Toronto Star has an interview with Elie Wiesel in which Elie offers some interesting, and perhaps entertaining, remarks on preserving his religious faith despite his suffering.

Q What is it like having strangers ask you if or why you believe in God?

A You know who asks me the most? It's children. Children ask, ``How can you still believe in God?'' In All the Rivers Run to the Sea, I speak about it. There are all the reasons in the world for me to give up on God. I have the same reasons to give up on man, and on culture and on education. And yet ... I don't give up on humanity, I don't give up on culture, I don't give up on journalism ... I don't give up on it. I have the reasons. I don't use them.

Q Why do you think people ask you these questions?

A It is for their sake. They want to understand. Look, a very religious person would not ask me this question; only if that religious person has some anxiety or some doubt, then that person wants to know how I deal with that anxiety and that doubt. And I say, `Look, I have faith. It's a wounded faith.'

Of course his answers leave you wanting to ask more questions. For example, I'm not sure what it means to have reasons but not to use them, but it sounds borderline irrational if one doesn't have better reasons.

While reading an interesting piece on adult bat mitzvah in the Boston Globe I stumbled upon some interesting biographical information about Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam. Up until the 1970's it was unusual for Jewish girls to have a bat mitzvah ceremony and in response some adult women began having such ceremonies. Below the fold Ruth Anna Putnam reflects on her bat mitzvah at age 70.

D.Z. Phillips, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wales, Swansea, died suddenly of a heart attack as he worked in the library at Swansea this week. He was 71. Phillips is perhaps best known as the leading Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion and as a prolific author. Among his many books are The concept of prayer, Wittgenstein and Religion, The Problem Of Evil And The Problem Of God, Death and immortality, and Philosophy's Cool Place. Phillips served as President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, Director of the Rush Rhees Archives and the Peter Winch Archives, and editor of the journal Philosophical Investigations. Professor Phillips's funeral service will be held at a Welsh congregational chapel in Swansea:- Ebenezer Newydd, Henrietta Street, Swansea On 4th August at 12.30 Swansea University Press Release icWales Obituary

Bill Moyers of PBS has a new series on interviews on faith and reason, available here. One of these interviews is with the philosopher Colin McGinn, author of countless articles and books, including the auto-biographical The Making of a Philosopher, which I found to be an enjoyable read. Moyers introduces McGinn as an individual who "stalked the arguments for and against God," "reasoning himself to atheism" in the process. Among other topics, McGinn discusses why he thinks "there are no arguments for God that are impressive" but that there are nevertheless "lots of good reasons to believe in God," and possible reasons for the resurgance of fundamentalism. The trascript can be found here, the video here, or one can subscribe to a podcast version of the entire set of interviews through iTunes.

I'll be in God's country--Alaska--all next week, so try not to discuss anything too interesting!

I've been there before and it set my sensus divinitatus into overdrive, so perhaps I'll come back with lots to tell.

That reminds me. I noticed the other day--totally meant to blog it but I forgot--that in Chisholm's 2nd Ed. of Theory of Knowledge when he is discussing the number of epistemic principles--I think he only offers two basic ones there: memory and perception--he notes that some will want fewer--perhaps only a principle of credulity--and some will want more. W.r.t. the latter, he notes that in the Christian tradition some have affirmed the existence of a special faculty to perceive the existence of God.

I don't have the book with me right now, but I think it was either Hugh of St. Victor or perhaps Richard of St. Victor and the term used was "occulis contemplationes," the "eyes of contemplation." If it's either of the St. Victor boys, then that's the earliest explicit reference I know of to such a faculty (although past history makes me think Augustine has said it somewhere).

See you when I get back.

Philosophy of Religion Student Conference
Rutgers University

The Philosophy department at Rutgers University will be hosting a student Philosophy of Religion conference, to be held in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Friday the 18th through Sunday the 20th of January 2007. Submitting papers for the conference is open to undergraduates, graduates, and people currently unaffiliated with any college or university. Submissions of original work in any subfield of Philosophy of Religion are welcome, including responses to works already in the literature.

Thomas Williams (Iowa) has an interesting, and very readable, article on the univocity of religious language here. The abstract is below the fold:

Colleen Keating, who's acquaintance I recently made, commented on my post about the new Plantinga volume that there's audio of an interview here. It won't be anything new to most readers, but I wanted to draw more attention to it, so I'm posting it here top level. I listened to it and it's pretty interesting.

He gives a standard summary of EAAN and touches briefly on his more recent article contra Kim, then the interviewer asks:

"What have some of the criticisms been?"

"A lot of the criticisms have just been to say 'that's nuts' or 'that's crazy' or 'good grief'."

I can honestly say that I've heard the last one offered, not even kidding.

He refers the the reader to the volume _Has Naturalism Been Refuted?_ but says that none of the criticisms there work out and adds that he "can't think of any strong criticisms."

The epistemology is what interests me most, and I was pleased to here him give a defense of the Principle of Indifference against Bertrand's paradox. However, I'm losing confidence in his epistemically degenerative pill analogy. I'm not really sure there's a defeater there.

I was a bit miffed that though he gave a long list of precursors for EAAN--including Nietzsche an Stephen J. Gould--but not C.S. Lewis--though he footnotes Lewis in Warrant and Proper Function.

The main website is here and there is even a pretty good discussion of the argument in the forum. I think Al will be pleased.

Recently there was a "substantive content change" to the Stanford Encyclopedia article "The Epistemology of Religion".

Since religious epistemology is my main thing, I can't resist a few opinions, but I'll put them below the fold.

The April edition of International Journal for Philosophy of Religion is now available online and there's an article by William Rowe called "Friendly Atheism, Skeptical Theism, and the Problem of Evil". I'm currently on the road and having trouble accessing the article. I've not read the paper, but he gave it at his farewell conference at Purdue in April 2005.

"Friendly atheism" is the view that though the evidence supports atheism, some theists are within their epistemic rights to accept theism. I suppose I'm a friendly theist that way, which means I need to have a response to Schellenberg's Hiddenness argument (which I do). As far as I know the term was first coined in "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Athiesm," American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, 1979 and reprinted in Rowe and Wainwright's Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings (1998).

As I say, I'm a friendly theist--I think that there are atheists whose atheism is on balance epistemically responsible and epistemically justified. But what about this:

Romans 1:20 (New King James Version)
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

Below the fold, I want to lob out three general strategies for reconciling friendly theism with this verse and the traditional take on general revelation in general.

Call for Papers

Society of Christian Philosophers APA Eastern Division Meeting

December 27-30, 2006

The SCP Program Committee for the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association is soliciting 2 short papers (no more than 2 pages single-spaced) for the purpose of generating an open discussion on philosophical issues in religious diversity.

We have a 2 hour group session which probably will be scheduled sometime on Thursday, December 28th. However, the APA does not guarantee a specific date and time at this point in the preparations for the meeting.
If you are interested in submitting a paper and willing to present it at the Society of Christian Philosophers meeting at the APA in December, e-mail your proposal to zeis@canisius.edu by August 15th.

SCP Eastern Division APA Program Committee
David Basinger
Gyula Klima
John Zeis, chair

Robert Merrihew Adams, Senior Research Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford University, already a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences has been elected to the British Academy. Before moving to Oxford Adams was at Yale University, and prior to that he taught for many years at UCLA. Many readers will be most familiar with Adams' extensive work in metaphysics and on divine command theory, though he is an accomplished Leibniz scholar too. He's also the husband of accomplished philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams. Congratulations to Professor Adams!

[HT: Leiter Reports]