The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy added another philosophy of religion entry this week: John Hare's contribution on Religion and Morality. It's a lot more historical than I expected, and it has a lot less detail on the contemporary issues, with only one paragraph of eleven sentences on the issues in contemporary analytic philosophy. But it seems like a good historical guide to a number of issues too often ignored in many historical introductions to ethics.

I teach a 300-level philosophy of religion class every spring semester. In the past, I've tended to teach the class as an overview of the various issues. I'll spend a little over half of the semester on various standards such as religious language, pluralism vs. exclusivism, attributes, a few of the arguments for God's exsitence (cosmological, ontological), a few of the arguments against God's existence (evil, hiddenness). I then spend the final 1/3 or so of the class dealing with issues of providence: risk vs. no-risk, whether foreknowledge of various sorts helps with providence, hell/heaven/purgatory, prayer. A previous copy of my syllabus can be found here in case you are interested.

I'm thinking about changing the structure this semester. I'd still focus the first part of the semester on many of the same issues, but try and keep them to no more than half of the course. The second half, I'd like to compare/contrast two extended views of God and His providential interacting with the world. I'm thinking of using Roger's Perfect Being Theology and would like a good contrasting view. I think that the middle chapters of Flint's Divine Providence will be too technical. I like Hasker's God, Time and Knowledge, but it's narrower in focus than I want. I was thinking about doing a book defending open theism and so took a look at The Openness of God this weekend. I'm only half through the book, but I've been very dissapointed. Any other suggestions?

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Johnny Cash and Philosophy: Ring of Truth forthcoming in Open Court's Popular Culture and Philosophy Series

Whether penning songs of social protest such as "Man in Black" and "Jacob Green," exploring the problem of personal identity in his biography of Saul/Paul in the novel Man in White, calling for prison reform and social justice in the Nixon White House, or expressing his faith in “When the Man Comes Around,” Johnny Cash has served as a gadfly and social conscience for generations of music fans.

For the forthcoming Johnny Cash and Philosophy: Ring of Truth we seek proposals for chapters treating the relationship between Johnny Cash and any aspect of philosophy. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): free will and addiction, capital punishment, personal identity, the nature of evil, religious experience, sexual morality, Native American rights, freedom of expression, gender roles, prison reform, prayer, religious conversion, postmortem existence, and Cash’s worldview [God, Love, and Murder].

I've been teaching an introductory philosophy course this semester with a new text for my God unit, Thinking About God by Greg Ganssle. It's designed to be usable for high school or introductory college/university courses, and it's just about the lowest level of detail that I would want to use for this course. I'm supplementing it some with other readings also, but it's nice to spend a lot of time just in one book after using lots of scattered readings in past versions of the course.

One thing that I found really interesting was in the section on the logical problem of evil. The logical problem of evil presents three traditional attributes of God (omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness) and then seeks to derive a contradiction if you admit to the existence of evil (which pretty much all traditional theists will do, and thus it's a problem even if the person presenting the problem doesn't happen to believe in evil, because the theist does, and it's supposed to be a contradiction for theism). Now it so happens that hardly any philosopher today accepts the logical problem of evil as a good argument, for several reasons, but in the process of explaining why Ganssle hits on an interesting issue that I hadn't thought of before. One way some people have resisted theists' attempts to respond to the problem of evil might actually help the theist in surprising ways.

The October issue of Analysis is now available on line. It has an article "Fine-tuning is not surprising" by one Cory Juhl. I'd never heard of him so I looked him up on the UT Department website and he's got good training in HPS.

I only perused the article, but I couldn't find anything very original upon perusal. Some of it seems like a less-precise rehash of some of Brad Monton's points discussed previously on the blog. One complaint that I very much share is the lack of any semantics offered for the kind of probability which is supposed to be at work in the argument. I've been slaving away at range theories of probability and point-set topology and re-reading Carnap trying to come up with something, but it's very difficult. Still, I'm less worried about logical probability measures over infinities than I was when I started.

Though I'm personally vexed by this, I'm not sure how big a problem it is for the argument from fine-tuning. I can see one sticking to the intuitive judgements reasonably without being in possession of the mechanics. I've discussed this problem with Richard Swinburne and he's certainly not interested in it. This is what he said in one email: "This notion of evidential probability, like- for example - the notion of cause, is so basic that any philosopher's attempt to give a precise definition of it in other terms is unlikely to capture its nature adequately."

He thinks the judgements themselves are intuitively correct. One might say that the intuitive judgements are in fact the standards according to which the theories should be judged (or at least relatively fixed points in a reflective equilibrium). A philosopher wants more, of course, but we might have to live without it.

I'll be presenting my own criticisms of the fine-tuning argument at the upcoming SLU Religious Epistemology Conference which I'm very much looking forward to.

I just read Brian Leftow's "God and the Problem of Universals" which is in the latest Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (vol. 2) (Table of contents available here). It is divided into four sections of three or four essays each and Part IV is "Metaphysics and Theism". [I previously interviewed Leftow for Prosblogion (link).]

I've mentioned my desire to explore divine conceptualist alternatives to the regnant Plantingan Platonism previously here. [By the way, another part of the Plantingan Paradigm is a "relational" vs. a "constituent" ontology. Michael Loux has an essay on this in the same volume (and Wolterstorff discusses it in "Divine Simplicity" Phil Perspectives 1991.]

Leftow's piece is meandering and mysterious at times, but he's doing front-line work which means there are also some very exciting ideas as well. I'll mention a few things I find especially mysterious and especially exciting below the fold.

It's been a bit quiet around here of late. I'm sure many of us are back to regular work, swamped with a backlog of projects, and enjoying the first hints of fall. So, here is an easy but fun project post that I started thinking about after reading a similar post at Right Reason. The project is to answer the following question. "What are the most important philosophy of religion articles published since 1950? I know there were many influential books written during this period, but that's a list for another day. I've answered only for the period 1950-1979 but I'd like to extend this list up trough the 90's. I'm interested to see what other people would add or subtract from the list. The list is below the fold.

To continue the recent discussions of hell, let me ask the wise folks of PB for their collective wisdom.

I was reading a recent article by Wilko Van Holten entitled "Can the Traditional View of Hell be Defended? An Evaluation of Some Arguments for Eternal Punishment" in Anglican Theological Review--not a journal I normally read, but I figured "What the hell?" (Ok, no more bad puns in this post, I promise).

Rest below the fold:

Prosbloggers,

I don't think I've seen the Second Annual Philosophy of Religion Conference, run by J. Kvanvig, advertised here yet. The Call for Papers can be found at: http://philofreligion.missouri.edu/2007callforpapers.html. The conference, which used to be at Mizzou, is now moving to Baylor with Kvanvig.

James

I reprint the full call for papers below the fold.