Abstract The editors introduce the special issue on atheism and the meaning of life, providing an overview of its scope and a concise summary of the contributions included in the issue.
Abstract Taken at face value, the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) says that God lacks proper parts, but the doctrine is also often formulated as a thesis identifying God with all his parts. The two formulations are not generally equivalent – on some plausible mereological theories, something can lack proper parts by being a part of all its (possibly distinct) parts. Thus, the DDS can be alternatively formulated as a thesis saying that God is part of all his parts – call this the symmetry formulation. The symmetry formulation is viable as a thesis about God’s relation to his attributes, because instantiation can plausibly be modelled as parthood. Moreover, the symmetry formulation retains the usual motivations for divine simplicity coming from the doctrines of aseity, transcendence, immutability, and unity. The symmetry formulation also addresses common objections to divine simplicity regarding distinctness in God’s attributes and those coming from modal collapse arguments.
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.
