Online research in philosophy

Anthony de Jasay attempts to demonstrate that public goods can be supplied privately without loss of efficiency, since there may be enough people willing to finance public?goods production voluntarily, even at the risk of subsidizing free riders, rather than risk that public goods will not be produced at all. Jasay's argument rests on the implausible assumption that the goods in question are completely indivisible. This assumption forces persons interested in having a given public good either to finance it or do without it entirely; they do not have the option of financing smaller quantities or poorer qualities of the good.

Rowe argues that if for every good world there is a better, then God is not morally perfect since no matter what world God were to create he could have done better than he did. I contend that Rowe’s argument doesn’t do justice to the role grace plays in the theist’s doctrine of creation, and respond to five new criticisms of my position that Rowe offers in Can God be Free?

In his book, Can God Be Free?, William Rowe has argued that if God is unsurpassably good He cannot be free; if He is free, He cannot be unsurpassably good. After following the discussion of this topic through a number of historical figures, Rowe focuses on the recent and contemporary debate. A key claim of Rowe's is that, if there exists an endless series of better and better creatable worlds, then the existence of a morally perfect creator is impossible. I show that this argument is unsound, since a key premise can be proved false from propositions Rowe himself accepts.

The cosmos is filled with evil that seemingly has no redeeming value. Granted, some evils do lead to greater goods, sometimes goods that could not exist without the evils. Thus, the exercise of courage is a good that requires either an actual evil to stand firm in the face of or the illusion of an evil—and an illusion is a kind of evil, too. But many evils appear to serve no such purpose. Philosophers call an evil that a supremely good God would have insufficient reason to permit to exist a gratuitous evil. A particularly powerful form of the argument from evil against the existence of the God of Western monotheism is, thus, that there..

          The cosmos is filled with evil that seemingly has no redeeming value. Granted, some evils do lead to greater goods, sometimes goods that could not exist without the evils. Thus, the exercise of courage is a good that requires either an actual evil to stand firm in the face of or the illusion of an evil—and an illusion is a kind of evil, too. But many evils appear to serve no such purpose. Philosophers call an evil that a supremely good God would have insufficient reason to permit to exist a gratuitous evil. A particularly powerful form of the argument from evil against the existence of the God of Western monotheism is, thus, that there seem to be gratuitous evils, hence there probably are gratuitous evils, and so this God does not exist.           In his Sermon 125, St. Augustine says.

While William Rowe has argued that the principle of credulity does not lend justification to religious experience, he must affirm something quite like the principle of credulity in his empirical argument from evil. To do so Rowe has proposed a modified version of the principle of credulity.I shall argue that Rowe’s modified principle of credulity creates for him a dilemma regarding the justification of belief in other minds. I further suggest it is not adequate for bridging the logical gap between the existence of apparently pointless evils and the existence of genuinely pointless evil.

In his most recent version of the evidential argument from evil, William Rowe argues that the observation of no outweighing goods for certain evils constitutes significant evidence against theism. I show that the new evidential argument cannot challenge theism unless it is also reasonable to believe that no good we know of justifies God in permitting any evil at all. Since the new evidential argument provides no reason at all to believe that God is not justified in permitting any existing evil, I conclude that Rowe's argument presents no evidential challenge to theism.

In this paper I try to show that three of William L. Rowe’s criticisms of my book, Theism, are much less than conclusive.(1) Rowe agrees that I have established, via my defense of Descartes’s Meditation Five argument for God’s existence, that God is not a non-existing being. He denies, however, that it follows that God is an existing being. In reply, I reject the thesis that something might be neither an existing nor a non-existing object.(2) Rowe maintains that the impossibility of God’s non-existence might consist simply of its being the case that no one can destroy God---a kind of impossibility which is not strong enough to sustain my (S5) modal argument for God’s existence. In reply, I argue that the impossibility of God’s non-existence must be logical.(3) Rowe maintains that it may well be that religious experiencers have experienced God without experiencing him qua maximally great being, so that religious experiences do not provide us with a reason to believe that a maximally great being is logically possible. I argue in reply that if religious experiencers do not experience God qua supremely perfect, then they have no reason to believe that they experience God.

Recently, scholars have turned to probability analysis to assess the rationality of belief in God, partly due to the emphasis of probability calculations in assessing the evidential problem of evil. William Rowe concludes that it is more probable that God does not exist than that he does, given the existence of horrendous evils and the fact that no know goods justify God in permitting any of these evils. The strength of his argument is that we do not need to determine whether there are, in fact, any justifying conditions in order to see the implications of the existence of horrendous evils for the probability of the existence of God. Rowe give an analogy to demonstrate that the mere discovery that no known reasons justify these evils shows it is probable that God does not exist. However, as it turns out, many of our intuitions conflict with probability calculus. Furthermore it is difficult to set up problems that can be effectively dealt with using probability calculus, even when it is used correctly. I illustrate this using the argument that Rowe presents and the analogy he offers to support it. First, I show how our intuitions can go astray, then I explain how Rowe’s argument is supposed to operate, and finally, I argue that it is actually of little or no help in guiding us in our beliefs.

William Rowe’s a posteriori arguments for the non-existence of God are well-known. Rather less attention has been given, however, to Rowe’s intriguing a priori argument for atheism. In this paper, I examine the three published responses to Rowe’s a priori argument (due to Bruce Langtry, William Morris, and Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder, respectively). I conclude that none is decisive, but I show that Rowe’s argument nevertheless requires more defence than he provides.