What is free will and do humans possess it? While these questions appear simple they have tied some of our greatest minds in knots over the millennia. This little book seeks to clarify for an audience of educated non-specialists some of the issues that often arise in philosophical disputes over the existence and the nature of human free will. Beyond that, it proposes a particular solution to the puzzles. Many philosophers have argued that free will is incompatible with determinism, and (...) many have also argued that it is incompatible with indeterminism. So, is free will simply an incoherent concept? Talbott argues that the best way out of this quagmire requires that we come to appreciate why certain conditions essential to our emergence as free moral agents--conditions such as indeterminism, ignorance, and a context of ambiguity and misperception--are themselves obstacles to a fully realized freedom. For a fully realized freedom requires that, as minimally rational individuals, we have learned some important lessons for ourselves; and once these lessons have been learned, some of our freest choices may be such that we could not have chosen otherwise because so choosing would then seem to us utterly unthinkable and irrational. (shrink)

In my paper, I defend a view that many would regard as self-evidently false: the view that God’s freedom, his power to act, is in no way limited by his essential properties. I divide the paper into five sections. In section i, I call attention to a special class of non-contingent propositions and try to identify an important feature of these propositions; in section ii, I provide some initial reasons. based in part upon the unique features of these special propositions, (...) for thinking that God does have the power to perform actions which his essential properties entail he will never perform; in section iii, I call into question the assumption that a person has the power to do something only if it is logically possible that he will exercise that power; and, finally, in sections iv and v, I try to specify a sense in which divine freedom and the kind of human freedom required by the Free will Defense are in fact the same kind of freedom. (shrink)

Jeff Jordan has recently challenged the idea, widely accepted among theistic philosophers, that “God’s love must be maximally extended and equally intense.” By way of a response, I suggest a way to sidestep Jordan’s argument entirely and then try to show that his own argument is multiply flawed. I thus conclude that his challenge is unsuccessful.

According to some theists, God will never completely destroy moral evil or banish it from his creation entirely; instead, he will eventually confine moral evil to a specific region of his creation, a region known as hell, and those condemned to hell, having no hope of escape from it, will live out eternity in a state of estrangement from God as well as from each other. Let us call that the traditional doctrine of hell. Elsewhere I have argued that any (...) form of theism which includes such a doctrine, even one that tries to preserve consistency by denying the universal love of God, is in fact logically inconsistent. But moderately conservative theists, as I have called them, have an argument for the traditional doctrine that some have found convincing, one that emphasizes libertarian free will. The argument is this. Because God is perfectly loving, he wills the good for every created person and wills the redemption of all who have fallen into evil; but because he has also given his loved ones the gift of freedom and some of them in fact exercise their freedom to reject him forever, it is simply not within his power, even as an omnipotent being, to redeem all of those who fall into evil. According to moderately conservative theists, therefore, the following hypothesis, which I shall call the Rejection Hypothesis , is at least possibly true: Some persons will, despite God's best efforts to save them, freely and irrevocably reject God and thus separate themselves from God forever. (shrink)

According to a long theological tradition that stretches back at least as far as St Augustine, God's justice and mercy are distinct, and in many ways quite different, character traits. In his great epic poem, Paradise Lost, for example, John Milton goes so far as to suggest a conflict, perhaps even a contradiction, in the very being of God; he thus describes Christ's offer of himself as an atonement this way.

I argue that, contrary to the opinion of Wes Morriston, William Rowe, and others, a supremely perfect God, if one should exist, would be the freest of all beings and would represent the clearest example of what it means to act freely. I suggest further that, if we regard human freedom as a reflection of God’s ideal freedom, we can avoid some of the pitfalls in both the standard libertarian and the standard compatibilist accounts of freewill.

I argue that the idea of a freely embraced eternal destiny in hell is deeply incoherent and implies, quite apart from its incoherence, that we are free both to sin with impunity and to defeat God's justice forever.

In “Three Versions of Universalism,” Michael Murray asks what purpose our earthly life might serve if universalism is true; and in this brief response, I suggesta possible answer.

Such was the innocent mind that first encountered The Problem of Pain and was exposed, for the first time, to the world of philosophical theology. Reading ",.- the book was like eating forbidden fruit; it was exhilarating but also a bit fright- ..„;, ening. For one thing, the book actually contained arguments, even arguments",,-" about God, and more importantly the arguments seemed to make sense! At the ".,'-„. small fundamentalist high school I attended, I had, to be sure, encountered ";!,' (...) arguments before. One of my teachers had argued that, during the last days, the", stars will quite literally fall upon the earth; and when a friend of mine suggested';; that a single star would consume the earth long before striking it, he was se-,'I„. (shrink)

A generalization about religious belief to which there are, I believe, few exceptions is this: The more confident one is in one's religious beliefs, the more willing one is to subject those beliefs to careful scrutiny; the less confident one is in them – the more one unconsciously fears that they cannot withstand such scrutiny – the more eager one is to find a device that would appear to protect them from careful scrutiny. And, more often than not, such a (...) protective device will include an assault upon human reason. (shrink)

I believe that Craig's arguments for the possibility of (DT) are important for two reasons: first, because the line he takes, though unsuccessful in my opinion, is the most plausible (or least implausible) line available; and second, because he sets forth with startling clarity some of the propositions that someone who takes this line must be willing to accept. But in the end, I shall argue, he not only fails to establish that (DT) is possible; he also fails in the (...) lesser task of trying to undermine my own argument that (DT) is impossible. Although Craig nowhere gives formal shape it, his argument for the possibility of (DT) seems to run something like this: He first insists that certain propositions other than (DT) are possible in the broadly logical sense, and he then tries to deduce the possibility of (DT) from these other possibilities; that is, he casts about for some proposition p - perhaps a conjunction of several propositions - that will enable him to argue as follows: (1) p entails (DT). (2) p is possible in the broadly logical sense. (3) Therefore, (DT) is also possible in the broadly logical sense. And, of course, the challenge he faces in defending such an argument is this: If, for some p, he.. (shrink)

In an article that I wrote back in 1987,1 I sought to make some ideas then current in the philosophical literature available to a wider audience of non-philosophers. I was also very hard on John Beversluis, author of C.S. Lewis and the Search for Ra- tional Religion (1985), and even implied, perhaps with less charity than I should have manifested, that his treatment of the problem of evil failed to meet even minimal standards of philosophical competence. I fully expected, therefore, (...) that his response, as set forth in the 2007 revision of his book, would be less than perfectly warm and welcoming. But when, at the behest of others, I finally got around to reading that response, I was stunned. For what I encountered was an amazing disregard for logical rigor, some appallingly bad arguments, and an even more appalling ignorance of the current philosophical literature on the problem of evil. (shrink)

How should we interpret the declaration in I John 4:8 and 16 that God not only loves, but is love? Many philosophically trained Christians will no doubt interpret this, as I do, to mean that love is part of God's very essence; that loving kindness is an essential, not merely an accidental, property of God. Of course the author of I John was not a philosopher and did not, fortunately, employ philosophical jargon in his writings; nor was he likely even (...) familiar with the philosophical distinction between essential and accidental properties. He nonetheless seems clearly to employ "God" as a proper name (as opposed to a title), the name of a distinct person whom we ought to adore and worship, and he says concerning this person that he is love. The point, then, hardly seems to be that the person who is God just happens to love us, as if it were a happy accident that he does; the point seems to be that it is his very nature to love us. In a broadly logical (or metaphysical) sense, it couldn't have been otherwise.1 That this is, at the very least, a natural interpretation seems indisputable. Commenting upon I John 4:8, the conservative New Testament scholar, Leon Morris, thus writes: God is love. This means more than `God is loving'. It means that God's essential nature is love. He loves, so to speak, not because he finds objects worthy of His love, but because it is His nature to love. His love for us depends not on what we are, but on what He is. He loves us because He is that kind of God. (shrink)

Gordon Knight recently challenged my assumption, which I made for the purpose of organizing and classifying certain theological disputes, that a specific set of three propositions is logically inconsistent . In this brief rejoinder, I explain Knight’s objection and show why it rests upon a misunderstanding.

In response to Lynne Rudder Baker’s intriguing paper, “Why Christians Should Not Be Libertarians,” I suggest that, even if a Christian simply lets the chips fall where they may with respect to the dispute between libertarians and compatibilists, a Christian should not be a determinist. I also offer for consideration a rather controversial non-Augustinian explanation for the near universality and seeming inevitability of human sin.

I begin with an inconsistent set of three propositions, each of which has the following characteristic: We can find prima facie support for it in the Bible. I then classify theologians according to which proposition they reject, and I identify three different pictures of God: the Augustinian picture, the Arminian picture, and the universalist picture. Finally, I explore some hermeneutical problems and suggest a way in which those who hold the universalist picture might interpret some of the texts upon which (...) the doctrine of eternal punishment has traditionally rested. (shrink)

I begin with an inconsistent set of three propositions, each of which has the following characteristic: We can find prima facie support for it in the Bible. I then classify theologians according to which proposition they reject, and I identify three different pictures of God: the Augustinian picture, the Arminian picture, and the universalist picture. Finally, I explore some hermeneutical problems and suggest a way in which those who hold the universalist picture might interpret some of the texts upon which (...) the doctrine of eternal punishment has traditionally rested. (shrink)

I begin with an inconsistent set of three propositions, each of which has the following characteristic: We can find prima facie support for it in the Bible. I then classify theologians according to which proposition they reject, and I identify three different pictures of God: the Augustinian picture, the Arminian picture, and the universalist picture. Finally, I explore some hermeneutical problems and suggest a way in which those who hold the universalist picture might interpret some of the texts upon which (...) the doctrine of eternal punishment has traditionally rested. (shrink)

This is a study of the problem of hell, which is an especially difficult form of the problem of evil. Many religious traditions postulate a final separation between the righteous and the unrighteous, between those who receive eternal life and those who do not. If some never receive eternal life, but are instead either annihilated or eternally estranged from God, that would seem to be a purely gratuitous evil; as Kvanvig points out, such evil could in no way be "redressed (...) by further good, at any rate, not by future good". So for these religious traditions, the question is acute: How could such gratuitous evil exist in a universe that an omnipotent and perfectly loving God supposedly governs? (shrink)

‘Bayesian epistemology’ became an epistemological movement in the 20th century, though its two main features can be traced back to the eponymous Reverend Thomas Bayes (c. 1701-61). Those two features are: (1) the introduction of a formal apparatus for inductive logic; (2) the introduction of a pragmatic self-defeat test (as illustrated by Dutch Book Arguments) for epistemic rationality as a way of extending the justification of the laws of deductive logic to include a justification for the laws of inductive (...) logic. The formal apparatus itself has two main elements: the use of the laws of probability as coherence constraints on rational degrees of belief (or degrees of confidence) and the introduction of a rule of probabilistic inference, a rule or principle of conditionalization. (shrink)

In a pair of recently published articles, Thomas Talbott has presented a carefully constructed case for universalism. He contends that from the principle Necessarily, God loves a person S at a time t only if God's intention at t and every moment subsequent to t is to do everything within his power to promote supremely worthwhile happiness in S, provided that the actions taken are consistent with his promoting the same kind of happiness in all others whom he (...) also loves and the propositions 1. God exists 2. God is both omniscient and omnipotent 3. God loves every created person 4. God will irrevocably reject some persons and subject those persons to ever-lasting punishment a contradiction may be deduced. For given, entails 5. For any created person S and time t subsequent to the creation of S, God's intention at t is to do all that he properly can to promote supremely worthwhile happiness in S. (shrink)

In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.

This volume brings together for the first time a significant number of Reid's manuscript papers on natural history, physiology and materialist metaphysics. An important contribution not only to Reid studies but also to our understanding of eighteenth-century science and its context.

Thomas Reid was a philosopher who founded the Scottish school of 'common sense'. Much of Reid's work is a critique of his contemporary, David Hume, whose empiricism he rejects. In this work, written after Reid's appointment to a professorship at the university of Glasgow, and published in 1785, he turns his attention to ideas about perception, memory, conception, abstraction, judgement, reasoning and taste. He examines the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, arguing that 'when we find philosophers maintaining that (...) there is no heat in the fire, nor colour in the rainbow … we may be apt to think the whole to be only a dream of fanciful men, who have entangled themselves in cobwebs spun out of their own brain'. Written by one of the Scottish Enlightenment's most important thinkers, this work brings to life the intellectual debates of the time. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas produced a voluminous body of work on moral theory, and much of that work is on virtue, particularly the status and value of the virtues as principles of virtuous acts, and the way in which a moral life can be organized around them schematically. Thomas Osborne presents Aquinas's account of virtue in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts, to show the reader what Aquinas himself wished to teach about virtue. His discussion makes the complexities of Aquinas's (...) moral thought accessible to readers despite the differences between Thomas's texts themselves, and the distance between our background assumptions and his. The book will be valuable for scholars and students in ethics, medieval philosophy, and theology. (shrink)

Each year individuals are required to execute millions of authorizations for the release of their health records as a condition of employment, applying for various types of insurance, and submitting claims for benefits. Generally, there are no restrictions on the scope of information released pursuant to these compelled authorizations, and the development of a nationwide system of interoperable electronic health records will increase the amount of health information released. After quantifying the extent of these disclosures, this article discusses why it (...) is important to limit disclosures of health information for nonmedical purposes as well as how it may be possible to do so. (shrink)

DNA identification is being used in ever-widening ways, including databases of greater scope, familial and lowstringency searches, and DNA dragnets. After examining the law enforcement and privacy interests, the article concludes that forensic DNA uses must be consistent with privacy and civil liberties.

The consequentialist project for human rights -- Exceptions to libertarian natural rights -- The main principle -- What is well-being? What is equity? -- The two deepest mysteries in moral philosophy -- Security rights -- Epistemological foundations for the priority of autonomy rights -- The millian epistemological argument for autonomy rights -- Property rights, contract rights, and other economic rights -- Democratic rights -- Equity rights -- The most reliable judgment standard for weak paternalism -- Liberty rights and privacy rights (...) -- Clarifications and responses to objections -- Conclusion. (shrink)