Philosophy of Religion

This book presents new work in philosophical theology on the universe, creation, and the afterlife. Organised thematically by the endpoints of time, the volume begins by addressing eschatological matters — the doctrines of heaven and hell — and ends with an account of divine deliberation and creation. This book develops a coherent theistic outlook which reconciles a traditional, high conception of deity, with full providential control over all aspects of creation, with a conception of human beings as free and morally responsible. The resulting position and defence is labelled ‘Philosophical Arminianism’, and deserves attention in a broad range of religious traditions.

The book is a new edition of Eternal God first published in 1988, and contains four new chapters. It offers a defence of divine timeless eternity. After sketching the nature of such eternity in the first two chapters, a number of philosophical objections are considered, such as the argument from personality and from the incompatibility of divine eternity and indexical knowledge. A number of standard objections are discussed, and the account is further developed in the light of these. Among them are the nature of an eternal God's foreknowledge of what happens in time, and its relation to human choice, and how and in what manner such divine foreknowledge differs from fatalism. This leads to a consideration of foreknowledge and human responsibility, the sense in which timeless divine choice is free, and how it is possible to refer to an eternal God. The first of the final four new chapters explores the view of W. L. Craig that God is timeless sans creation but temporal thereafter. This leads to a consideration of timelessness and causation, in connection with creation, and then the importance of the distinction between a timeless God's perspective on his creation and those of agents in time. Assuming that God is triune, the final chapter discusses the relation between the three persons of the divine, first if God is considered to be in time, and then if he is eternal.

A fundamental question in the field of religious epistemology asks whether religious belief must be based on evidence in order to be properly held. In recent years two prominent positions on this issue have been staked out: evidentialism, which claims that proper religious belief requires evidence; and Reformed epistemology, which claims that it does not. This book contains eleven chapters by prominent philosophers which push the discussion in new directions. The book has three parts. Chapters in the first part explore the demand for evidence: some object to it while others seek to restate it or find space for compromise between Reformed epistemology and evidentialism. Chapters in the second part explore ways in which beliefs are related to evidence, that is, ways that what evidence for or against religious belief is available to a person can depend on that person’s background beliefs and other circumstances. The third part of the book contains chapters that discuss actual evidence for and against religious belief. Evidence for belief in God includes the so-called common consent of the human race and the way that such belief makes sense of the moral life; evidence against it includes profound puzzles about divine freedom which suggest that it is impossible for a being to be morally perfect.

It is a principal aim of this book to show that several widely believed and largely undisputed principles in philosophical theology are in fact just philosophical dogmas. The well-entrenched principles have served as basic assumptions in some of the most powerful apriori atheological arguments. But most theists also maintain that the principles express apriori necessary truths. The philosophical dogmas include principles that are presumed to follow from the nature of an essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially perfectly good and necessarily existing being. Among the atheological arguments that deploy these philosophical dogmas are the Logical Problem of Evil, the Logical Problem of the Best Possible World, the Logical Problem of Good Enough Worlds, the Problem of Divine Freedom, the Problem of No Best World, and the Evidential Problem of Evil. Solutions to several less serious atheological problems are also forthcoming. It is among the principal conclusions of the book that these arguments present no important challenge to the existence of an Anselmian God.

This book offers a theory of the possible and the necessary — modality — in which God plays the chief role, and a new sort of argument for God’s existence. It has become usual to say that a proposition is possible just in case it is true in some ‘possible world’ (roughly, some complete history a universe might have) and necessary just if it is true in all. Thus much discussion of possibility and necessity since the 1960s has focussed on the nature and existence (or not) of possible worlds. The book holds that there are no such things, nor any sort of abstract entity. The metaphysical ‘work’ such items usually do it assigns to God and events in His mind. It reduces ‘broadly logical’ to causal modalities and replaces possible worlds in the semantics of modal logic with God and His mental events. The book argues that theists are committed to theist modal theories, and that the merits of a theist modal theory provide an argument for God’s existence.Historically, almost all theist modal theories base all necessary truth on God’s nature. The book disagrees: it argues that necessary truths about possible creatures and kinds of creatures — about essences — are due ultimately to God’s unconstrained imagination and choice. On its theory, it is no sense part of the nature of God that normal zebras have stripes (if that’s a necessary truth). Stripy zebras are simply things God thought up, and they have the nature they do simply because that is how He thought of them. Thus the theory takes a half-step toward Descartes’ view of modal truth.

This book is a critical examination of the philosophical strategies for defending religious belief. The main strategies may be presented as conforming to the end nodes of a decision tree for a believer. The faithful can interpret a credal statement (e.g. ‘God exists’) either as a factual claim, or otherwise. If it is a factual claim, they can either be warranted to endorse it without evidence, etc., or not. Finally, should religious belief require evidential support, then ought that support be assessed by the same criteria that we use in evaluating evidence in science, or not? Each of these options has been defended by prominent analytic philosophers of religion. In Part I, Herman Philipse assesses the tenability of each of these strategies and argues that the most promising option for believers who want to be justified in accepting their creed in our scientific age is the Bayesian cumulative case strategy developed by Richard Swinburne. Parts II and III are devoted to an in-depth analysis of this case for theism. Using a ‘strategy of subsidiary arguments’, Philipse concludes (1) that theism cannot be stated meaningfully; (2) that if theism were meaningful, it would have no predictive power concerning existing evidence, so that Bayesian arguments cannot get started; and (3) that if the Bayesian cumulative case strategy did work, one should conclude that atheism is more probable than theism. According to a referee, the book is ‘full of careful, rigorous reasoning – much of it original’.

Molinism, named after the 16^th century Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina, re‐emerged in the 1970s after it was unwittingly assumed in versions of Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defence against the Logical Argument from Evil. The Molinist notion of middle knowledge——and especially its main objects, so‐called counterfactuals of (creaturely) freedom—have been the subject of vigorous debate in analytical philosophy of religion ever since. Is middle knowledge logically coherent? Is it a benefit or a liability overall for a satisfying account of divine providence? The essays in this collection examine the status, defensibility, and application of Molinism. Friends and foes of Molinism are well‐represented, and there are some lively exchanges between them. The collection provides a snap‐shot of the current state of the Molinism Wars, along with some discussion of where we've been and where we might go in the future. More battles surely lie ahead; the essays and ideas in this collection are likely to have a major impact on future directions. The essays are specially written by a line‐up of established, well‐respected philosophers of religion, metaphysicians, and logicians. There is a substantive Introduction and an extensive Bibliography to assist both students and professionals.

This is the third volume of the Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion series. As with the first two volumes, these essays follow the tradition of providing a non-sectarian and non-partisan snapshot of the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion. This subdiscipline has become an increasingly important one within philosophy over the last century, and especially over the past half century, having emerged as an identifiable subfield within this time frame along with other emerging subfields such as the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. This volume continues the initial intention behind the series of attracting the best work from the premier philosophers of religion, as well as including top philosophers outside this area when their work and interests intersect with issues in philosophy of religion. This inclusive approach to the series provides an opportunity to mitigate some of the costs of greater specialization in our disciplines, while at the same time inviting greater interest in the work being done in the philosophy of religion. We thus present the third volume in this series, a volume containing contributions by an impressive group of philosophers on topics of central important to the philosophy of religion.

At a time in which probability theory is exerting an unprecedented influence on epistemology and philosophy of science, promising to deliver an exact and unified foundation for the philosophy of rational inference and decision-making, it is worth remembering that the philosophy of religion has long proven to be an extremely fertile ground for the application of probabilistic thinking to traditional epistemological debates. This book offers a representative sample of the work currently being carried out in this potentially rich field of inquiry. Grouped into five sections, the chapters span a broad range of traditional issues in religious epistemology. The first three sections discuss the evidential impact of various considerations that have been thought to have a bearing on the question of the existence of God. These include witness reports of the occurrence of miraculous events, the existence of complex biological adaptations, the apparent ‘fine-tuning’ for life of various physical constants and the existence of seemingly unnecessary evil. The fourth section addresses a number of issues raised by Pascal’s famous pragmatic argument for theistic belief. A final section offers probabilistic perspectives on the rationality of faith and the epistemic significance of religious disagreement.

This book shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief, but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life’s moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive though ethics provides comprehensive standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One, concerning the relation between theism and evil, explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under a God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account concerns the metaphysical resources of theism and the nature of persons, human and divine, and it yields a theory that can sustain a rational theistic worldview in the contemporary scientific age.