The Prosblogion
The Philosophy of Religion Blog
October 25, 2017 — 10:59
Author: Helen De Cruz Category: Uncategorized Tags: ABD, Eligibility Requirements, ethics, philosophy, science Comments: 0
The Society of Christian Philosophers invites applications for its second round of the Graduate Student Cross-Training (GSCT) Fellowship Program, with fellowships to begin fall 2018. The GSCT Fellowship program is intended to equip graduate student members of the Society of Christian Philosophers with an opportunity to take up to one academic year to develop competency in an empirical science connected with their research. The 2017-2018 fellows are: Allison Thornton (Baylor, biology), Isaac Wilhelm (Rutgers, physics), Vivek Mathew (Cornell, cognitive science and psychology), Eddy Chen (Rutgers, physics), and Hayden Kee (Fordham, developmental psychology).
Fellowships. Up to five fellowships will be awarded. Each GSCT Fellowship will provide recipients with a stipend of $30,000, plus $2,000 for the home institution’s overhead costs and an additional research fund for the applicant of $2,000. This fund can support the purchase of books, journal subscriptions, or travel to disciplinary conferences, subject to the following conditions: (a) any books or journal/articles subscriptions must be for the purposes of cross-training in an empirical discipline; and (b) any travel costs must be for the purposes of traveling to a professional meeting, conference, or workshop in the cross-training discipline. The Society of Christian Philosophers will contract with recipients’ home institutions for the award monies, and the fellows’ home institutions will administer the award on behalf of the Society of Christian Philosophers. The home institution will be expected to continue providing fringe benefits and tuition support. At the end of the fellowship period, each fellow will submit a 5-page narrative summary of their fellowship experience.
Course of Study. Acceptable courses of study might include a plan to audit undergraduate and graduate-level courses, take up residence in a laboratory, or earn a degree in an empirical science. Fellows will be expected to undertake their study at their home institution, but study at another institution may be warranted in rare instances. All fellows must have a faculty mentor in their cross-training discipline.
Eligibility Requirements. The following requirements must be met for an application to be eligible for consideration:
- Applicant is a member in good standing of The Society of Christian Philosophers.
- Applicant is enrolled in a terminal philosophy PhD program at an accredited university.
- Applicant has reached ABD status, or will do so by June 1, 2018.
- Eligible scientific disciplines for cross-training are psychology, cognitive science, biology, physics, genetics, neuroscience, and astronomy. Cross-training in mathematics, logic, environmental science, economics, medicine, and political science will not be supported (with the exception of behavioral economics). Proposals expressing an interest in cross-training for the purposes of research in political philosophy, in philosophy of law, or in applied ethics, where this includes bioethics, environmental ethics, sexual ethics, medical ethics, and business ethics, are not eligible.
- John Templeton Foundation employees, officers, and Trustees are not eligible.
Full details can be found here: http://kevintimpe.com/gsct.html
October 14, 2017 — 15:30
Author: Kenny Pearce Category: Existence of God Problem of Evil Tags: evil, evolution, explanation, God, intentionality, reference, theodicy Comments: 8
The following line of thought is commonly found in analytic philosophy of mind: the reason calculators, for instance, are not minds is that the symbols they manipulate in order to solve mathematical problems to not mean anything to them (the calculators). It is not that their symbols/representations lack meaning or reference. Rather, they have the meaning or reference they do because of our conventions and the aims and purposes we have for calculators. This is known as derived intentionality. Our mental states, on the other hand, exhibit original intentionality. Their meaningfulness is not due to someone else’s employment of those symbols, but our own. Now, this talk about aims, purposes, and employment (according to this common line of thought) is a hint in the direction of the proper explanation of original intentionality. What would be needed for the calculator to think would be for these symbols to play an informational or indicative role for it, for them to have a function in meeting its needs, ensuring its survival, etc. And this is what we find with respect to information encoded in human and animal brains: certain states have the function of carrying information about the environment because either evolution or learning selected for those states to occur in those circumstances so that the animal’s well-being (evolutionary fitness) would be promoted by responding appropriately to those circumstances.*
If this story is true, it opens up the possibility of a new and interesting sort of theodicy. If the story is true then it may turn out that, quite apart from any questions about free will, it is metaphysically impossible for created minds to exist in the complete absence of evil.
To see why, consider a problem. On this view, if God directly creates an adult human ex nihilo** (like swampman) and God intends the human’s brain states to represent certain states of the external world, then, one worries, the human’s brain states will have only derived intentionality and the human will therefore not exhibit genuine thought—any more than a calculator does. So what does God need to do in order to give the human genuine thought? God needs to bring it about that these brain states function as representational or information-carrying states for the human, that the interpretation of them as meaning this or that is not imposed from the outside, but part of the human’s constitution. In order to bring this about (according to the story) the human must have needs which are satisfied only by the proper functioning of the system. The only is important: there must be a contrast class of cases in which the needs are unsatisfied. It thus appears that (if this story is correct) creatures can have states exhibiting original intentionality, and hence engage in genuine thought, only if they are genuinely vulnerable to their environment, and this requires the existence of evil.
Objection One: this story does nothing to address the magnitude, kinds, and unjust distribution of evil. Well, I’m not sure it does nothing about this problem, but it certainly doesn’t solve it. But no one should expect a real solution to that problem.
Objection Two: the theist can’t endorse the story in question, since the theist holds that God, an immaterial being with no needs, has original intentionality. To this objection, I have two replies. First, many theists have accepted some form of the doctrine of analogy, according to which the thing we call ‘knowledge’ in God is not actually of the same kind as our knowledge (though our use of the same word for both is supposed to be somehow non-arbitrary), and even theists who don’t endorse this doctrine must admit (on grounds quite independent of the story I’ve just told) that God’s knowledge is quite different from ours, so this may not be very problematic. Second, since God was not made by someone else, there is no worry that God’s states might have derived intentionality, and so at least one part of the worry the story is addressing does not apply.
Objection Three: most theists believe the human mind is immaterial, so they don’t want a naturalistic reduction of intentionality. Again, I have two replies. First, although this is probably true as a sociological generalization, that doesn’t reduce the philosophical interest of this combination of views. There’s nothing inconsistent in combining theism with this approach to intentionality and it looks like it has at least one significant benefit for the theist: it has the consequence that there couldn’t have been created minds and no evil at all, and so explains why there is at least some evil in the world. (As I conceded above, it does very little if anything to explain the magnitude, kinds, and distribution of evil.) Second, the relevant portions of the account could be endorsed by someone who held that the intrinsic nature of mental states was exhausted by their phenomenal character and representation/intentionality derives from the way those states are used by the mind according to rules (as on my interpretation of Berkeley). So it is not inconsistent with immaterialism about mind, or even with some of the leading arguments for immaterialism about the mind (those stemming from the irreducibility of qualia).
* Rather different versions of (approximately) this line of thought can be found, for instance, in Fred Dretske and Ruth Millikan.
** Essentiality of origins concerns may lead one to deny that this creation is really a human, but let’s ignore that complexity.
(Cross-posted at blog.kennypearce.net.)
October 10, 2017 — 2:59
Author: Helen De Cruz Category: Christian Theology General Tags: Alvin Plantinga, belief, Notre Dame, philosophy, religion Comments: 0
By Nevin Climenhaga, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame
As I had the honor to attend the recent Templeton Prize Ceremony for Alvin Plantinga, Helen De Cruz has asked me to write a summary of the event for the Prosblogion audience.
For those who would like to see the ceremony for themselves, a video of the ceremony is available on YouTube here. I note to my satisfaction, though, that you will not get to see everything those of us at the event saw. In particular, the narrator on the tribute video at 8:16 on YouTube is different – those of us in attendance saw the same video, but narrated by Morgan Freeman. I presume that Templeton did not want to pay the fees to post the Morgan Freeman-narrated video online, proving that even Templeton money does have its limits.
The ceremony was held on September 24 at the Field Museum in Chicago. Templeton usually hosts their prize ceremonies in London, so those of us who were in nearby Notre Dame felt fortunate to be able to attend this ceremony closer to home. The auditorium was very full, and many of those in attendance were not only influenced by Plantinga’s work, but were his direct “academic descendants” through teaching and advising. (Plantinga was an advisor for two of my own undergraduate professors, Robin Collins and Caleb Miller, both of whom were in attendance.) The tribute video shown during the event also illustrated how many people Plantinga has impacted, at one point zooming through Skype conversations with philosophers from some 20 different countries influenced by Plantinga.
more…
September 8, 2017 — 18:38
Submissions are invited for the Religious Studies Postgraduate Essay Prize, which is sponsored jointly by Cambridge University Press and the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. The winning entry will be published in Religious Studies, and the winner awarded £300.
The Prize is an international prize, and open to all those who are registered for a postgraduate degree at the time of submission. The topic of the essay should be in the philosophy of religion and must be no longer than 8,000 words in length. The judges reserve the right not to award the Prize if no submission of sufficient merit is received. All entries will be considered for publication in Religious Studies.
Essays should be submitted via the journal’s electronic system. A special submission area will be established for entries to the Essay Prize. The author’s name and contact details should not be included on the paper, but submitted separately.
The closing date for entries is 31 December 2017.
May 12, 2017 — 6:00
Author: Kenny Pearce Category: Concept of God Religion and Life Tags: Amber Griffioen, anti-realism, expressivism, fictionalism, God, imaginativism, non-cognitivism, religion, religious experience, Virtual Colloquium Comments: 4
This week’s Virtual Colloquium paper is “With or Without You: ‘Post-Metaphysical’ Religion and the Religious Imagination” by Amber Griffioen. Dr. Griffioen received her PhD from the University of Iowa in 2010 and is currently Margarete von Wrangell Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her papers on self-deception, superstition, and religion have appeared in journals such as Religious Studies, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, and European Journal for Philosophy of Religion.
With or Without You: “Post-Metaphysical” Religion and the Religious Imagination
Amber Griffioen
This paper represents the (still very rough) skeleton of a paper, adapted from a recent conference talk at UNISA on The Resurgence of Metaphysics in Science, Philosophy, and Theology. I am currently working to expand my thoughts from this talk into a full-length article. The paper begins with a sort of overview of one of the gulfs that seems to separate analytic and continental philosophers of religion (at least in my experience), namely the insistence of the former on continuing to focus on religious epistemology and the metaphysics of classical theism and the resistance of the latter to engaging in any sort of metaphysical or “ontotheological” enterprise. I do not mean this introduction to cover the entire spectrum of analytic or continental philosophy of religion; I merely want to gesture at a point of contention that often arises when I (as a participant in the more analytic tradition) engage in dialogue with continental philosophers of religion. The paper itself is (ideally) supposed to use the instruments from my more analytic conceptual toolkit to suggest a way in which the analytic desire for a deeply “metaphysical” religion can be made commensurate with the continental demand that we go “beyond” metaphysics.
The middle part of the paper draws on some other work I’ve done (published in German) on demarcating the realism/anti-realism debate and the cognitivism/non-cognitivism debate, which are sometimes run together in what I think are unhelpful ways. On the assumption a) that many continental philosophers of religion are anti-realists about the God of classical theism and b) that many analytic philosophers of religion want to hold on to some cognitivist understanding of religious language, I move on to talk about the promise that fictionalism might hold for the development of a “post-metaphysical” theological semantics. At the same time, I think fictionalism is limited in at least two ways: a) it generally assumes a kind of anti-realism about the objects of discourse, and b) it usually represents an instrumentalist approach to the arena of discourse in question. I thus think the development of an alternative semantics is warranted—one which is cognitivist, expressivist, and non-error theoretic, and which moves us past the somewhat stagnant realist/antirealist debates. It also allows that religion, like sports or music, may be an autotelic (not mere instrumental) enterprise, one engaged in for its own sake. This is a view I am calling “religious imaginativism”. It claims that the cognitive attitudes expressed by religious language are not, strictly speaking, beliefs but rather imaginings, combined with the more volitional attitude of acceptance. I argue that religious concepts require the implementation of the imagination, such that believers, agnostics, and non-believers alike must employ the imagination to get these concepts off the ground in the first place. The view is thus supposed to allow that—even if antirealism about God turns out to be true—it might still be legitimate to employ the term ‘God’ and to engage in “metaphysical” debate about the appropriate way to talk about God and God’s nature from within the imaginativist framework. At the same time, so long as we’re operating within a particular religious “model”, religious realists and religious antirealists who care about the model itself should be able to successfully communicate about God. That is, religiously committed believers, agnostics, and even atheists can successfully employ religious language without necessarily talking past each other.
I am treating this online colloquium like I would a live colloquium presentation. The text is thus still quite short and not fully fleshed-out. It is intended more to elicit questions, discussion, and constructive suggestions (for further reading, directions to take this in, ways to address objections, etc.). I haven’t laid out the entire view here. In fact, I’m still working the kinks out of it. I also have not inserted references to the relevant literature yet, so what you see are really my developing thoughts on a complex issue. Still, I hope you enjoy reading it, and I look forward to your comments!
The complete paper is available here. Comments welcome below!
April 28, 2017 — 6:00
Author: Kenny Pearce Category: Religion and Life Tags: Amod Lele, Aristotle, Buddhism, ethics, Harvard University, Philosophical Traditions, Resolving Disagreements Comments: 0
Today’s virtual colloquium is “Resolving Disagreements across Philosophical Traditions: an Aristotelian-Historicist Methodology” by Amod Lele. Dr. Lele received his PhD in religion from Harvard University in 2007. Currently, he is Senior Educational Technologist and Lecturer in Philosophy at Boston University, as well as a Visiting Researcher at BU’s Center for the Study of Asia. His papers, focused primarily on the Indian Buddhist philosopher Santideva, have appeared in journals including the Journal of Buddhist Ethics and the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice.
Resolving Disagreements across Philosophical Traditions
An Aristotelian-Historicist Methodology
Amod Lele
Can comparative religious ethics do more than compare? Once we have found similarities and differences between different traditions – including similarities within differences and differences within similarities (Yearley 1990) – what then? Mencius was not content to compare Yang Zhu, Mozi and Xunzi; he wanted to form an account of human virtue more adequate than theirs. Likewise, Aquinas’s integration of Augustinian Christianity and Muslim Aristotelianism was no mere articulation of similarities and differences; he aimed to provide a true account of the world and human flourishing, drawing on the wisdom of his two very different teachers. Given our awareness today of the wide-ranging differences across traditions, can we now aim to complete a project like Aquinas’s and Mencius’s own, one that attempts to resolve differences across traditions?
This paper will argue that we can. It will articulate and develop an Aristotelian-historicist methodology for cross-cultural ethics: one rooted in Aristotelian dialectic, maintaining the deeper awareness of cultural difference stemming from the German historicist tradition. It will take particular inspiration from the Aristotelian and historicist works of Alasdair MacIntyre (as articulated in a wide variety of works and especially MacIntyre 1991), but will also articulate a critique of MacIntyre’s method in important respects.
From Aristotle the methodology accepts the idea of dialectic: starting from established beliefs and resolving apparent contradictions among them by showing that the contradictions were only apparent or showing why one side was wrong but appeared right. Drawing on historicist philosophy of science – Kuhn, Lakatos and the Duhem-Quine thesis – it acknowledges that claims can rarely be refuted piecemeal and need to be understood within the context of a wider theoretical system, thus aligning itself with a “holist” or “historian’s” approach to comparative ethics rather than a “formalist” or “ethicist’s” approach. (See Sizemore 1990, 87; Stalnaker 2006, 16.) Further, it accepts that traditions may be incommensurable – that is, having no neutral or common standard by which their claims may be judged.
Unlike some formulations of the holist approach, however, the proposed methodology does not take incommensurability as final. With MacIntyre, it argues that traditions can become commensurable (and thereby supersede or be superseded) by learning the history of each other’s characteristic anomalies in their own terms and becoming able to explain another tradition’s anomalies better than they could themselves.
The project diverges from MacIntyre in refusing the ideal of situating ourselves within one single tradition. It argues that membership in multiple traditions of inquiry is necessary, across disciplines at a minimum (a properly informed scientific inquirer should be both a Darwinian and Mendelian biologist, and an Einsteinian and quantum physicist). Moreover the general condition of being (sometimes incoherently) “betwixt and between” traditions is not merely a modern problem, as MacIntyre (e.g. 1988, 397–8) implies it is, but a feature shared by Muslims who pray to local gods and Buddhists in Thailand who make offerings to Ganesh. So the methodology suggests that a joint process of synthesis is likely to be more fruitful than one-sided supersession.
A key question for any such project is reflexivity: how does it apply to itself? Since the methodology claims to be situated in Aristotelian-historicist tradition rather than tradition-neutral, one can well ask whether the methodology should be of interest to anyone who is not already Aristotelian or historicist. I claim that the methodology is, in MacIntyre’s words, “the best theory so far” – for everyone, not merely for those who are already Aristotelians or historicists. It is not that I advocate this methodology because I am an Aristotelian; rather, I am an Aristotelian because I believe it to be the most helpful methodology. But the methodology also draws from historicism a humility that recognizes that those involved in other traditions will start from very different places; insofar as this method rests on Aristotelian or historicist presuppositions that they cannot accept, it invites them to develop an alternative from which the dialogue can begin. “We have to begin by disagreeing even on how to characterize that about which we disagree, if we are to make any movement, even a stumbling and halting one, in the direction of rational agreement.” (MacIntyre 1991, 122–3)
Works cited
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1991. Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversations Between Confucians and Aristotelians About the Virtues. In Culture and Modernity, edited by Eliot Deutsch. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 104–22.
Sizemore, Russell F. 1990. Comparative Religious Ethics as a Field: Faith, Culture and Reason in Ethics. In Ethics, Wealth and Salvation: A Study in Buddhist Social Ethics, edited by Russell F. Sizemore and Donald K. Swearer. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Stalnaker, Aaron. 2006. Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Yearley, Lee H. 1990. Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
The complete paper is available here. Comments welcome below!
April 24, 2017 — 15:48
Author: Kenny Pearce Category: Christian Theology Tags: body, George Berkeley, idealism, Incarnation, Jonathan Edwards, Joshua Farris, Mark Hamilton, philosophy, theology Comments: 1
Having finished commenting on every chapter of Idealism and Christian Theology, allow me here to offer some concluding thoughts on the book and its aims and scope.
First, some comments regarding scope. The title ‘idealism and Christian theology’ allows for a very wide scope. In the design of a volume like this, a judgment must be made about how broadly or narrowly the title is to be interpreted. Here, the title bears a relatively narrow interpretation in two respects, only one of which is explicit in the introduction. The explicit restriction of scope is that the volume considers only Berkeleian and Edwardsian idealisms and not, e.g., Kantian or post-Kantian idealisms (p. 3). The implicit restriction is that the Christian theology is confined exclusively to conservative/traditional Protestant theology.
By my count, three of the essays focus primarily on Berkeley and five focus primarily on Edwards. Of the three essays remaining, one (Wainwright) is primarily concerned with comparison and contrast between Berkeley and Edwards, and the other two (Wessling and Arcadi) focus on the theological consequences of idealism without engaging in significant exegesis of either Berkeley or Edwards (though Wessling connects his version of idealism with Edwards and Arcadi connects his with Berkeley).
While I’m tabulating things, here are some facts about the authors: four work primarily in philosophy, seven in theology. All eleven authors are male. Six of the seven theologians are affiliated with Christian institutions (colleges or seminaries), all of which have a conservative Protestant orientation. Three authors are affiliated with Fuller Theological Seminary. By contrast, all four of the philosophers (and the one remaining theologian) are affiliated with secular universities. All of the Berkeley essays (and the one comparative essay) are by philosophers, while all of the Edwards essays are by theologians.
These facts are likely connected with a point of contrast between the Berkeley essays and the Edwards essays, which I have been noting as I go along: the Edwards essays pretty much universally pay careful attention to Edwards’ own theological commitments, and the way Edwards himself connects his idealism with his theology. The authors writing about Edwards generally seem sympathetic to Edwards’ theology, as well as his idealism. By contrast, Airaksinen is the only author to pay significant attention to Berkeley’s theological commitments. The other authors writing about Berkeley are generally concerned with how Berkeley’s idealism interacts with certain theological claims they (the authors) take to be important. This observation is not necessarily a criticism; it’s another choice about scope. The two questions (how Berkeley’s idealism interacts with his own theological commitments; how Berkeley’s idealism interacts with our theological commitments) are both perfectly legitimate, provided we distinguish them from one another. However, it is a little odd, and perhaps unfortunate, that all the Berkeley essays are on one side and all the Edwards essays on the other. This probably has to do with the disciplinary divide: the fact that all the Berkeley essays are by philosophers and all the Edwards essays are by theologians (with one comparative essay by a philosopher).
Second, some comments regarding the aims of the volume. In my introductory post, I wrote: “This post will be not so much a discussion of the book’s introduction as my own way of framing and approaching the issues in the book.” However, there turned out to be a degree of mismatch between my conception of the connection between idealism and Christian theology and the conception that animates this volume. My own account had primarily to do with a certain cluster of problems faced by the Christian idealist, which might be placed under the general heading ‘theology of the body.’ The body has significant importance to Christian theology, and idealism might be accused of running into Gnosticism by devaluing the body. To be sure, these sorts of issues do crop up in several places in the volume, and in some cases are addressed quite insightfully. (See especially the essays by Hamilton, Cortez, and Arcadi.) However, as the editors emphasize in the introduction (p. 3), this volume is more concerned with the value of idealism for constructive theological work than with the compatibility of idealism with basic points of orthodoxy. Of course, the orthodox theologian can use idealism constructively only if it is compatible with orthodoxy, and this is the reason that my question (the compatibility of idealism with ecumenical orthodoxy regarding the theology of the body) does come up in a number of places. But this is not the central focus.*
Finally, an overall evaluation. This volume must be understood as a defence of the harmony (not mere logical compatibility) of Berkeleian/Edwardsian idealism with traditional/conservative Protestant theology. Read in this way, all of the eleven essays are good, and at least six are excellent. The book is important and timely insofar as it stands at the intersection of two trends: the increasing seriousness with which idealism is taken in analytic philosophy, and the increasing engagement between analytic philosophy and theology. I, for one, think both of these trends are positive developments, and I therefore hope that this book will help to solidify both of them and also to begin a larger conversation about the relevance of metaphysical idealism to Christian theology.
Table of Posts
- Introduction
- Spiegel on Berkeley and Orthodoxy
- Wainwright on Berkeley and Edwards
- Wessling on ‘Idealistic Panentheism’
- Yandell on Berkeley and Creation
- Farris on Edwards on the Imago Dei
- Mark Hamilton on Idealism and Fallenness
- Cortez on Edwards on the Resurrection
- Crisp on Edwards on the Incarnation
- Tan on Edwards’ Christology
- Arcadi on Idealism and the Eucharist
- Airaksinen on Berkeley’s Theological Ethics
(Cross-posted at blog.kennypearce.net.)
* Thanks to Joshua Farris for helpful correspondence on these points.
April 21, 2017 — 6:00
Author: Kenny Pearce Category: General Tags: Brandon Warmke, ethics, forgiveness, God, Philosophical Studies, philosophy Comments: 2
Today’s Virtual Colloquium is “God’s Standing to Forgive” by Brandon Warmke. Dr. Warmke received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Arizona in 2014 and is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His work in moral philosophy has been published in journals such as Philosophical Studies, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophy and Public Affairs.
God’s Standing to Forgive
Brandon Warmke
Consider two cases:
| LUCY: | I lie to my brother, telling him I bought a gift for our parents when I did not do so. Realizing my guilt, I ask my new plumber Lucy to forgive me for my lie. Lucy forgives me for lying to my brother. |
| GOD: | I lie to my brother, telling him I bought a gift for our parents when I did not do so. Realizing my guilt, I ask God to forgive me for my lie. God forgives me for lying to my brother. |
The claim that Lucy could forgive me for lying to my brother will, I think, strike most people as very strange. And yet for many people, it will not seem nearly so strange to think that God could do so. An apparently central tenet of all three Abrahamic faiths is that God can and does forgive human persons for the wrong things they do to one another. But how is this possible? Because I lied to my brother—and not to Lucy—we are inclined to think that Lucy cannot forgive me. She lacks standing to do so. But then why think that God can forgive us for the wrongs we do to others? It is natural to suppose that just like I did not lie to Lucy about the gift, I also did not lie to God about the gift. And so if Lucy does not have the standing to forgive me, how does God? This is the question I wish to explore: how could God have the standing to forgive us for the things we do to one another? Call this the problem of divine standing. In this paper I provide two different solutions to the problem.
I begin by cataloging the various ways that one might have standing to forgive someone for wrongdoing. One has direct standing to forgive a wrongdoer when one is the direct victim of that wrongdoing. One has indirect standing when one is wronged as a result of a wrongdoing to someone else. Controversially, one can possess proxy standing to forgive when one can forgive on behalf of the victim. Also controversially, one can possess third-party standing to forgive a wrongdoer for what she did to someone else.
I then show that none of these individual varieties of standing to forgive explains why God would be able to forgive interpersonal human wrongs. For example, one might argue that when humans wrong one another, both the human victim and God have direct standing to forgive, but for different wrongs. When I lie to you, you can forgive me for lying to you, and God can forgive me for, say, disobeying God. But such a solution would still not secure God’s standing to forgive me for lying to you.
I then develop two different solutions to the problem of divine standing. One kind of solution concedes that God cannot forgive wrongs between human persons because God lacks standing to do so, but argues that this is no problem. There are many things that God cannot do. Just as God cannot, say, keep your wedding vows to your spouse (only you can do that), God cannot forgive you for lying to your spouse (only s/he can do that). This solution also stresses the importance of human forgiveness: because only you can forgive the wrongs done to you, those wrongs will be forgiven only if you do so.
For those who desire for God to be able to forgive us our “trespasses” against others, I develop another solution to the problem of divine standing. On this strategy, when we wrong others: (1) the human victim has direct standing to forgive us for the interpersonal human wrong; (2) God has direct standing to forgive for the wrong against God; and (3) God has third-party standing to forgive for the interpersonal human wrong. In developing this solution, I defend the possibility of third-party standing. I suggest a new strategy for defending third party-forgiveness and show that persons can come to have such standing when they stand in relationships of personal care with both victim and wrongdoer. I conclude that since God stands in relationships of personal care with all of us, this explains why God has standing to forgive us for our wrongs against each other and not just our wrongs against God.
The complete paper is here. Comments welcome below!