• Zain Ali, Faith, Philosophy and the Reflective Muslim
• Yujin Nagasawa (ed.), Scientific Approaches to Philosophy of Religion

Forthcoming Titles:

• Istvan Aranyosi, God, Mind and Logical Space: A Revisionary Approach to Divinity
• Eric Steinhart, Your Digital Afterlives
• Gregory Dawes and James Maclaurin (eds.), Cognitive Science and Religion
• Trent Dougherty, The Problem of Animal Pain: A Theodicy for All Creatures Great and Small
• Aaron Rizzieri, Pragmatic Encroachment, Religious Belief and Practice

Series Editors:
Yujin Nagasawa (University of Birmingham, UK)
Erik Wielenberg (DePauw University, USA)

Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion is a long overdue series which will provide a unique platform for the advancement of research in this area. Each book in the series aims to progress a debate in the philosophy of religion by (i) offering a novel argument to establish a strikingly original thesis, or (ii) approaching an ongoing dispute from a radically new point of view. Each title in the series contributes to this aim by utilising recent developments in empirical sciences or cutting-edge research in foundational areas of philosophy (such as metaphysics, epistemology and ethics). The series does not publish books offering merely extensions of or subtle improvements on existing arguments. Please contact Series Editors (y.nagasawa@bham.ac.uk / ewielenberg@depauw.edu) to discuss possible book projects for the series.

Dear Colleagues,

I am delighted to announce the launch of a research project entitled "Theism: An Axiological Investigation".

This Templeton-funded project will support various initiatives, including one Research Fellowship for the 2013-2014 academic year.

Junior, mid-career, and senior philosophers are all welcome to apply for this position.

The successful applicant will either receive a stipend/salary or funds for teaching release.

To learn more about this project, and to see the call for applications for the Research Fellowship, please visit the project website:

http://www.ryerson.ca/~kraay/theism.html

Applications are due on June 14, 2013.

- Klaas

Philosophical Perspectives on Theological Realism

Call for Papers

In recent decades, an increasing number of philosophers in the so called "analytic tradition" have begun to produce exciting philosophical work on topics belonging traditionally to the provenance of systematic theology. The Analytic Theology Project is a multinational four-year endeavor that contributes to this development in a creative way. It funds systematic research to promote long overdue interdisciplinary cooperation among analytic philosophers and theologians. All research initiatives aim at examining the traditional questions of theology from the perspectives of contemporary Christian theology and analytic philosophy. In this way new advances at the intersection of both fields shall be explored. Moreover, the project will critically reflect on possible limits of analytic approaches and will consider the value of complementary philosophical approaches for theological research.

Among the main grant activities for achieving the goals of the project are three 10-day Summer Schools, the first of which has been carried out successfully at Munich in 2012. These seminars provide younger scholars with a survey of methods of analytic philosophy and theology as well as training in key topics in Analytic Theology. In addition the seminars aim to develop professional relationships among younger scholars in the interest of long-term collaboration and mutual intellectual support as their careers progress.

The Summer School will be followed by the Analytic Theology Conference on the same topic, which will take place from 09th - 11th of September 2013. For further information on the conference programme please follow the corresponding link on http://www.uibk.ac.at/analytic-theology/summerschools/.

Organizers:
Prof. Dr. Thomas M. Schmidt (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Prof. Dr. Oliver Wiertz (Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt)
Confirmed Speakers:
Daniel A. Dombrowski, Seattle University (USA)
Sami Pihlström, Collegium for Advanced Studies Helsinki (Finland)
Philip J. Rossi SJ, Marquette University (USA)
Genia Schönbaumsfeld, University of Southampton (UK)

For the Short Paper Sessions during the afternoons, contributions to the following areas are welcome:

Philosophy of Religion and other philosophical disciplines
- Epistemological Realism
- Metaphysical Realism
- Moral Realism

Four Ways of Challenging Theological Realism
- Pragmatism
- Hermeneutics
- Phenomenology
- German Idealism
- A Defense of Theological Realism

Applications in German or English can be made via email to Oliver Wiertz, wiertz@sankt-georgen.de until 5th of May 2013 and should include an abstract (500 words), Curriculum Vitae, and a list of publications, if existing. All applicants will be informed whether or not their abstract has been accepted until 15th of May 2013. The number of participants is limited to 15. Conference language will be English.

Applicants must be enrolled as PhD students in philosophy or theology at an accredited degree-granting institution or be within 5 years of receiving their PhD. They will be chosen on the basis of demonstrated interest and on the likelihood of future productivity. Each selected seminar member will receive a stipend for travel and lodging costs.

Contact: Prof. Oliver Wiertz, Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen, Offenbacher Landstr.
224, 60599 Frankfurt/Germany, wiertz@sankt-georgen.de.

Conference location: Erbacher Hof, Main (http://www.ebh-mainz.de/).

This seminar, as well as the Kuyper Center, are made possible by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

PDF Flyer

I may finally have an answer to David's question. I think that the Molinist should answer in the affirmative if and only if non-derivatively free actions have explanations.

Suppose w0 is the actual world. Consider the conditional C→A, where C says that Curley has such-and-such character and is offered a $5000 bribe at t0, and A says that he freely accepts the bribe at t0. Suppose w1 is a sufficiently close-by world where C and A are true. Now let's put ourselves in w1. So, Curley freely accepts the $5000 bribe. Does this have an explanation? If not, then a fortiori I think we should not have said in w0 that C→A had an explanation. After all, if it has an explanation in w0, it surely doesn't lose one in w1, just because C holds there. But it would be just too weird that in w1, C→A has an explanation but A does not, especially if, as will at least typically be the case, C has an explanation.

Conversely, suppose that in w1, A has an explanation. What kind of an explanation is that? The most plausible candidate for an explanation of a free action is in terms of non-necessitating reasons and character. Maybe, in w1, what explains A is that Curley is very greedy. But that Curley is very greedy is a part of C. So it seems very reasonable to say at w0 that what explains C→A is that were C to hold, Curley would be very greedy (a necessary truth, since C includes a description of Curley's character). Now you might say: Yeah, but that he would be greedy in C doesn't entail or maybe even make likely that he would take the bribe. But the very same point holds in w1: that he is greedy doesn't entail or maybe even make likely that he takes the bribe--yet, we supposed, it explains it. If we accepted the explanation of the categorical claim in w1, we should accept the corresponding explanation of the conditional claim in w0, if w1 is close enough to w0.

Now here's an argument for holding that such experiences have a different evidential status when they are experienced by me than they do when I have reliable testimony of someone else's experience. It is based on Reid's famous 'same shop' argument. Suppose I have an intense religious experience of the second sort. I am trying to use my cognitive faculties to determine whether this was a veridical experience of a supernatural reality, or a cognitive malfunction. But if it was a cognitive malfunction, this casts doubt on the reliability of my cognitive faculties, the very same faculties I am using to conclude that my experience was a cognitive malfunction. The more I attribute to myself such malfunction, the more I undermine the reliability of my faculties, but since these attributions are the result of the exercise of my cognitive faculties, my position here turns out to be self-defeating. For this reason, there is a strong presumption in favor of my own sanity. However, I don't have similar reasons for presuming any other particular individual to be sane. Something like this is behind Plantinga's view that the atheist and the Christian can each be justified (subjectively rational) in regarding the other as the victim of a cognitive malfunction, despite having all the same third-personal evidence.

Here's a thought, though. The reason I need to presume my own past sanity is in order to avoid undermining the present deliverances of my cognitive faculties, the faculties I use to evaluate my sanity. Given the right kind of evidence, one can, of course, rationally believe that one has a severe mental disorder, but in order to do this one needs to regard the disorder as not undermining one's ability to evaluate the evidence for the disorder. This is how John Nash is portrayed at the end of the film A Beautiful Mind: he knows that he has hallucinations, but believes in the general reliability of his ability to evaluate what he seems to see and hear to determine whether it makes sense. So what's needed is an explanatory hypothesis which doesn't impugn one's current efforts to evaluate the experience in question. The less a malfunction hypothesis casts doubt on one's present cognitive performance, the less 'same shop' considerations give one reason to disfavor it.

A case of this which is much less extreme than Nash's is the hypothesis that one experienced a cognitive malfunction due to a drug which has now passed out of one's system. In this case, the previous malfunction has no tendency to undermine the reliability of one's present deliberation, because one is not presently under the influence of the drug.

Now here's where the 'expiration dates' mentioned in my title come in. We humans tend to change over time, and this includes changes to our cognitive faculties. These changes can involve honing our faculties by education, ceasing to be effected by distorting influences, and so forth. In other words, our cognitive faculties can improve. But the hypothesis that one previously experienced major cognitive malfunction is self-defeating only if one thinks the underlying causes of the malfunction are still around. The longer in the past the putative malfunction occurred, and the more one's psychology has changed since then, the more intrinsically plausible it will be that the underlying causes are gone. As a result, these 'same shop' considerations get less and less force, so that one's own religious experience in the distant past start looking, epistemologically speaking, a lot like the testimony of others' religious experiences.

It's a well-known fact that mystics (both the great mystics and the more ordinary ones) often experience doubts when they go a long time without the kind of religious experience which previously helped to form their faith. I always used to think this was a type of irrationality. (One of those ordinary sorts of irrationality to which humans are prone.) After all, in general if one has seen something one shouldn't start to doubt its existence just because one saw it a long time ago. But the considerations I've presented give some reason to think that these mystics' doubts are rational after all. The longer one goes without religious experience the weaker the grounds for belief provided by one's past religious experience become. This is because the epistemic cost of regarding the past experience as resulting from cognitive malfunction decreases the further in the past the experience is.

(cross-posted at blog.kennypearce.net)

Begin with this observation. If the non-epistemic Copenhagen interpretation (NECI) of Quantum Mechanics is literally true, then before there were observers, there was no earth and hence no life on earth. Given indeterministic events in the history of the universe, the world existed in a giant superposition between an earth and a no-earth state. The Milky Way Galaxy may not have even existed then, but instead there was a giant superposition between Milky-Way and no-Milky-Way states. And then an observation collapsed this giant superposition in favor of the sort of Solar System and Milky Way that we observe. There are difficult details to spell out here, which we can talk about in the discussion. But note that the story predicts that we will have astronomical evidence of the Milky Way existing long before there were observers on earth, even though perhaps it didn't--perhaps there was just the giant superposition. For when such a superposition collapses, it leaves evidence as of the remaining branch having been there for a long time earlier.

Now to make this a defense of the idea that suffering in the animal world entered through human sin, I need a few assumptions beyond the above plain NECI story:

1. the observations that collapse the wavefunction are observations by intelligent embodied observers
2. quantum states only come to be substrates of conscious states when the wavefunction is strongly concentrated on them (think of a very narrow Gaussian)
3. prior to there being humans on earth, there were no highly concentrated quantum states of the sort that would be substrates of conscious states
4. humans were the first embodied intelligent observers of the earth (or of other stuff relevantly entangled with it)
5. God set up special laws of nature such that if humans were never to make wrong choices, no wavefunctions would ever collapse into the substrates of painful states.
6. optional but theologically and philosophically attractive: the unsuperposed existence of humans comes from a special divinely-wrought collapse of the wavefunction (this would solve one problem with NECI, namely how the first observation was made, given that on plain NECI before the first observation there was a superposition of observer and no-observer states before it; it would also help reconcile creation and evolution)

One might even connect the giant superposition with the formless and void state mentioned in the Book of Genesis, though I do not particularly recommend this exegesis and I don't believe the story I am giving is in fact true (and I am mildly inclined to think it false).

Response: So does the plain NECI story, without any of my supplements such as that it is intelligent observation that collapses the wavefunction. And just like the plain NECI story, my extended story explains why have the evidence we do.

Objection 2: Like the worst of the young-earth creationist stories, this story involves a massive divine deception.

Response: Not at all. Consider Descartes' attractive idea that what we expect from God is not that we would always get science right, but that we would be capable of scientifically correcting our mistakes. And the discovery of quantum mechanics, with the invention of the NECI interpretation, came within a century of Darwin's work. As soon as we had quantum mechanics with the NECI interpretation, we had good reason to doubt whether prior to the existence of observers there was an earth simpliciter or just an earth-component in a giant superposition.

Objection 3: There are better interpretations of quantum mechanics than NECI.

Response: Weighing the pros and cons of an interpretation of quantum mechanics requires weighing all its costs and benefits. This will include weighing the theological benefits of this interpretation, given the evidence that there is a God.

Variant: If we want, we can reinterpret the paleontological and geological claims about how things were before observers as relativized to a component of the wavefunction, while exempting consciousness from this relativization--only where there are highly concentrated states is there consciousness. The Everett interpretation basically does this relativization for all claims. The present relativization is, I think, less problematic than the Everett one. First, it doesn't branch intelligent agents or conscious states in the way the Everett interpretation does, a branching that generates the severely counterintuitive consequences of Everett's theory. Second, I do not think it has the well-known serious philosophical problems with the interpretation of probability that the Everett interpretation suffers from: the probabilistic transitions all happen with intelligent observation, and are objectively chancy transitions with the probabilities being interpreted according to one's favorite view of objective chances.

Final remarks: Why don't I believe this story? Well, for one, I find myself incredulous at it. Second, we know that either quantum mechanics or relativity theory is false, and I see little reason to assign more credence to quantum mechanics. Third, I do want to preserve the claims of the special sciences, like biology and geology, without implausible relativization. Fourth, I am sceptical of (1), the idea that only intelligent observation collapses the wavefunction.

For centuries, atheism was suppressed because of its supposed amorality. Now, New Atheists such as A.C. Grayling and Sam Harris argue that decent, liberal morality is perfectly possible without religious belief--indeed, that it is only possible without it. Others, such as Jürgen Habermas, acknowledge that Christianity has had a peculiar capacity to articulate humanist values and norms, but that these can be extracted without loss from their theological roots. This May, the McDonald Centre, together with the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter, gather ten philosophers and theologians--both believers and unbelievers--from the UK, the USA, and New Zealand to address questions such as these:

• Even if morality in general does not need religion, might specific moralities nonetheless need it?
• Might morality be better off without religion? Is it better off without any religion or only certain kinds?
• When notions of human dignity or rights are extracted from theological language, is anything important lost in translation? Are such notions really sustainable apart from a theological worldview?
• Are religious believers more, or less, moral than others? Or are such questions philosophically irrelevant?

Speakers include: David Baggett (Liberty), Julian Baggini (The Philosophers' Magazine), Nigel Biggar (Oxford), John Cottingham (Reading), John Hare (Yale),Terrence Irwin (Oxford), Michael Hauskeller (Exeter), Tim Mulgan (Auckland), Keith Ward (Oxford), Mark Wynn (Leeds).

Register online now as space is limited: http://groupspaces.com/mcdonaldcentre/item/414088

When: 16-17 May 2013
Where: University of Oxford
Cost: £50 (students £30), including lunch

Now, suppose as seems plausible to me that there are precisely two kinds of explanation: constitutive-style and causal-style explanations. Constitutive-style explanations explain a truth by explaining how the truth is grounded: the knife is hot because its molecules have high kinetic energy. Causal-style explanations explain a truth by giving non-grounding conditions that nonetheless in a mysterious but familiar causal or at least causal-like give rise to the holding of the truth.

Now, brutish truths have no constitutive-style explanations. For the constitutive-style explanation involves the describing of a grounding. But brutish truths also have no causal-style explanations. For causal-style explanations involves the describing of causal-style relations between the aspects of the world (in the concrete sense) that ground the explanandum and explanans. (In fact, for this reason, brutish truths not only lack causal-style explanations but are not causal-style explanations for anything else.) So, brutish truths have no explanations.

But if there are true fundamental Molinist conditionals of free will about non-existent agents, there will also be ones that have explanations. For, some, maybe all, free actions can be explained in terms of the reasons the agent had. Thus, Curley accepts the bribe because he wants to be richer. Granted, this is a non-necessitating explanation--that Curley wants to be richer does not entail that he accepts the bribe. But that's still an explanation, and one of causal-type. And exactly parallel explanations can be given for Molinist conditionals. Thus, Curley would have accepted the bribe in circumstances C because circumstances C includes his wanting to be richer. And presumably this kind of explanation would have held even had Curley never existed, and presumably if Molinism is true, there are such explanations for true conditionals about actually non-existent agents. Thus some fundamental Molinist conditionals of free will about non-existent agents can be explained. But this contradicts their brutishness.

Moreover, presumably some fundamental true Molinist conditionals of free will about non-existent agents explain God's creative inactions. Thus, perhaps, God did not create Badolf Bitler, because Bitler would have been so much worse than Hitler. But these conditionals do not provide a constitutive-style explanation for such actions. So they provide a causal-style explanation. But they can't do that, because they're brutish.

The same argument goes against Merricks-style presentism on which fundamental truths about the past are brutish. But many, perhaps all, fundamental truths about the past are explained by other fundamental truths about the past.

I think the weakest part of my argument is my insistence that there is non-constitutive explanation of brutish truths. One might say that in addition to causal-type explanations, there are counterfactual-causal and past-causal explanations. Thus, if C caused E, then the proposition that E occurred is explained by C's having caused E. And likewise that Curley would have accepted the bribe is explained by the fact that C would have probabilified Curley's acceptance.

Nonetheless, while this answer is available to the Molinist or to Merricks, it is an additional cost to the theory. For we avoid multiplying types of explanations.