Recently in Christian Theology Category

According to Mark 3:28-29, Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin."

I never was sure exactly what this blaspheming referred to. Anyway, whatever it is, it's something that, according to Jesus, a person will not be forgiven for. If a person will not be forgiven for it, then it follows that God will not forgive the person for it. Then I thought of this argument:

1) Necessarily, the Greatest Conceivable Being (GCB) will forgive all sins.
2) Possibly, God, as conceived of by Jesus, will not forgive all sins.
3) So, God, as conceived of by Jesus, is not the GCB.

Regarding (1), it seems to me that any being that will forgive all sins is greater than one that will not. I take it that A can forgive B even if B has not repented in any way. My only concern is that maybe the GCB's being perfectly just prohibits him from forgiving all sins. But I can't see why this is so. It seems that a parent can both justly punish a child and forgive her child. Any thoughts?

Jaegwon Kim's well known Pairing Problem is supposed to show that it is impossible both that immaterial souls cannot have causal efficacy in the physical world as well as to other immaterial souls. The problem, in brief (super-brief) is that for event A to cause event B, there must be some further factor X in virtue of which A causes B. There is no such further factor X in the case of the mental events (willings, actings, intendings) of souls and physical events. So, souls cannot be causally related to the physical world. This argument is supposed to apply to ALL souls.

I just finished (most of) Plantinga's really nice article "Materialism and Christian Belief" in Persons: Human and Divine, and he proposes that broadly logical necessity is that relation. He writes,

According to classical theism, it's a necessary truth that whatever God wills, takes place. It's a necessary truth that if God says, "Let there be light," then there is light. Necessarily, if God says, "Let Adam come into existence," Adam comes into existence. So what is it that makes it the case that God's intentions cause what they cause? To ask that question is like asking, "What is it that makes an equiangular triangle equilateral?" The answer is (broadly) logical necessity; it's necessary that whatever God wills comes to be just as it's necessary that every equiangular triangle be equilateral. Accordingly there isn't a problem about that factor X in the divine case... (p. 133)

So Kim's Pairing Problem that it is impossible that souls be causally related to the world fails. Plantinga goes on to show that once you have theism, there is no problem for human souls having causal interaction in the world as well.

This seems compelling to me. Anybody see any problems with it?

According to most Anselmians—and most theists—God has a special set of essential properties. Those essential properties include omniscience, omnipotence, perfect goodness and necessary existence. But how do we know this? There are just two possibilities: either we know that God has those essential properties apriori or we know aposteriori. Again, almost no theist maintains that we know the essential properties of God aposteriori. The reason this is rejected is because it entails that we might have discovered that God was less than essentially perfectly good, etc. But almost no theist thinks that’s a possible discovery. So, most Anselmians—I’d again say most theists—maintain that (A) is true.

A. A being x = God only if (i) for most essential properties P of x, it is primarily necessary (i.e., apriori) that x has P, and (ii) the essential properties of x include omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and necessary existence

There is a concise and valid apriori demonstration based on (A) and some well-known logical relations holding between primary necessity (aprioricity) and secondary necessity (metaphysical necessity). Let M be restricted to essential properties understood as properties objects have in every world in which they exist. Here’s a concise ontological argument.

I'm going a bit out on a limb and talking about stuff I haven't read too much about. But if blogs are for learning and fun discussion, I guess I don't need to be an expert! Also, this post is directed more toward people who are theists, substance dualists, and deniers of open theism.

The following two claims seem plausible enough to me:

1. God is not morally obligated to create the best possible world.
2. There are no supererogatory acts.

Supererogatory acts are those acts that go above and beyond what duty or obligation requires. But if God isn't obligated to create the best possible world, and is merely obligated to produce a good enough world, then isn't it better if God creates a world that's better than the minimally good enough world? It seems like a supererogatory act for God to create at all, since it will never be the best act of creation. So there does seem to be a problem if you accept both these claims. But, though I would not submit to martydrom for either claim, there do seem to me to be good arguments for both, and yet they seem inconsistent.

1. I think it's plausible that adding one more intrinsically good thing to a world will make the world better, and its always possible to add one more intrinsically good thing. This means there is no best possible world, and thus it is impossible even for an omnipotent being to create the best possible world. Unless God is obligated to do the impossible, it seems that claim 1 is true.

2. Consequence-based ethical theories have usually required maximizing the best consequences, but a lot of people have rejected such an approach, because it implies that it's wrong to go see a movie because that money could better be spent helping starving people get some food (for one example). So we now have satisficing theories approaches that say that all we're obligated to do is seek good enough consequences. A similar approach occurs in non-consequentialist ethics, where perfect duties are duties everyone has but imperfect duties are acts that someone or other ought to do but no one particular person is required to do them.

I recently finished Robert Adams' old article "The Virtue of Faith" (chapter 1 of the book The Virtue of Faith), and I found a really interesting point. Uncertainty and faith are necessary for a certain sort of special good in a relationship. I think it's worth quoting Adams on this:

There's a tradition in Christendom which says that faith in Jesus Christ as one's savior, and commitment to him as lord, is necessary for salvation. (Different Christian traditions might state this requirement differently; the important point is that almost everybody who hasn't been in contact with Christian missionaries, or isn't part of a chain which goes back to Christian missionaries, will fail to meet this requirement.)

There's another Christian tradition which says that one must have this faith before one's death.

While I see somewhat strong scriptural merit behind the first tradition (despite a growing number of Christian philosophers rejecting it; I think they're called inclusivists), I don't see much scriptural merit behind the second tradition. Furthermore, as my friend Patrick Todd pointed out to me at the Pacific SCP, it seems arbitrary for God to pick death as the moment beyond which there is no return. From the standpoint of eternity, why then? What's so important about that point? It seems that a less arbitrary point would be when a person has shaped his character in such a way that he would never have the faith which I described in the first paragraph of this post (this shaping might happen via what Robert Kane calls "self-forming actions"). A picture of how all this might happen is illustrated beautifully in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. Furthermore, I bet that inclusivists might be more open to exclusivism if they rejected the second tradition.

So, I don't see much scriptural merit behind the second tradition. On the more philosophical side (and hence, more germane to this blog), it seems that death would be an arbitrary point at which to judge people's eternal destiny.

Given dissertation and job applications and such, I'm pressed for time, so this post might be a little sloppy and quick. At the recent Pacific SCP, Wes Morriston presented on the problem of genocides in the Bible, and he presented what I took to be a very powerful argument that we should not believe that God commanded genocides in the Bible. I will extract one point from his talk, develop the argument, and hope that it creates helpful discussion.

Let's take reformed epistemology, at a first approximation, to be the view that beliefs about God can be properly basic. A belief is basic iff it is not held on the basis of another belief, and a belief is properly basic iff it is basic and has positive epistemic status. I say beliefs about God rather than the specific belief that God exists, because, following Plantinga, it is more likely that the properly basic beliefs humans have will have contents such as God is speaking to me, God is with me now, God is to be praised, and so forth. Each of these propositions would be the obvious basis for belief that God exists, and this belief could be very quickly and easily inferred. This is the sort of stuff Plantinga said in his very early work.

I've been working through Huemer's recent book Ethical Intuitionism, and I've overall been finding it to be exceptionally clear and well written, especially compared to a lot of other metaethics and moral epistemology I've read.

Huemer raises a series of objections to Divine Command Theory (DCT), the view that "that right actions are right only because God commands them" (p. 55). His second objection is as follows:

We return this week to Moser's book The Elusive God. In these three sections Moser addresses God's intervening Spirit, the acquaintance with the power of God's intervening Spirit, and the split between Jerusalem (philosophy) and Athens (theology). While there are a number of places in which I wanted to agree with Moser, I found the arguments scarce, the explanations often confusing, and some of the claims simply repetitive. Perhaps this is because this section marks more of a turn to theology rather than philosophy, but nonetheless I still expected more clarity.

1. Spirit

As we've seen to this point, Moser certainly doesn't think it is sufficient to have propositional knowledge of God. His claim is that a perfectly loving God is going to offer a distinctive kind of purposively available evidence. A kind of evidence that has been widely overlooked by philosophers and theologians. This evidence is that divine self-revelation of God's imparted Spirit to humans. With the imparting of God's Spirit, humans receive the power to be transformed towards God's moral character.

I'm far from an expert on these matters, but from the small sample of theology I've read it doesn't seem to me that the imparting of God's Spirit and it's transformative power have been much neglected. Perhaps I've just been reading all the right stuff, but I doubt it. Examples like this, and the repeated kicking at natural theology, keep me thinking that I wished Moser would just make the case for his positive argument without trashing the practice of philosophy and theology along with their practitioners.

In any case, Moser makes a number of appeals to the writings of Paul in making the case for how the imparting of God's Spirit gives us two things, (1) a new noncoercive power that is felt by the recipient and observable by others, and (2) directly self-authenticating firsthand veridical evidence of God's reality. One thing that get's confusing is that it often isn't clear on the first reading who power is supposed to be evidence for. On the one hand we can have knowledge of God's Spirit via our conscience, but we can also have knowledge via the evidence of new power. Of course both of these are also supposed to serve as evidence for others, at least if the have "eye's to see".

I've read this section about 15 times and it still isn't clear to me what the Spirit is supposed to be. I suspect that if one didn't grow-up Christian, or spend a good deal of time reading theological literature, one could easily get lost or confused about the Spirit. Here are a few candidates for what Moser means when he talks of Spirit:

1. Spirit = Holy Spirit (i.e. third person of the Trinity)


2. Spirit = God (e.g. God is Spirit and he's imparting himself)


3. Spirit = gift of spirit

Moser does three main things in sections 5-8 of chapter 2:

1. He gives an explanation for divine hiddenness
2. He gives a deeper explanation of purposively available divine reality using the notion of attunement
3. He gives an argument for God's existence.

I will briefly describe these three things and raise a few questions along the way.

1. Divine Hiddenness

Moser provides a handful of possible explanations for divine hiddenness, distances himself from two popular explanations, and then makes a move that is quite analogous to the skeptical theist response to the problem of evil.

Moser calls his reply to the problem of divine hiddenness the Divine Purposes Reply, which states, "God would restrain divine manifestations, at least for a time, to at least some humans in order to enhance satisfaction of God's own diverse perfectly authoritative and loving purposes regarding humans" (110). Furthermore, there isn't one particular purpose that God's hiding satisfies. Moser suggests the following as some of God's purposes: