Religious Studies:1-18 (forthcoming)
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A number of philosophers have recently defended the evil-god challenge, which is to explain relevant asymmetries between believing in a perfectly good God and believing in a perfectly evil god, such that the former is more reasonable than the latter. In this article, I offer a number of such reasons. I first suggest that certain conceptions of the ontology of good and evil can offer asymmetries which make theism a simpler hypothesis than ‘maltheism’. I then argue that maltheism is itself complex in a variety of ways: it is difficult to articulate a simple precise version of maltheism; maltheism posits a mixture of positive and negative properties; maltheism posits a more complex relationship between moral motivation, practical reason and action; and maltheism relevantly parallels other epistemically ‘complex’ sceptical scenarios.
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DOI | 10.1017/s0034412519000465 |
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References found in this work BETA
Quantitative Parsimony.Daniel Nolan - 1997 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (3):329-343.
The Evil-God Challenge: Extended and Defended.John M. Collins - 2019 - Religious Studies 55 (1):85-109.
Is Theism a Simple Hypothesis? The Simplicity of Omni-Properties.Calum Miller - 2016 - Religious Studies 52 (1):45-61.
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Citations of this work BETA
The Intrinsic Probability of Grand Explanatory Theories.Ted Poston - forthcoming - Faith and Philosophy.
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2019-09-21
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22 ( #35,573 of 2,403,516 )
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