J. L. Schellenberg, in "A New Logical Problem of Evil," argues that (if God exists) God has, of necessity, a disappreciation of evil, operating at a meta-level in such a way as to give God a non-defeasible reason to rule out actualizing a world containing evil. He also argues that since God's motive in creating the world is to share with finite beings the good that God experiences prior to creation, which is good without evil, it follows that God will create a world that contains no evil. I investigate in detail the foregoing lines of argument and provide grounds for rejecting them.
J.L. Schellenberg argues that since God, if God exists, possesses both full knowledge by acquaintance of horrific suffering and also infinite compassion, the occurrence of horrific suffering is metaphysically incompatible with the existence of God. In this paper I begin by raising doubts about Schellenberg’s assumptions about divine knowledge by acquaintance and infinite compassion. I then focus on Schellenberg’s claim that necessarily, if God exists and the deepest good of finite persons is unsurpassably great and can be achieved without horrific suffering, then no instances of horrific suffering bring about an improvement great enough to outweigh their great disvalue. I argue that there is no good reason, all things considered, to believe this claim. Thus Schellenberg’s argument from horrors fails.
Chapter 10 critiques Michael Almeida’s case for God’s having providential options involving unrestricted actualization. Almeida holds that as well as strong actualization and weak actualization, there are two other approaches to world-actualization open to God: restricted actualization and unrestricted actualization. The latter consists in God’s bringing about a finite person’s freely performing an undetermined action merely by God’s predicting it. The alleged availability of unrestricted actualization yields a novel libertarian account of divine providence, incorporating, for example, the thesis that necessarily God can actualize every morally perfect world, i.e., every world in which there are significantly free beings, each of whom performs morally significant actions and “goes right” with respect to each of them.
This chapter discusses an evidential argument from evil against the existence of God, advanced by Michael Tooley in his book (co-authored with Alvin Plantinga), Knowledge of God. Whereas Tooley’s main earlier argument from evil had been formulated in axiological terms—the goodness or badness of states of affairs—in Knowledge of God he favours a deontological formulation, which focuses on the rightness and wrongness of actions and on rightmaking and wrongmaking properties. It is argued that both Tooley’s conceptual apparatus and his inductive reasoning are defective, and that his argument is therefore unsuccessful. An alternative probabilistic analysis is then provided that reaches a conclusion incompatible with Tooley’s argument while retaining connection with it.
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This paper argues that (1) Richard Swinburne's general account of the simplicity of empirical hypotheses fails because it involves a deeply problematic notion of postulating a property, while there is a wide range of hypotheses where the assessment of simplicity rests entirely on the number and kinds of postulated properties (2) Swinburne's main argument in The Christian God for the simplicity of theism, the one based on considerations about pure limitless intentional power, is significantly weaker than he seems to believe. The paper does not draw a conclusion about whether theism is simple.
My reply corrects one misstatement in Oppy's summary of my book, abandons a footnote in the light of one of Oppy's criticisms, and argues that Oppy's other criticisms do not succeed in showing either that my claims are mistaken or that the arguments by which I supported them are defective.
The main conclusion of the paper is that the prospects for a successful Free Will Defence employing Alvin Plantinga's basic strategy are poor.
This chapter discusses attempts to refute theism using premisses which entail that God does not exist. J. L. Mackie's paper “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955) and H. J. McCloskey's book God and Evil (1974) offer such arguments. Other attempts rely on premisses identifying non‐defeasible moral duties applying to all rational agents, including God if he exists. All such premisses are either false or doubtful, unless the argument is reinterpreted as evidential rather than logical.
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I argue that For every creatable world there is another one that is better than it does not entail There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being. An agent choosing which world is to be created from an infinite hierarchy of candidates should satisfice. For there are independent reasons for resisting the inferences from You have better reason to choose A than you have to choose B to You should choose A rather than B and to If you were to choose A rather than B then you would be acting in a morally better or more rational way.
The Two-Envelope Paradox is classically presented as a problem in decision theory that turns on the use of probabilities in calculating expected utilities. I formulate a Maximin Version of the paradox, one that is decision-theoretic but omits considerations of probability. I investigate the source of the error in this new argument, and apply the insights thereby gained to the analysis of the classical version.
Many people think of God as similar to a human being, but without various limitations and defects, and with much greater powers. They hold that although much that we say when likening God to human beings is either analogical or metaphorical, much is not: it is literally true that God has beliefs, intentions and other mental states, in the same sense, or in close to the same sense, as when we say that human beings do. This paper defends this view by arguing that it is consistent with thinking of God as God's incorporeal, omniscient, immutable, and timeless. It is inconsistent with the claim that God lacks a plurality of properties; but one does not need to hold anthropomorphism to find simplicity with respect to properties implausible.
