July 2006 Archives

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.'

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]

This post examines Richard C. Potter's solution to the problem of reconciling creatio ex nihilo with ex nihilo nihil fit in his valuable article, "How To Create a Physical Universe Ex Nihilo," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, (January 1986), pp. 16-26. (Potter appears to have dropped out of sight, philosophically speaking, so if anyone knows what became of him, please let me know. The Philosopher's Index shows only three articles by him, the last of which appeared in 1986.)

One of my projects for this summer is to prepare a new (for me) course: Virtues and Vices. I'm taking a largely historical approach to the course. The three major texts that I'm using are Aquinas' The Cardinal Virtues, Stephen Pope (ed.) The Ethics of Aquinas and Dante's Purgatorio. I have found reading this material and preparing for the course to be fascinating and stimulating. It has raised a number of questions. For instance, why would Aquinas say "since human beings cannot use reason apart from sense powers, which need bodily organs, human beings need to sustain their bodies in order to use their reason"? This seems to contradict what he says elsewhere about the possibltiy of disembodied human intellect and will. But the question I want to ask about today concerns how Aquinas and Dante rank the virtues and their corresponding vices.

More below the fold.

Many of my philosophical interests intersect at a theistic theory of the possibles (the possibles are things that could possibly be, whether they actually are or not). I’m interested generally in modality, but also in theories of abstracta, the nature of possibilia, and a traditional understanding of the nature and attributes of God. This post isn’t about these things in particular, but these interests did lead me to an article by John Doyle entitled, “Suarez on the Reality of the Possibles” (The Modern Schoolman, Nov, 1967).

Let me start by saying that I don’t know much about Suarez past what I learned in this article. So, in the sequel, any time I talk about Suarez, I really mean Doyle’s understanding of Suarez.

Suarez has some interesting things to say about the relation between God and the possibles. Often Christians say that the possibles somehow rely on God for their existence. Aquinas, for instance, says that it is necessary for every being that exists to be created by God (ST I q44, a1). Other Christians believe that if the possibles are independent of God’s creative work, they infringe on his aseity. Suarez doesn’t agree.

Suarez says that even if God did not exist, the possibles would still exist. The possibles aren’t dependent on God, then, since they can exist even if God doesn’t exist (given that the possibles don’t contingently depend on God).

However, Suarez goes even further and claims that if the possibles didn’t exist, God couldn’t exist. Doyle writes, concerning Suarez’s view of the possibles:

“Of themselves they are eternally true and apt to be known, even if there were no God. Far beyond this, their reality is such that if they were not what they are, there would be no God and, a fortiori, none of the actual creatures that depend on him.”

Suarez has the order of dependence the other direction from Aquinas. The existence of the possibles doesn’t depend on the existence of God, since they can exist without him; but, if there were no possibles, there would be no God.

Suarez has other interesting things to say about the relationships between God and the possibles. He says (here I quote Doyle) that the possibles “are ‘not positively but in a certain negative way’ equal to God.” I suppose they are equal to God in a negative way insofar as Suarez says the possibles have their existence insofar as they are non-contradictory, but I’m not sure. Suarez also says (again, quoting Doyle) “the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, proceeds from the Father’s knowledge of Himself and of creatures inasmuch as they are possible.” As Doyle rightly sees, this makes the Son “somehow subsequent” to the possibles. I’ve never seen any Christian, let alone a philosophical powerhouse like Suarez, affirm something like this. Does anyone know anything about this, or about other Christian philosophers who have held similar views?

I'd like to welcome our latest contributor Tim Pawl. Tim is currently a fourth year graduate student in philosophy at Saint Louis University, studying with Eleonore Stump.

Kevin and I have been discussing God's relation to necessary truths ad nauseam recently. I advanced a conceptualist argument for the dependence of necessary truths on God. Here I want to query people's intuitions on conceptualism.

Take the standard Plantingian account of modal actualism and replace every occurrence of "property" with "divine concept" and call that Actualist Conceptualism. (In terms of Jaeger's semantics, the universal domain would just be one of divine concepts rather than properties and everything else should be isomorphic.) The question I wan to ask is:

Why would anyone *not* be an Actualist Conceptualist?

It just seem so attractive. You solve all the same puzzles at a fraction of the cost.

I can only think of a few reasons not to go there right now.

1. Technical problems with the semantics.
2. Independent reasons to like Platonic entities.
3. Independent reasons not to like conceptualist account of necessary truths.
4. Existence of necessary truths no accountable for by concepts.

Of course, you could also not like Plantingian actualism (I prefer Adams's account), but my question here is really addressed to those who do. In other worlds, if you accept that system, why not this one which is structurally the same but with half the entities?

So I'm wondering what people's intuitions are here.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on William of Ockham has had a "substantive update" (yesterday).

I must say that I've found interest in Ockham really swelling over the last several years. I'm very glad about that. It's one of those situations where I wish I could cite every instance, but I can only remember about four things that make me say that, but I'm sure the impression is based on much more.

The much anticipated Knowledge and Reality: Essays in Honor of Alvin Plantinga is finally out. Only a few of the essays are specifically philosophy of religion, with most being in epistemology. With Plantinga, however, some of his most important PR work depends in part on his epistemology.

Here's the squib from from the publisher (available here):

This volume comprises essays presented to Alvin Plantinga on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Plantinga is one of the leading figures in Anglo-American metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of religion; his work in these areas has been the focus of wide scholarly attention. This collection of essays, all of which were written specifically for this volume in honor of Plantinga’s 70th birthday, ranges broadly over topics in metaphysics and epistemology and includes contributions by some of the best philosophers writing today. The volume will be of particular interest to metaphysicians, epistemologists, philosophers of religion and theologians as it includes important recent work by some of the leading thinkers in these fields.

With contributions from William P. Alston, Michael Bergmann, Richard Fumerton, Jenann Ismael, Jonathan Kvanvig, Trenton Merricks, Richard Otte, John Pollock, Michael C. Rea, Eleonore Stump, James Tomberlin, Peter van Inwagen, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Keith Yandell.

I'll post the table of contents below the fold to save space.

I just got the June British Journal for the Philosophy of Science a day or two ago and it features Brad Monton's "God, Fine-Tuning, and the Problem of Old Evidence." I first met Brad when he came to the University of Missouri where I was an MA student and gave this presentation. It is a really nice paper and we had a long correspondence over it. Many readers will have seen this paper in a nice PowerPoint presentation on the lecture circuit, but it's well worth reading the full paper if you haven't.

Here's the abstract:
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The fundamental constants that are involved in the laws of physics which describe our universe are finely tuned for life, in the sense that if some of the constants had slightly different values life could not exist. Some people hold that this provides evidence for the existence of God. I will present a probabilistic version of this fine-tuning argument which is stronger than all other versions in the literature. Nevertheless, I will show that one can have reasonable opinions such that the fine-tuning argument doesn't lead to an increase in one's probability for the existence of God.
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If I get caught up--ha!--I might comment on this a bit, since I think it raises some important questions about the fine-tuning argument. I'll make a very brief comment below the fold.

Ted and I are working on a response to the Problem of Divine Hiddenness which takes a comprehensive look at the way the problem involves the notion of belief. We first started exploring this on Prosblogion here and then later presented the preliminary results at an SCP meeting (another item to be thrown in with Kevin's recent post here). One issue is that belief needn't be *full* belief to have the good-making properties Schellenberg adverts to in explaining the badness of certain kinds of individuals lacking belief.

We are inclined to agree with Pojman on a certain delimitation of the following thesis:

The Faith Without Belief Thesis: Possibly, S has "salvific" faith in God and S's degree of belief in the proposition that God exists is less than one half.

More below the fold.

I'm working through Rowe's Can God be Free? as part of a book review. In the chapter on Aquinas, Rowe is considering Aquinas' view on God's relation to necessary states of affairs. According to Rowe, God needn't do anything to bring about necessary states of affairs given that they are necessary. In a footnote to this discussion, Rowe writes: "This does not mean that there is no way in which necessary facts such as the number 4's being larger than the number 2 depend on God. It only means that God doesn't create them."