paley’s argument for design. Almost all commentators suppose that Paley’s argument is an inductive argument---either an argument by analogy or an argument by inference to the best explanation. I contend, on the contrary, that Paley’s argument is actually a straightforwardly deductive argument. Moreover, I argue that, when Paley’s argument is properly understood, it can readily be seen that it is no good. Finally---although I do not stress this very much---I note that the points that I make about Paley’s argument can carryover to modern design arguments that are based upon the argument that Paley actually gives.

Before being able to answer key practical questions dependent on a criterion of personal identity (e.g., am I justified in anticipating surviving the death of my body?), we must first determine which general approach to the issue of personal identity is more plausible, reductionism or non-reductionism. While reductionism has become the more dominant. approach amongst philosophical theorists over the past thirty years, non-reductionism remains an approach that, for all these theorists have shown, could very well still be true. My aim in this paper is to show that non-reductionism is actually either irrelevant---with respect to the practical questions we want answered---or logically impossible. In arguing for this conclusion, I draw from a case Derek Parfit has employed---the CombinedSpectrum---and I provide a number of variations to it which ultimately reveal that we have no possible rational recourse other than to become reductionists.

In “A Refutation of Drange’s Arguments from Evil and Nonbelief” (Philo, vol. 5, no. 1), Christopher McHugh posed his so-calledExpectations Defense against versions of the Argument from Evil and Argument from Nonbelief that appear in my book Nonbelief & Evil. I here raise objections to his defense.

The problem of infant suffering and death has remained one of the most intractable problems for theists. Andrew Chignell has attempted to develop a theodicy for this problem that is based on Marilyn Adam’s paradigm for theodicy. However, his discussion repeatedly avoids the argument that, traditionally, most have thought to be the basis of this problem of evil. Thus, his theodicy provides the traditional theist with no adequate response to the problem. I argue that since infant suffering is a serious (and inadequately addressed) problem for any theodicy, animal torture and death is a serious problem as well. I note that few theodicies have addressed animal suffering in a manner that takes their pain seriously.

According to Theodore Schick, Jr., Eugenie C. Scott’s endorsement of methodological naturalism---roughly, the view that science is limited by its methodology to be neutral vis-à-vis the supernatural---is misguided. He offers three arguments; I contend that none is successful.