Controversy over the epistemology of disagreement endures because there is an unnoticed factor at work: the intrinsic value we give to self-trust. Even if there are many instances of disagreement where, from a strictly epistemic or rational point of view, we ought to suspend belief, there are other values at work that influence our all-things considered judgments about what we ought to believe. Hence those who would give equal-weight to both sides in many cases of disagreement may be right, from (...) the perspective of pure rationality. But their critics are right too, in seeing something undesirable in the consequences of giving equal weight. Among epistemologists, there is a tendency to set aside trust and other such non-epistemic factors, on the grounds that these are not germane to their topic. But ultimately, the value of self-trust shows signs of encroaching on the strictly epistemic question of when our beliefs may be said to be justified. Hence again, even if the equal-weighters are right about what is rational, they may be wrong about what knowledge requires. (shrink)

Kant’s accounts of the Highest Good and the moral argument for God and immortality are central features of his philosophy. But both involve lingering puzzles. In this entry, we first explore what the Highest Good is for Kant and the role it plays in a complete account of ethical life. We then focus on whether the Highest Good involves individuals only, or whether it also connects with Kant’s doctrines about the moral progress of the species. In conclusion, we look into (...) three ways of articulating the moral argument for God and immorality that take our commitment to the Highest Good as their point of departure. (shrink)

The objection of horrible commands claims that divine command metaethics is doomed to failure because it is committed to the extremely counterintuitive assumption that torture of innocents, rape, and murder would be morally obligatory if God commanded these acts. Morriston, Wielenberg, and Sinnott-Armstrong have argued that formulating this objection in terms of counterpossibles is particularly forceful because it cannot be simply evaded by insisting on God’s necessary perfect moral goodness. I show that divine command metaethics can be defended even against (...) this counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands because we can explain the truth-value intuitions about the disputed counterpossibles as the result of conversational implicatures. Furthermore, I show that this pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics has several advantages over Pruss’s reductio counterargument against the counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands. (shrink)

The Christian tradition affirms that faith is a virtue. Faith is a multifaceted reality, though, encompassing such diverse aspects as belief, trust, obedience, and more. Given this complexity, it is no surprise that various thinkers emphasize different aspects of faith in accounting for faith’s status as a virtue. In this paper I join Søren Kierkegaard in arguing that faith is a passion, and that faith is a virtue because it disposes the person of faith to proper emotional responses. The paper (...) has three sections. First, I lay the groundwork for understanding faith as a passion by explaining the relationship between passions and emotions. Drawing on the works of Kierkegaard, Merold Westphal, and Robert C. Roberts, I distinguish two senses of passion, and show how these senses are related to each other and to faith. The second section uses the account of faith developed in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to develop the idea that passional faith is a deep, identity-forming attachment to God. Finally, I explicate the idea that passional faith, so understood, functions as an emotion disposition. I do so by expounding part one of Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses, which explores some of the ways in which faith disposes one away from certain emotions and toward other emotions. (shrink)

The Euthyphro objection is often perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the king objection to theistic meta-ethics. This paper proposes a response that hasn’t been much explored within the contemporary literature, based on the metaphysics of dispositions and natural law theory. The paper will first contend that there is a parallel between ways theists conceptualise God’s role in creating laws of nature and the ways God creates goods. Drawing upon these parallels I propose a possible response to the dilemma, where this (...) response parallels the dispositionalist response as to how God creates laws of nature. I do this by first explicating a natural law theory of goodness, then suggesting how the ontology of dispositions can be used in a novel way to account for goods, and finally by explaining how all this relates to the dilemma. I conclude the paper by posing some objections to myself and providing some replies. (shrink)

I provide an argument from consciousness for God’s existence. I first consider a version of the argument which is ultimately difficult to evaluate. I then consider a stronger argument, on which consciousness, given our worldly laws of nature, is rather substantial evidence for God’s existence. It is this latter argument the paper largely focuses on, both in setting it out and defending it from various objections.

A good deal of attention has been given in recent philosophy of religion to the question of whether we can sensibly attribute to God a form of knowledge which the 16th-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina termed "middle knowledge". Interest in the doctrine has been spurred by a recognition of its intimate connection to certain conceptions of providence, prophecy, and response to petitionary prayer. According to defenders of the doctrine, which I will call "Molinism", the objects of middle knowledge are (...) all the true counterfactuals of the form, 'If C were to occur, then S would freely do A', where C specifies a particular set of circumstances. (Such propositions are usually referred to as "counterfactuals of freedom" - hereafter "CFs".)' I will try to assess the current status of two distinct questions: (1) Are there true CFs? and (2) Could God know true CFs if there are any? Obviously, Molinism must answer both questions affirmatively. Most of the discussion has focused on the first question. I hope to show that this approach has been a dialectical mistake on the part of critics of Molinism, for the difficulties of giving an affirmative answer to question (2) are, I believe, far easier to state clearly and convincingly. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge both the contemporary secular view that religious faith is not a virtue, and also the contemporary theistic view that religious faith is a virtue that is unavailable to nonbelievers. Although these views appear reasonable from the respective sides when faith is interpreted as belief, if faith is understood to be the entrusting of one’s ultimate concerns to whatever powers are in control (as I suggest), then such faith, with its accompanying ‘freedom from bondage’ (Spinoza), not (...) only appears to be a virtue in itself, but it also appears to be one that can be achieved by nonbelievers as well as by theists.This is not to claim, however, that theists should hold the nonbeliever’s faith to be as viable as their own (or vice versa); rather, it is to claim that there is no more reason for theists to hold that nonbelievers must be without faith than there is for them to hold that nonbelievers must be without hope or love.Still, of course, it may be that God does exist and that the belief that he exists is part of the formula for the realization of some ultimate religious concern, such as eternal life. (For example, it could have been that there was a person conducting a rescue mission for the mountain climbers, but who refused to bring those who did not believe so to final safety, even though they has boarded the platform.) So, if God does exist and if the formula for eternal life, for example, does include the requirement that creatures believe that he exists, then atheists and agnostics will certainly have erred by not embracing theism. But their error then (assuming their doubts not to be the products of such vices as pride or dishonesty) will have been an error in calculative judgment, rather than a failure in virtue: they will have erred by not having engaged a hypnotist—at least in last resort— to equip them with a precautionary theism. (shrink)

This paper begins with the oft-repeated claim that having faith involves trust in God. Taking this platitude seriously requires at least two philosophical tasks. First, one must address the relevant notion of “trust” guiding the platitude. I offer a sketch of epistemic trust: arguing that epistemic trust involves several components: acceptance, communication, dependence, and confidence. The first duo concerns the epistemic element of epistemic trust and the second part delimit the fiducial aspect to epistemic trust. Second, one must also examine (...) what differentiates faith qua trust. I argue that we should not distinguish faith from trust merely by believing religious propositions but by the attitudes they express. In particular, the attitude of faith is more deeply entrenched and central to one’s noetic structure than trust simpliciter. The paper ends by arguing that the account proposed insofar as it accommodates and explains certain “faith desiderata”. We can thus give content to the “faith is a kind of trust” platitude with a model of trust on hand while showing how that model confirms and explains important features of faith. (shrink)

In this essay I will contend that there is something called holy fear, which expresses love for God. First I distinguish holy fear from certain types of unholy fear and from the type of fear regulated by the virtue of courage. Next, relying on the work of Thomas Aquinas, I consider the roles love and power play in holy and unholy fear and extend his analysis of the passion of fear by analogy to the capital vices. I conclude that this (...) extension illuminates the moral significance of John PaulII’s call not to be afraid and shows how this theme of his pontificate is inextricably linked to another great theme of his teaching, that of love as a gift of oneself. (shrink)

Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics identifies the virtues with the traits the fully virtuous person possesses. Further, it depicts the fully virtuous person as having all the cognitive perfections necessary for possessing practical wisdom. This paper argues that these two theses disqualify faith as trust, as construed on contemporary accounts of faith, as a virtue. For faith’s role as a virtue depends on limitations of its possessor that are incompatible with the psychological profile of the fully virtuous person on the neo-Aristotelian picture. (...) I argue that because of tensions internal to the standard neo-Aristotelian view and the compelling arguments in recent literature that faith is a virtue, the neo-Aristotelian has good reason to revise her account of virtue and picture of the fully virtuous person. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne argues that belief is a necessary but not sufficient condition for faith, and he also argues that, while faith is voluntary, belief is involuntary. This essay is concerned with the tension arising from the involuntary aspect of faith, the Christian doctrine that human beings have an obligation to exercise faith, and the moral claim that people are only responsible for actions where they have the ability to do otherwise. Put more concisely, the problem concerns the coherence of the (...) following claims: (1) one cannot have faith, (2) one has an obligation to have faith, and (3) ought implies can. To solve this dilemma, I offer three solutions that I believe have the philosophical resources to demonstrate the consistency of these claims. Thus, I defend the claim that it is logically possible for a person to be culpable for an involuntary failure to have faith in God. (shrink)

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] intellectual virtue an obstacle to religious faith? The papers in this fine collection answer this question either directly or indirectly.1 The editors, Laura Callahan and Timothy O’Connor, are to be congratulated on requesting, and receiving, from the authors accessible papers that cover many of the relevant issues. In addition they have provided a clear introduction and useful summaries....In (...) this review, I first consider the way the editors explicate the question. Then I examine the authors' answers. Finally I draw some conclusions from the various papers.In their Introduction the editors remind us of the complexity of faith, which typically involves: various intellectual propensities, notably tenacity of belief; a world-view; a moral orientation and an ‘affective stance’. This last may well be the... (shrink)

I argue that it is rational for a person to believe the conjunction of her beliefs. This involves responding to the Lottery and Preface Paradoxes. In addition, I suggest that in normal circumstances, what it is to believe a conjunction just is to believe its conjuncts.

What is the highest good actually good for in Kant’s third Critique? While there are well-worked out answers to this question in the literature that focus on the highest good’s practical importance, this paper argues that there is an important function for the highest good that has to do exclusively with contemplation. This important function becomes clear once one notices that coherent [konsequent] thinking, for Kant, was synonymous with "bündiges" thinking, and that both are connected with the highest good in (...) the third Critique’s moral proof for God’s existence. I show that the original meaning of "bündig," which is from the carpentry trade and has been forgotten, illuminates the stakes of the highest good in Kant’s system. For us, as proverbial carpenters of reason, coherence is essential for the intellectual activity of constructing a philosophical worldview in his transcendental idealism. I motivate the reading further by showing how this function can neatly reconstruct Kant’s proof for God’s existence in the third Critique. I conclude by sketching Kant’s reasons for why the project of creating a coherent worldview grounded in the highest good is worth the labor costs. (shrink)

In classical India, debates over rational theology naturally become the occasion for fundamental questions about the scope and power of inference itself. This is well evinced in the classical proofs for God by the Hindu Nyāya tradition and the opposing arguments of classical Buddhists and Mīmāsā philosophers. This paper calls attention to, and provides analysis of, a number of key nodes in these debates, particularly questions of inferential boundaries and whether inductive reasoning has the power to support inferences to wholly (...) unique entities (like God). (shrink)

A well-known objection to divine will/divine command moral theories is that they commit us to the view that God's will is arbitrary. I argue that several versions of divine will/divine command moral theories, including two of Robert Adams's versions of the DCT and my own divine preference theory, can be successfully defended against this objection. I argue that, even if God's preferences are somewhat arbitrary, we have reasons to conform our wills to them. It is not a fatal objection to (...) divine will/divine command moral theories if they imply that God's will/God's commands is/are arbitrary, to some extent. (shrink)

Belief is a central focus of inquiry in the philosophy of religion and indeed in the field of religion itself. No one conception of belief is central in all these cases, and sometimes the term 'belief' is used where 'faith' or 'acceptance' would better express what is intended. This paper sketches the major concepts in the philosophy of religion that are expressed by these three terms. In doing so, it distinguishes propositional belief (belief that) from both objectual belief (believing something (...) to have a property) and, more importantly, belief in (a trusting attitude that is illustrated by at least many paradigm cases of belief in God). Faith is shown to have a similar complexity, and even propositional faith divides into importantly different categories. Acceptance differs from both belief and faith in that at least one kind of acceptance is behavioral in a way neither of the other two elements is. Acceptance of a proposition, it is argued, does not entail believing it, nor does believing entail acceptance in any distinctive sense of the latter term. In characterizing these three notions (and related ones), the paper provides some basic materials important both for understanding a person's religious position and for appraising its rationality. The nature of religious faith and some of the conditions for its rationality, including some deriving from elements of an ethics of belief, are explored in some detail. (shrink)

The “ ethics of belief” refers to a cluster of questions at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, and ethics. The central question in the debate is whether there are norms of some sort governing our habits of belief formation, belief maintenance, and belief relinquishment. Is it ever or always morally wrong to hold a belief on insufficient evidence? Is it ever or always morally right to believe on the basis of sufficient evidence, or to withhold belief in (...) the perceived absence of it? Is it ever or always obligatory to seek out all available epistemic evidence for a belief? Are there some ways of obtaining evidence that are themselves immoral or imprudent? -/-. (shrink)

The subject of this thesis is physicalism, understood not as some particular doctrine pertaining narrowly to the philosophy of mind, but rather as a quite general metaphysical claim to the effect that everything is, or is fundamentally, physical. Thus physicalism explicates the thought that in some sense physics is the basic science. The aim of the thesis is to defend a particular brand of physicalism, which I call eliminative type physicalism. It claims, roughly, that every property is a physical property, (...) a property mentioned in the laws of physics, and hence that any putative property not identifiable with a physical property must be eliminated from our ontology. Eliminative type physicalism is apt to face three objections, and so my thesis, like Caesar's Gaul, falls into three parts. In the first, I argue against the idea that there are tenable positions, both physicalist and non-physicalist, alternative to eliminative type physicalism. I argue that each of these positions token physicalism (Fodor, middle Putnam), supervenience physicalism (Lewis, Horgan) and and a non-physicalist view I call pluralism (Goodman, late Putnam) is defective. In the second part, responding to the objection that there is just no reason to be a physicalist, I develop a positive argument for eliminative type physicalism, an argument resting upon a strong version of the explanatory test for reality according to which only explanatorily indispensable properties can justifiably be said to exist. In the third and final part, I argue, against the charge that eliminative type physicalism cannot accommodate what I call phenomenal properties (qualia, raw feels etc.), that there is no good reason to deny, and one good reason to affirm, that phenomenal properties just are physical properties. (shrink)

Faith is a central attitude in Christian religious practice. The problem of faith and reason is the problem of reconciling religious faith with the standards for our belief-forming practices in general (‘ordinary epistemic standards’). In order to see whether and when faith can be reconciled with ordinary epistemic standards, we first need to know what faith is. This chapter examines and catalogues views of propositional faith: faith that p. It is concerned with the epistemology of such faith: what cognitive attitudes (...) does such faith require, what epistemic norms govern these attitudes, and whether Christian faith can ever adhere to them. (shrink)

شیخ محمدحسین غروی اصفهانی بر وجود خداوند استدلالی را اقامه کرده است که در در زمرۀ براهین وجودی و صدیقین به شمار می‌رود. این برهان، در میان اندیشمندان معاصر، طرفداران و منتقدان جدی داشته و در مجموع پنج تقریر برای آن بیان گردیده است. در مقالۀ پیش رو، تقریرهای پنجگانه‌ای که برای برهان ایشان بیان گردیده است، در سه محور کلی مورد بررسی واقع شده‌ است: محور اول، مفهوم واجب‌الوجود از این جهت که مفهومی ذهنی است؛ محور دوم، مفهوم واجب‌الوجود (...) از این جهت که از امری ورای خود حکایت می‌نماید؛ و در نهایت، حقیقت واجب‌الوجود یا موجود بذاته در خارج. بعد از بیان هر تقریر، همخوانی آن با بیان محقق اصفهانی مورد بررسی قرار گرفته و در نهایت بین تقریرهای مختلف از جهت همخوانی با متن کلام ایشان داوری انجام شده است. نتیجۀ نهایی که در این مقاله گرفته می‌شود این است که تقریر برهان بر اساس محور دوم تنها تقریری است که با ابیات محقق اصفهانی همخوانی دارد. (shrink)

کانت به طور کلی براهین نظری دال بر وجود باری را در سه دستۀ برهان وجودی، جهان‌شناختی و نظم جای می‌دهد. در نگاه او، چون وجود یک محمول واقعی و تعین‌بخش نیست، نمی‌تواند در تعریف شیء حاضر باشد و بنابراین برهان وجودی عقیم است. این مقاله، همگام با کانت و بنت، می‌کوشد تا نشان دهد که وجود نه مایۀ کمال و نه محمولی تعین‌بخش است. نیز بر خلاف نظر بنت، که دلایل کانت را ناکافی می‌داند، ادعا می‌شود که کانت مغالطۀ (...) بنیادینی را که در برهان وجودی نهفته است پیدا و هویدا کرده است. به زعم کانت، خطای برهان جهان‌شناختی وابستگی آن به برهان سست‌بنیان وجودی است. بنت به درستی، ابهام و سستی این وابستگی را مورد توجه قرار می‌دهد. با این حال، کانت در فرصتی دیگر، با نقدی قوی، استدلال جهان‌شناختی را از اعتبار ساقط می‌کند. در مرحلۀ آخر، کانت با همۀ دلبستگی‌ای که به برهان نظم دارد، آن را مبتنی بر برهان معیوب جهان‌شناختی توصیف می‌کند. نقد بنت در این مرحله، از ارتباطی ذاتی که میان برهان جهان‌شناختی و نظم وجود دارد غفلت می‌ورزد. (shrink)