This book has argued that problems of religious luck, especially when operationalized into concerns about doxastic risk and responsibility, can be of shared interest to theologians, philosophers, and psychologists. We have pointed out counter-inductive thinking as a key feature of fideistic models of faith, and examined the implications of this point both for the social scientific study of fundamentalism, and for philosophers’ and theologians’ normative concerns with the reasonableness of a) exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, and b) theologically-cast but bias-mirroring (...) trait-ascriptions to religious insiders and outsiders. It is important to keep the descriptive/explanatory and normative concerns properly separated, but philosophy of luck and risk are relevant to both. More specifically, inductive risky theological strategies,we have argued, are a relevant concern both descriptively and normatively. The descriptive/explanatory relevance of measures of high inductive risk connects it with cognitive and social psychology of religion, while its normative relevance connects with critical concerns with epistemology of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, and the ethics of belief. A research program to examine fideistic orientation and its relation to epistemically risky doxastic strategies is one of potentially numerous research programs on which philosophers and psychologists might work collaboratively. So this concluding chapter of our study culminates with the outline of a proposed research program at the intersection of shared concerns. I term this research program CICI, because it examines what lies at the intersection of CSR’s standing interest in the appeal of counter-intuitive ideas, and our own study’s focus on the fideistic penchant for counter-inductive thinking. Religious Studies scholars typically focus on particular traditions and teachings, while CSR scholars tend to eschew such content-focused approaches in favor of a study of evolutionary and hence generic or trans-religious functions and processes. I argue that CICI has the added benefit of effectively mediating this generic-specific contrast between CSR and Religious Studies, allowing CSR research to be more closely connected with and relevant to comparative fundamentalism. (shrink)

To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There is a strong tendency (...) among adherents of different faith traditions to invoke asymmetric explanations of the religious value or salvific status of the home religion vis-à-vis all others. Attributions of good/bad religious luck and exclusivist dismissal of the significance of religious disagreement are the central phenomena that the book studies. Part I lays out a taxonomy of kinds of religious luck, a taxonomy that draws upon but extends work on moral and epistemic luck. It asks: What is going on when persons, theologies, or purported revelations ascribe various kinds of religiously-relevant traits to insiders and outsiders of a faith tradition in sharply asymmetric fashion? “I am saved but you are lost”; “My religion is holy but yours is idolatrous”; “My faith tradition is true, and valued by God, but yours is false and valueless.” Part II further develops the theory introduced in Part I, pushing forward both the descriptive/explanatory and normative sides of what the author terms his inductive risk account. Firstly, the concept of inductive risk is shown to contribute to the needed field of comparative fundamentalism by suggesting new psychological markers of fundamentalist orientation. The second side of what is termed an inductive risk account is concerned with the epistemology of religious belief, but more especially with an account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. Problems of inductively risky modes of belief-formation problematize claims to religion-specific knowledge. But the inductive risk account does not aim to set religion apart, or to challenge the reasonableness of religious belief tout court. Rather the burden of the argument is to challenge the reasonableness of attitudes of religious exclusivism, and to demotivate the “polemical apologetics” that exclusivists practice and hope to normalize. Lexington Books Pages: 290 978-1-4985-5017-8 • Hardback • December 2018 • $95.00 • (£65.00) 978-1-4985-5018-5 • eBook • December 2018 • $90.00 • (£60.00) ISBN 978-1-4985-5018-5 (pbk: alk. paper) (coming 2020) [Download the 30% personal use Discount Order Form I uploaded for hardcover or e-book, and please ask your library to purchase a copy for their collection.]. (shrink)

John Wesley explained the existence of evil in moral rather than metaphysical terms. His understanding of the fall was fairly typical of western theology and he also enthusiastically embraced a version of the felix culpa theme as essential for theodicy. Unlike many influential western theologians, he also relied heavily on libertarian freedom to account for evil. His most striking proposal for theodicy involves his eschatalogical vision of the future in which he believed the entire world living then will be converted. (...) I argue that his theodicy is implicitly universalist, especially in its eschatalogical speculations, and show that this is in tension with his strong libertariancommitments. (shrink)

One of the major arguments for theological voluntarism offered by the Ash’arites involves the claim that that some of the factors upon which our salvation or condemnation depend are beyond our control. We will call this “the problem of salvific luck.” According to the Ash’arites, the fact that God does save and condemn human beings on the basis of factors beyond their control casts doubt on any non-voluntarist conception of divine justice. A common way to respond to this Ash’arite argument (...) for voluntarism is to eliminate the role of luck in God’s judgments. But this is not the Mu’tazilite way of resisting the argument. The Mu’tazilite, who oppose theological voluntarism, choose a more daunting solution to the problem of salvific luck. They reject the claim that God’s Judgment concerning the eternal destiny of some persons would be unjust if it depended upon factors beyond their control. The paper discusses this solution to the problem of salvific luck. (shrink)

Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Kinds of moral luck are differentiated by the source of lack of control such as the results of her actions, the circumstances in which she finds herself, and the way in which she is constituted. Many philosophers accept the existence of some of these kinds of moral luck but not others, because, in their view, the existence of only some of them would (...) make morality unfair. I, however, argue that this intermediary approach is unstable, because either morality is fair in ways that rule out resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck (and this leads to moral responsibility skepticism), or morality is unfair in ways that permit the existence of those kinds of moral luck. Thus, such intermediary approaches lack the motivation that their proponents have long taken them to have. In the appendix, I point to ways in which morality is unfair concerning the scope of moral responsibility, moral obligation, moral taint, being a good or bad person, and flourishing. (shrink)

The problem of moral luck is that a general fact about luck and an intuitive moral principle jointly imply the following skeptical conclusion: human beings are morally responsible for at most a tiny fraction of each action. This skeptical conclusion threatens to undermine the claim that human beings deserve their respective eternal reward and punishment. But even if this restriction on moral responsibility is compatible with the doctrine of the final judgment, the quality of one’s afterlife within heaven or hell (...) still appears to be lucky. Utilizing recent responses to the problem of moral luck, I explore several Molinist accounts of the final judgment that resolve both theological problems of moral luck. Some of these accounts entirely eliminate moral luck while others ensure that the moral luck involved in the judgment is overall good luck. (DOWNLOAD the published version at the external link below.). (shrink)

Every account of moral responsibility has conditions that distinguish between the consequences, actions, or traits that warrant praise or blame and those that do not. One intuitive condition is that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness cannot be affected by luck, that is, by factors beyond the agent’s control. Several philosophers build their accounts of moral responsibility on this luck-free condition, and we may call their views Luck-Free Moral Responsibility (LFMR). I offer moral and metaphysical arguments against LFMR. First, I maintain that considerations (...) of fairness that often motivate LFMR do not require its adoption. Second, I contend that LFMR has counterintuitive implications for the nature and scope of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and that LFMR is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum. Third, I state some common reasons for thinking that LFMR’s commitment to true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom is problematic, and I argue that if there are no such true counterfactuals and if LFMR is true, a person is praiseworthy and blameworthy at most for a tiny fraction of her actions. Fourth, I argue that proponents of LFMR cannot escape this skeptical cost by appealing to a different kind of counterfactual of freedom. Fifth, I develop an anti-skeptical motivation to affirm the idea that luck can affect moral responsibility. (shrink)

I begin with a distinction between narrow and broad defenses to the logical problem of evil. The former is simply an attempt to show that God and evil are not logically incompat-ible whereas the latter attempts the same, but only by appealing to beliefs one takes to be true in the actual world. I then argue that while recent accounts of original sin may be consistent with a broad defense, they are also logically incoherent. After considering potential replies, I conclude (...) by proposing an account of original sin that is both logically coherent and consistent with a broad defense. (shrink)

In this article I formulate a skeptical argument against the possibility of adhering to the divine will in a non-accidental way. In particular, my focus in the article is on a widely embraced modal condition of accidentality, according to which non-accidentality has to do with a person manifesting dispositions that result in a given outcome in a modally robust way. The skeptical argument arises from two observations: first, various authors in the epistemology of religion have argued that it is often (...) not possible to reason reliably about religious matters, and second, non-accidentally adhering to a given norm is often associated with reasoning about the requirements of the norm in question in a reliable way. In addition to pointing out the existence of the argument, I outline strategies in which religious thinkers could reasonably challenge it by denying that reliable reasoning about the requirements of divine will is necessary for adhering to it in a non-accidental manner. Hence, I argue that the possibility of non-accidental adherence to the divine will does not depend solely on whether it is possible to reliably reason about what it requires one to do. (shrink)

‘Constitutive luck’ refers to luck that affects the sort of person one is. This article demonstrates that it is a philosophically troubling sort of luck, causing problems in, at least, ethics and political philosophy. Some, notably Susan Hurley, Nicholas Rescher, and Daniel Statman, have argued that such trouble can be avoided, by pointing out that the notion of constitutive luck is incoherent. The article examines this claim by means of a discussion of the idea of luck in general, settling on (...) an account of luck in terms of the notions of chance, value, and (lack of) control. This account is then used to show that the notion of constitutive luck is not incoherent. We are stuck with the problems made by constitutive luck. (shrink)

“Divine hiddenness”, as the phrase suggests, refers, most fundamentally, to the hiddenness of God, i.e., the alleged fact that God is hidden, absent, silent. In religious literature, there is a long history of expressions of annoyance, anxiety, and despair over divine hiddenness, so understood. For example, ancient Hebrew texts lament God’s failure to show up in experience or to show proper regard for God’s people or some particular person, and two Christian Gospels portray Jesus, in his cry of dereliction on (...) the cross, as experiencing abandonment by God, whom he regarded as “Abba, Father”, an experience shared by many mystics, saints, and ordinary folk of all theistic traditions, described at its worst as “the dark night of the soul”. Understood in this way, divine hiddenness poses an existential problem for those who have such experiences. -/- However, “divine hiddenness” refers to something else in recent philosophical literature, especially since the publication of J.L. Schellenberg’s landmark book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993). In this context, it refers to alleged facts about the absence of belief of God, on the basis of which one might think there is no God. For example, Schellenberg argues that, since there are nonbelievers who are capable of a personal relationship with God and who do not resist it, there is no perfectly loving God, while Stephen Maitzen argues that naturalism better explains the “demographics” of nonbelief than theism and Jason Marsh argues that naturalism better explains “natural nonbelief” than theism. Understood in this way, divine hiddenness constitutes putative evidence for atheism. -/- Although some of the recent philosophical literature addresses the problem understood in the first way (e.g., DeWeese-Boyd 2016; Garcia 2002), this entry focuses on divine hiddenness understood in the second way. The first section discusses the relationships between nonbelief and another source of alleged evidence for atheism: evil. The second section states and defends the argument from nonresistant nonbelief. The third section sketches attempts to explain nonresistant nonbelief from a theistic perspective. The fourth section states other responses to the argument from nonresistant nonbelief. The fifth section discusses the argument from the demographics of nonbelief and the sixth section discusses the argument from natural nonbelief. (shrink)

I argue that certain kinds of luck can partially determine an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. To make this view clearer, consider some examples. Two identical agents drive recklessly around a curb, and one but not the other kills a pedestrian. Two identical corrupt judges would freely take a bribe if one were offered. Only one judge is offered a bribe, and so only one judge takes a bribe. Put in terms of these examples, I argue that the killer driver and (...) bribe taker are more blameworthy than their counterparts. I offer three arguments for that view, and, in doing so, I exemplify a general way to advance the moral luck debate. First, I argue against an account of moral responsibility that implies that the judges are equally blameworthy. Second, I argue that the killer driver is more blameworthy than the merely reckless driver. Third, I locate an alternative sense in which the agents in each case pair are morally on par. (shrink)

A crucial objection to the doctrine of original sin is that it conflicts with a common intuition that agents are morally responsible only for factors under their control. Here, I present an account of moral responsibility by Michael Zimmerman that accommodates that intuition, and I consider it as a model of original sin, noting both attractions and difficulties with the view.