Abstract Contemporary classical theists routinely argue that God’s creative act is a kind of divine free willing or free choosing. This article argues that ‘free willing’ or ‘free choosing’ ( liberum arbitrium ) cannot be a proper divine act on the terms of classical theism. To advance this claim about classical theism at large, we take as our test case Thomas Aquinas’ argument that God freely wills this world, since it is so conceptually comprehensive and representative of much Christian thinking on these matters. We deploy Thomas’ accounts of divine predication, divine attributes, and the nature of free willing to show that when we correctly apply Thomas’ classical theist doctrine of divine perfection to analogically purify the concept of finite free willing – and so render it capable of being properly attributed to God – none of the defining characteristics of free willing remain to be predicated substantially of God; the attribution becomes equivocal. But such equivocations, in Aquinas’ account of divine predication, can still function as religiously useful metaphors, which is what we argue ‘God freely wills creatures’ must be on classical theist terms. Thus, our argument invites classical theists to re-examine the ‘divine-creating-as-free-choosing’ analogy, and to search for other, more adequate ways of analogically conceiving divine creating.
Abstract Nicholas Hadsell suggests an answer to the question of divine authority. Hadsell agrees with Mark Murphy that it isn’t enough to point to divine omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, or our gratitude to God. Hadsell’s answer is that God has practical authority over us because he is our parent. Since parents incur duties towards their children, and since the discharge of those duties requires authority, God likewise has authority over us. Hadsell’s parental model is the wrong one for understanding God’s normative relation to mature rational creatures. It’s true that Scripture often compares God to a loving parent, but the dominant and overarching shape of God’s dealings with mature moral agents is covenantal.
Abstract This paper argues that worship-worthiness should be treated as the foundational question of philosophy of religion. To develop this claim, I divide the philosophy of worship into two branches: the axiology of worship (whether God is worthy of worship) and the deontology of worship (whether we ought to worship God). After developing a tripartite account of worship, I distinguish two broad theological approaches: Worship-Worthiness Theology (WWT), which takes worship-worthiness as its organizing concern, and Non-Worship-Worthiness Theology (NWWT), which begins from other metaphysical or theological priorities. I argue that WWT has axiological, prudential, and methodological priority over NWWT – a thesis I call Worship-Worthiness First. I argue that this thesis can transform existing debates in the philosophy of religion. I develop this thesis through three case studies: perfect being theism, arguments for God’s existence, and the nature of God. Worship-worthiness, this paper argues, is not one topic among others. It is the question that should guide and structure all the others.
Abstract This paper focuses on two important questions about Christianity and sanctification: • If Christianity is true, then what can we reasonably predict about the impact of the sanctification process on Christians? • Is the empirical research on morally relevant behaviour consistent with such predictions, and in particular, is there evidence consistent with there being better moral character on average in Christians rather than non-Christians? In addressing the first question, we will focus on whether, if Christianity is true, there is good reason to predict that Christians on average will have a more virtuous character than non-Christians. In addressing the second question, we will see that there is significant empirical evidence that is consistent with this prediction.
The editors of the special issue on panpsychism and pan(en)theism introduce the issue. This includes brief summaries of each of the articles.
& Sacute;r & imacr;vidy & amacr; is a Tantric tradition which includes a form of religious initiation into an esoteric practice. Descriptions of initiation allude to and often describe the initiator sharing an experience with the initiand. In this article, we will suggest that such experiences can be understood in terms of a 'shared token experience'. To make a case for taking such an experience into account, we use an argument for the epistemic value of religious experience. Our defence of the sharing of token experience across subjects also opens up questions as to the limits of consciousness or subjecthood. The phenomenon of & Sacute;r & imacr;vidy & amacr; initiatory experience also undermines two assumptions regarding what it means to be a subject. The first assumption is that each conscious subject is a unified whole insofar as its different experiential parts are mereologically connected to one subject. The second assumption is that each subject's experiential field is bounded to one subject such that no two subjects can share the same experiential field. We argue that these assumptions do not necessarily preclude the possibility of a shared token experience.
This paper explores the mechanism and metaphysics of aesthetic experience according to the 10th-11th-century Sanskrit nondual Pratyabhij & ntilde;& amacr; & Sacute;aiva philosopher Abhinavagupta. It contributes to the global history of aesthetics by showing how the same mechanism, apoha (exclusion), accounts for both art appreciation and artistic creation in Abhinavagupta's work. Examining the technical elements of this mechanism from Abhinavagupta's metaphysical works sheds notable light on the nature of commonization (s & amacr;dh & amacr;ran & imacr;+root kr/bh & umacr;), a key element of Abhinavagupta's aesthetic theory. This paper also contributes to cross-cultural aesthetic theorizing by drawing on C. Thi Nguyen's work on agency as an artistic medium to provide a framework for contemporary philosophers of aesthetics to approach Abhinavagupta's theory.
Sceptical theism is commonly deployed as a response to evidential arguments from evil by challenging our entitlement to infer, from the evils we observe, what God would or would not be likely to permit. Standard fine-tuning arguments, however, appear to require precisely the sort of expectation-guided reasoning that sceptical theism places under pressure: namely, the claim that a life-permitting universe is not too improbable given theism. Recent discussion has sharpened this tension: Donahue argues that sceptical-theist considerations undercut standard fine-tuning arguments, while Boyce argues that sceptical theists can nevertheless endorse a suitably revised version. I argue that Boyce's proposal is philosophically important but dialectically costly. Boyce does not replace generic theism with a more specific hypothesis; rather, he keeps generic theism as the target hypothesis while allowing historically mediated background information, D, to generate the relevant theistic expectations. My objection is that once D is admitted for that positive purpose, it cannot be quarantined from adverse evidential assessment. The result is not merely that the problem of evil is formally reopened. Rather, enriched versions of evil, suffering, and divine hiddenness become serious enough to require independent theistic response. Boyce's strategy therefore preserves coherence only by narrowing sceptical theism's traditional broad anti-evil role.
This paper argues for the non-existence of God conceived as a perfectly just Supreme Lawgiver who holds all rational agents accountable for commands attributed through revelation. Unlike divine hiddenness arguments that appeal to God's love, this argument examines the procedural requirements of perfect justice: just accountability requires that agents recognise the existence of the authority to which they are subject. If God justly holds all blameless, non-resistant agents accountable to revealed commands, such agents must believe they have adequate evidence that the Commander exists. Yet many conscientious agents, including canonised saints and sincere seekers, report lacking adequate evidence despite sustained, non-resistant effort. The resulting epistemic situation is incompatible with just accountability since no-one can be justly obligated to obey commands from an authority whose existence they cannot recognise. The argument concludes that no recognisably perfectly just Supreme Lawgiver exists who holds all accountable to revealed commands. The conclusion leaves open the possibility that a non-commanding deistic God exists, but argues that God as the revealed Commander whose justice is recognisably exercised does not exist. Abrahamic conceptions of revealed divine legislation, moral obligation, punishment, and forgiveness cannot be grounded in recognisably just divine authority.
In The Image of God (2022), Eleonore Stump seeks to address a residual problem that remains even after a successful theodicy, namely the problem of mourning. The problem of mourning concerns the appropriateness of certain evaluative responses (such as grief or disappointment) with respect to the world that contains suffering. To answer this problem, Stump seeks to demonstrate how lives with suffering are maximally great precisely because they contain suffering: some person S's most glorious self is to be located in her participating in the sufferings of Christ and thereby magnifying God's love in herself. This paper identifies a problem with Eleonore Stump's solution to the problem of mourning, namely valorisation: Stump's solution entails that there is a type of suffering that is constitutive of value and therefore a reason-giving end in it itself. Valorisation is something we should avoid. I therefore present a different solution to the problem of mourning that is based on the incommensurability of S's best lives. After this I address one final issue - the problem of preference - that is in the neighbourhood of Stump's problem of mourning. I argue that if S's best lives are incommensurate, we can reject the preference problem as incoherent.
A non-identity theodicy is any attempt to explain why an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and all-loving God might cause or permit the pain and suffering of his creatures that makes use of one or more claims about the identity conditions of those creatures. Most non-identity theodicies make use of one identity thesis in particular: origin essentialism, the thesis that the particular circumstances in which a person first comes into existence are essential to that person. In this paper, I argue that, despite some impressive upshots, origin essentialist non-identity theodicies fall short in at least two ways. I argue, furthermore, that both of these shortcomings can be rectified by building a non-identity theodicy on a stronger identity thesis: superessentialism, the thesis according to which every event in the life of a person, and not just the circumstances in which he or she first begins to exist, is essential to that person.
This paper explores the implications of J & imacr;va Gosv & amacr;m & imacr;'s (sixteenth century) Bhed & amacr;bheda Ved & amacr;nta for the contemporary philosophical debate on consciousness, thereby contributing to the broader and growing interest in the insights that Indian traditions may bring to current discussions in the philosophy of mind. More specifically, I develop here a metaphysical, coarse-grained partial reconstruction of J & imacr;va's thought, arguing that it can be interpreted as a distinctive form of priority cosmopsychism, which I term & sacute;akti-based Ved & amacr;nta cosmopsychism. Needless to say, this involves both a terminological and a taxonomical task, as I seek to clarify how key aspects of J & imacr;va's thought can be articulated through the conceptual framework and vocabulary of contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In the final part of the paper, I turn to a more fine-grained analysis, examining the implications of & sacute;akti-based Ved & amacr;nta cosmopsychism for central issues in the philosophy of consciousness, including the causal exclusion problem and the explanatory gap problem, here framed as the individuation problem. I also address some few objections, among them a cosmopsychist formulation of the Ved & amacr;ntic problem of imperfection.
In a recent article, Michael Rea has argued that hope for universalism to be true is incompatible with a lack of belief in its truth, so that hopeful universalists should become believing universalists. His reasoning, in short, is that hope for universalism involves belief that universalism is good, and such belief conflicts with a recognition of what might be God's perfect will - that universalism is false. In response, I defend hopeful universalism by arguing that at least in some cases, we should align our hopes (or what Eleonore Stump terms our 'desires of the heart') with what we take to be not God's consequent will, but only God's antecedent will - and it may be only God's antecedent will, and not God's consequent will, that universalism be true.
I present a new ontological argument that rests on two evaluative theses, both inspired by Anselm's Proslogion 2. First, for any F and Q, it is no better for there to be an F, given Q, than it is for there to be something perfect. Second, it is better for there to be something perfect if there is such a thing than if there isn't. It follows that there is something perfect. I examine these premises, consider some parodies, and suggest possible atheistic replies.
The idea that God must relate perfectly to our subjectivity is central to Linda Zagzebski's work on omnisubjectivity. There is a hitherto undiagnosed tension, however, between different criteria one might use to judge what perfectly relating to our subjectivity consists in. God's relationship to what Zagzebski calls 'counteractuals', individuals that do not exist but that could have, brings this tension into focus. On the one hand, if God does not know what the subjective experiences of counteractuals would be like, then God's omnisubjectivity would appear to be unacceptably limited in scope. On the other hand, if God knows the subjectivity of actual creatures in the same way that God knows the subjectivity of counteractual creatures, then the motivation for omnisubjectivity ends up being undercut to a significant extent. This essay resolves this tension with a model that draws on interpersonal perception and divine introspection.
This paper argues for a revised approach to religious literacy that I call the interreligious attentiveness (IA) approach. I argue that this approach is better than those endorsed by other scholars in the academic study of religion - namely, knowledge, analysis, and skills approaches. I draw attention to the limitations of these approaches by virtue of three challenges: conversion (exclusivist groups), multiple religious belonging, and motivation. I then argue that the IA approach offers a more effective response to these challenges and should be regarded as the preferred approach.
Traditional Christian theism maintains that God's creative act is intentional and rational, which suggests God must have ideas or creative blueprints in mind when creating. We also have good reason to think that God's creative act displays creativity or artistry. Tom Ward has recently argued that God gets his creative blueprints from knowing himself, a position he calls 'Containment Exemplarism'. However, Paul Gould has recently argued that Containment Exemplarism undermines God's status as paradigmatically artistic or creative. I argue that Gould's argument is unsuccessful. As I will argue, the conception of creativity Gould employs as the basis for his argument, if understood permissively, can be reconciled to Containment Exemplarism. If understood in a manner to avoid this reconciliation, the conception of creativity Gould utilises is unduly restrictive and leads to unintuitive consequences. Containment Exemplarists would thus be entitled to reject it.
