Virtuosity in music performance is often associated with fast, precise, and efficient sound-producing movements. The generation of such highly skilled movements involves complex joint and muscle control by the central nervous system, and depends on the ability to anticipate, segment, and coarticulate motor elements, all within the biomechanical constraints of the human body. When successful, such motor skill should lead to what we characterize as fluency in musical performance. Detecting typical features of fluency could be very useful for technology-enhanced learning (...) systems, assisting and supporting students during their individual practice sessions by giving feedback and helping them to adopt sustainable movement patterns. In this study, we propose to assess fluency in musical performance as the ability to smoothly and efficiently coordinate while accurately performing slow, transitionary, and rapid movements. To this end, the movements of three cello players and three drummers at different levels of skill were recorded with an optical motion capture system, while a wireless electromyogrphy (EMG) system recorded the corresponding muscle activity from relevant landmarks. We analyze the kinematic and coarticulation characteristics of these recordings separately and then propose a combined model of fluency in musical performance predicting music sophistication. Results suggest movements from expert performers' are characterized by consistently smooth strokes and scaling of muscle phasic coactivation. The explored model of fluency as function of movement smoothness and coarticulation patterns was shown to be limited by the sample size but serves as a proof of concept. Results from this study show the potential of a technology-enhanced objective measure of fluency in musical performance, which could lead to improved practices for aspiring musicians, instructors, and researchers. (shrink)

An interview exploring the complexity of contemporary French philosophical atheism, in the light of Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Badiou, Nancy and Meillassoux (Edinburgh UP, 2011).

There is a tension in the Gospel of Matthew between two very different images of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, God is portrayed as being boundlessly gracious and forgiving, while in eight Matthean parables, God is seen as vindictive and punitive. This poses an ethical dilemma: which God is with us and whom should we emulate?

Philosophers of religion debate what is meant by the word 'God,' in the conclusion of proofs of God's existence. If'God' is a proper name, there seems to be no good proof that a non-empirical entity has this name. If it is a common name, it seems that it must mean what classical theists mean by 'God' - and the existence of such a being is hard to prove. I defend a third possibility: that 'God' names a common name that is (...) the least prescriptive possible, while being sufficient to signify one kind of thing different from all others. (shrink)

Andrew H. Gleeson has written an essay commenting on an exchange between Dewi Z. Phillips and me, arguing that I was mistaken to dismiss Phillips’ criticism of the standard definition of omnipotence as unsuccessful. Furthermore, he charges Swinburne, me, and analytic theists in general, with an excessive anthropomorphism that obliterates the distinction between Creator and creature. In response, I contend that all of Gleeson’s criticisms are unsound.

As exemplified by three cases, difficulties in the dialogue between religion and science not infrequently arise from differing views of God's omnipotence and omniscience. From the side of theology, reflections on the biblical and church‐related sources of those views, on Auschwitz and theproblem of theodicy, on God as Creator of the universe, and on how to read and interpret the Bible show that a view of a God who self‐limits almightiness and all‐knowing in order to grant freedom and functional integrity (...) to a Creation about which God cares can be multiply justified. Such a view is not dissonant with regard to a self‐organized, open universe, producing “unexpected” emergent features as seen by science. (shrink)

Based on a question posed by global philosophy of religion project regarding the absence of literal attribution of omnibenevolence to God in the Qur’ān, this paper aims to examine how to understand perfect goodness in Islam. I will first discuss the concept of perfect goodness and suggest that perfect goodness is not an independent attribute on its own and it is predicated on other moral attributes of God without which the concept of perfect goodness could hardly be understood. I (...) will examine perfect goodness by a specific emphasis on the attribute of justice as one of the conditions to be satisfied by a perfectly morally good being. In so doing, I will appeal to the distinctions made among great-making properties by Daniel Hill, and Al-Ghazālī’s definition of justice by applying them to God’s moral attributes. I will argue that justice has a crucial role in maximality-optimality balance between great-making properties and it seems quite difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of goodness without justice. Having said that, I will claim that the conceptual frame I suggest sheds light on why omnibenevolence is not literally attributed to God in the Qur’ān. Then, I will briefly show how the divine attributes mentioned in the Qur’ān and the discussions about divine names and attributes in the Islamic tradition supports the understanding of perfect goodness I defend. Consequently, I will try to show that far from indicating that the Islamic concept of God doesn’t involve perfect goodness, the Qur’ān establishes the proper meaning of perfect goodness by focusing on its constitutive attributes, and thus provides us with a sound conception of it. (shrink)

In The Existence of God Richard Swinburne argues that ‘if there is a God, any experience which seems to be of God, will be genuine – will be of God.’ On the face of it this claim of the essential veridicality of any religious experience, given the existence of God, is incredible. Consider what is being claimed by looking at a particularly dramatic example – but one that is well within the purview of Swinburne's claim. The ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ who (...) murdered at least thirteen women, claimed to hear voices telling him to kill. He took these voices to be divine. While it is easy enough to suspect the killer's sanity, it is not so easy to doubt his sincerity. Yet since Swinburne claims that God probably exists, he is committed to the view that the Ripper had a series of genuine religious experiences – so much for the arduous preparations sometime taken as necessary for a ‘vision’ of God. (shrink)

Because the traditional Inuit way of life was a successful adaptation to the harshest environment in which humans reside, their religion is of considerable importance in understanding the potentialities of culture and is often cited in general studies of comparative religion. Yet prior to the work of Daniel Merkur, there have been no monograph-length studies of Inuit religion, and journal articles have been few and far between. In part, this is due to the immense difficulty of the task. The (...) considerable ethnographic material is of varying, often poor quality with regard to Inuit religion, and there are virtually no recordings of relevant material in the various dialects of the Inuit language. (shrink)

1. Constructing a defence in the case of God is doing something not only for his glory but also for our advantage, in that it may move us to •honour his greatness, i.e. his power and wisdom, as well as to •love his goodness and the justice and holiness that stem from it, and to •imitate these as best we can. This defence will have two parts—a preparatory one and then the principal one. The first part studies the •greatness and (...) the •goodness of God separately. The second part concerns these two perfections taken together, including the providence that God extends to all created things and the control that he exercises over creatures endowed with intelligence, particularly in all matters concerning piety and salvation. ·The first part will occupy sections 2–39, the second part sections 40–144·. (shrink)

Mark C. Murphy addresses the question of how God's ethics differs from human ethics. Murphy suggests that God is not subject to the moral norms to which we humans are subject. This has immediate implications for the argument from evil: we cannot assume that an absolutely perfect being is in any way bound to prevent the evils of this world.

(i) God is omniscient; therefore, for any change, C, among particulars, God knows the occurrence of C. (ii) If God knows the occurrence of C, then X. (iii) not-X. It is clear that the set of propositions (i)—(iii) is inconsistent. This is the general form of two problems—which I call the ‘problem of change in knowledge’ (PCK) and the ‘problem of change in essence’ (PCE)—for Avicenna concerning God’s knowledge of particulars. No work in the secondary literature has discussed exactly (...) what PCK and PCE are. In this paper, I will clarify exactly what they are. (shrink)

God and Goodness takes the experience of value as a starting point for natural theology. Mark Wynn argues that theism offers our best understanding of the goodness of the world, especially its beauty and openness to the development of richer and more complex material forms. We also see that the world's goodness calls for a moral response: commitment to the goodness of the world represents a natural extension of the trust to which we aspire in our dealings with human (...) beings. (shrink)

The God of Western religion is said to be eternal. But what does that mean? Is God somehow beyond time, living a life that does not involve one thing after another? Or is God's relationship to time much more like ours, so that God's eternality just consists in there being no time at which God doesn't exist? Even for non-believers, these issues have interesting implications for the relation between historical and scientific findings on the one hand, and religion on (...) the other. This Element introduces the reader to the requisite metaphysical background, and then examines reasons for and against thinking of God as timeless. (shrink)

God is omniscient; therefore, He knows that ‘the flower in my hand is red.’ If God knows that ‘the flower in my hand is red,’ then He knows it perceptually. God does not know anything perceptually. It is clear that the set of propositions – form an inconsistent triad. This is one of four problems with which Avicenna was engaged concerning God's knowledge of particulars, which I call the problem of perceptual knowledge. In order to solve PPK and (...) three other problems, Avicenna has developed a theory concerning God’s knowledge of particulars. Secondary literature around Avicenna’s theory of God’s knowledge of particulars has mostly directed its attention to give an account of Avicenna’s positive theory rather than the problems which that theory was designed to solve. But this paper will not do the same thing as this secondary literature. In contrast, in this paper, I will concentrate on the characterization of one of the problems, i.e., PPK, because of which Avicenna has presented his positive theory of God’s knowledge of particulars. In short, this paper aims to show why Avicenna deems explaining God’s knowledge of, say, the redness of a flower, via his accepted theory of perception as problematic. In this regard, I will extract three versions of PPK based on Avicenna's philosophy and through it will shed some light on Avicenna’s theory of God’s knowledge of particulars. (shrink)

God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism is a defense of God's aseity and unique status as the Creator of all things apart from Himself in the face of the challenge posed by mathematical Platonism. After providing the biblical, theological, and philosophical basis for the traditional doctrine of divine aseity, William Lane Craig explains the challenge presented to that doctrine by the Indispensability Argument for Platonism, which postulates the existence of uncreated abstract objects. Craig provides detailed (...) examination of a wide range of responses to that argument, both realist and anti-realist, with a view toward assessing the most promising options for the theist. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, this groundbreaking volume engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology. (shrink)

The paper reaches two main conclusions: Firstly, even if there are one or more possible worlds than which there are none better, God cannot actualise any of them. Secondly, if there are possible worlds which God can actualise, and than which God can actualise none better, then God must actualise one of them. The paper is neutral between compatibilist and libertarian views of creaturely freedom. The paper's main ideas have been used, with modifications, in my book "God, (...) the Best, and Evil" (OUP 2008). (shrink)

This is a concise and profound book from one of the world's leading political and legal philosophers about a major theme, equality, and the proposition that humans are all one another's equals. Jeremy Waldron explores the implications of this fundamental tenet for law, politics, society and economy in the company of John Locke, whose work Waldron regards 'as well-worked-out a theory of basic equality as we have in the canon of political philosophy'. Throughout the text, which is based on (...) the Carlyle Lectures given in Oxford in 1999, Jeremy Waldron discusses contemporary approaches to equality and rival interpretations of Locke, and this dual agenda gives the whole an unusual degree of accessibility and intellectual excitement, of interest to philosophers, political theorists, lawyers and theologians around the world. (shrink)

This paper has been superseded by chapter 3 of my book "God, the Best, and Evil" (OUP 2008). The chapter concerns God's choices in cases in which God has infinitely many better and better options.

"This book focuses on arguments from suffering against the existence of God and on a variety of issues concerning agency and value that they bring out. The central aim is to show the extent and power of arguments from evil. The book provides a close investigation of an under-defended claim at the heart of the major free-will-based responses to such arguments, namely that free will is sufficiently valuable to serve as the good, or prominently among the goods, that provides a (...) God-justifying reason for permitting evil in our world. Offering a fresh examination of traditional theodicies, it also develops an alternative line the author calls a divine intimacy theodicy. It makes an extended case for rejection of the position of skeptical theism. The book expands upon an argument from evil concerning a traditional doctrine of hell, which reveals a number of interesting issues concerning fault, agency, and blameworthiness. In response to recent work contending that the problem of evil is defanged since God's baseline attitude toward human beings is indifference, the book defends the essential perfect moral goodness of God. Finally it takes up the question of whether or not it makes sense to live a religious life as an agnostic or as an atheist"--. (shrink)

Many maintain that petitionary prayer is pointless. I argue that the theist can defend petitionary prayer by giving a general account of how divine and creaturely causation can be compatible and complementary, based on the claim that the goodness of something depends on its cause. I use Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysical framework to give an account that explains why a world with creaturely causation better reflects God’s goodness than a world in which God brought all things about immediately. In such (...) a world, prayer could allow us to cause good things in a distinctive way: by asking God for them. (shrink)

We are living at the dawn of the first truly scientific picture of the universe-as-a-whole, yet people are still dragging along prescientific ideas about God that cannot be true and are even meaningless in the universe we now know we live in. This makes it impossible to have a coherent big picture of the modern world that includes God. But we don't have to accept an impossible God or else no God. We can have a real God if we redefine (...) God in light of knowledge no one ever had before. The key question is, “Could anything actually exist in the scientific universe that is worthy of the name, God?” My answer is yes: God is an “emergent phenomenon,” as real as the global economy or the government or the worldwide web, which are all emergent phenomena. But God arose from something deeper: the complex interactions of all humanity's aspirations. An emerging God has enormous implications. (shrink)

This is the first sustained, whole-Bible treatment on the theme of meeting God face to face. Starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation, the author systematically covers the major events in salvation history, all of which reveal the beauty of encountering God's grace in abundance.

Thinking about God is historical thinking and that in two senses : the idea of God has a history, and those who think about God think through an historically formed mind. The task of the theologian, is not the attempt to move outside his historicity - such an attempt constitutes a fallacy and not a virtue - but to accept its implications and limitations. Methodologically this means that the theologian must point to the historical perspectives that underlie the idea of (...) God in its development and, in his own constructive thought, must work self-consciously with an historical perspective informed by the psychological and cosmological understanding of his own time. This book centers on that idea which traditionally has been associated with the very godness of God - the idea of divine abso luteness - and puts certain historical, logical, religious and, finally, cosmological questions to it. The roots of that idea lie in Greek thought, which entered Christian theology via the early church fathers; even so, there is much indication, particularly in Patristic trinitarian thought, that the Biblical heritage is pushing theological thinking towards a social or relative concept of divine being (ch. 1). (shrink)

Scientific accounts of existence give chance a central role. At the smallest level, quantum theory involves uncertainty and evolution is driven by chance and necessity. These ideas do not fit easily with theology in which chance has been seen as the enemy of purpose. One option is to argue, as proponents of Intelligent Design do, that chance is not real and can be replaced by the work of a Designer. Others adhere to a deterministic theology in which God (...) is in total control. Neither of these views, it is argued, does justice to the complexity of nature or the greatness of God. The thesis of this book is that chance is neither unreal nor non-existent but an integral part of God's creation. This view is expounded, illustrated and defended by drawing on the resources of probability theory and numerous examples from the natural and social worlds. (shrink)

Euteleology is a metaphysics according to which reality is inherently purposive and the contingent Universe exists ultimately because reality’s overall telos, the supreme good, is realized within it. This book provides an exposition of euteleology and a defence of its coherence. The main aim is to establish that euteleological metaphysics provides a religiously adequate alternative to the ‘personal-omniGod’ understanding of theism prevalent amongst analytic philosophers. The quest for an alternative to understanding the God of the Abrahamic traditions as an (...) omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect personal being is motivated by criticizing the religious adequacy of this conception of God. This criticism deploys a ‘normatively relativized’ version of the ‘logical’ Argument from Evil: it is argued that an omnipotent personal agent would unavoidably be responsible for a morally flawed relationship with human beings caught up in horrendous evils. Reasons are given for preferring a ‘non-personalist’ account of theism, and the religious adequacy of a euteleological theism is then defended against two main objections—first, that it faces a problem of evil that threatens its coherence, and, second, that it cannot make good sense of the practices of prayer and worship that are essential to theist religion. An important theme is that, though God is not a personal being, nor any kind of ‘being amongst beings’ in basic euteleological ontology, God-talk may be understood as resting on a radical analogy that is apt for enabling right human responses to ultimate divine reality. (shrink)

Part of the Elements Philosophy of Religion series, this short book focuses on the spiritual dimensions of life’s meaning as they have been discussed in the recent English and mainly analytic philosophical literature. The overarching philosophical question that this literature has addressed is about the extent to which, and respects in which, spiritual realities such as God or a soul would confer meaning on our lives. There have been four broad answers to the question, namely: God or a (...) soul is necessary for meaning in our lives; they are not necessary for it; one or both would enhance the meaning in our lives; and they would detract from it. These views have been largely advanced in chronological order through the history of Western philosophy, with the view that life would be meaningless without God and a soul having been most prominent in the medieval period, the rejection of this claim having arisen in the modern era, and then sophisticated positions about enhancement or reduction having appeared in earnest only in the past 20 years. This book addresses all four positions, paying particular attention to the more recent views. Beyond familiarizing readers with these positions, it presents prima facie objections to them, points out gaps in research agendas, and suggests argumentative strategies that merit development. (shrink)

The divine purpose theory —according to which that human life is meaningful to the extent that it fulfills some purpose or plan to which God has directed us—encounters well-known Euthyphro problems. Some theists attempt to avoid these problems by appealing to God’s essential goodness, à la the modified divine command theory of Adams and Alston. However, recent criticisms of the modified DCT show its conception of God’s goodness to be incoherent; and these criticisms can be shown to present (...) an analogous set of problems for the DPT. Further, the argument can be extended to any account of meaningfulness according to which the value of what humans do can only be conferred by God. Thus, it would seem that there is no tenable version of the view that meaningfulness is conferred on human life by some act or attitude of God’s. (shrink)

I start by way of clarifying briefly the problem of special divine intervention. Once this is done, I argue that laws of nature are generalizations that derive from the dispositional behaviour of natural kinds. Based on this conception of laws of nature I provide a metaphysical model according to which God can realize acts of special divine providence by way of temporarily changing the dispositions of natural entities. I show that this model does not contradict scientific practice and is (...) consistent with the assumption that the physical realm is causally closed. I then argue that prima facie any putative candidate for an act of God could also be seen as a random event or as indicating that there is something wrong with our formulation of the corresponding law of nature. While there is no sufficient philosophical or scientific reason to prefer one of these models, I argue that there are sufficient and legitimate theological reasons to endorse a framework in which at least the obtaining of some anomic states of affairs is seen as the effect of special divine intervention. Doing so, theology has the hermeneutic resources to uncover a dimension of meaningful reality, which without faith could not be seen. (shrink)

In this paper I make the case for epistemic relativism: the radical view that all human knowledge/truth is relative. I extend the application of epistemic relativism to include necessary laws such as the laws of logic. I argue that the truth of such laws are relative to human thought, which are ultimately instances derived from our experiences. These experiences act as limitations to which we are conceptually bound. As a result of this, we cannot apprehend God’s omnipotence. This (...) includes God’s maximal power in being able to perform logically impossible actions. Our epistemic inability to conceive of such logically impossible actions is therefore testimony that God transcends the laws of logic. (shrink)

God is thought to be eternal. Does this mean that he is timeless? Or is he, rather, omnitemporal? In this paper we want to show that God cannot be omnitemporal. Our starting point, which we take from Bernard Williams’ article on the Makropulos Case, is the intuition that it is inappropriate for persons not to become bored after a sufficiently long sequence of time has passed. If God were omnitemporal, he would suffer from boredom. But God is the greatest (...) possible being and therefore cannot be bored. God, hence, is not omnitemporal. After the presentation of our argument, we address several objections by examining possible differences between human and divine persons. (shrink)

In God and Phenomenal Consciousness, Yujin Nagasawa bridges debates in two distinct areas of philosophy: the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion. First, he introduces some of the most powerful arguments against the existence of God and provides objections to them. He then presents a parallel structure between these arguments and influential arguments offered by Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson against the physicalist approach to phenomenal consciousness. By appealing to this structure, Nagasawa constructs novel objections to Jackson's and (...) Nagel's arguments. Finally, he derives, from the failure of these arguments, a unique metaphysical thesis, which he calls 'non-theoretical physicalism'. Through this thesis, he shows that although this world is entirely physical, there are physical facts that cannot be captured even by complete theories of the physical sciences. (shrink)

The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word "God" can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English translation for the first time. Among Levinas's writings, this volume distinguishes itself, both for students of his thought and for a wider audience, by the range of issues it addresses. Levinas not only rehearses the ethical themes that have led him to be regarded as (...) one of the most original thinkers working out of the phenomenological tradition, but he also takes up philosophical questions concerning politics, language, and religion. The volume situates his thought in a broader intellectual context than have his previous works. In these essays, alongside the detailed investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, and Buber that characterize all his writings, Levinas also addresses the thought of Kierkegaard, Marx, Bloch, and Derrida. Some essays provide lucid expositions not available elsewhere to key areas of Levinas's thought. "God and Philosophy" is perhaps the single most important text for understanding Levinas and is in many respects the best introduction to his works. "From Consciousness to Wakefulness" illuminates Levinas's relation to Husserl and thus to phenomenology, which is always his starting point, even if he never abides by the limits it imposes. In "The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other," Levinas not only addresses Derrida's Speech and Phenomenon but also develops an answer to the later Heidegger's account of the history of Being by suggesting another way of reading that history. Among the other topics examined in the essays are the Marxist concept of ideology, death, hermeneutics, the concept of evil, the philosophy of dialogue, the relation of language to the Other, and the acts of communication and mutual understanding. (shrink)

It is difficult to evaluate the role of activity - of force or of that which has causal efficacy - in Descartes’ natural philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes claims to include in his natural philosophy only that which can be described geometrically, which amounts to matter (extended substance) in motion (where this motion is described kinematically).’ Yet on the other hand, rigorous adherence to a purely geometrical description of matter in motion would make it difficult to (...) account for the interactions among the particles that constitute Descartes’ universe, since the notions of extension and kinematical motion do not in themselves imply any causal agency. There is, after all, no reason to expect that a particle whose single essence is extension, even if we suppose it to be moving, should impart motion to another particle, while conversely, there is no reason to expect a resting particle to hinder the motion of an impinging one. Descartes' hankering for an austere ontology of matter in motion is in danger of excluding causal agency (force, conceived dynmically) from matter. To the modern reader it may seem obvious that Descartes did not get himself into such a fix, since matter in motion so readily reminds us of kinetic energy or of some more primitive notion of force. Yet by no means is it obvious that Descartes attributed causal efficacy to matter in motion per se. Serious scholars have held opposite positions on this issue. Westfall, Gabbey, and others’ have argued that although on the metaphysical plane Descartes attempted to eliminate force from his mechanical universe, nonetheless ‘force is a real feature’ of his mechanical world. The thrust of this view is that Descartes conceived of force as ‘the capacity of a body in motion to act’, by means of impact, upon other bodies. An opposing interpretation, defended here, is that Descartes did in fact deny causal agency to moving matter per se, restricting agency to immaterial substances such as the human mind, angels, and God. The intention of this interpretation is not to de-emphasize the role of matter in motion in Descartes’ explanation of nature, but rather to stress the fact that Descartes did not conceive of this moving matter dynamically. -/- Reprinted in Descartes, ed. by J. Cottingham, Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 281–310. (shrink)

Many thinkers have said that a God whose existence is argued for metaphysically would have no religious significance even if he existed. This book examines the God or Absolute which emerges in various metaphysical systems and asks whether he, she, or it could figure in any genuinely religious outlook. The systems studied are those of Spinoza, Hegel, T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley (very briefly), Bernard Bosanquet, Josiah Royce, A. N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne. There is also a chapter on (...) Kierkegaard as the most important critic of metaphysical religion (especially Hegelian Christianity). The book ends with a statement of a form of absolute or pantheistic idealism espoused by the author and an indication of what religious significance it may have. (shrink)