The Number of Gods

This paper challenges the claim that the traditional Christian (Augustinian, Thomistic, Anselmian) idea of hell as a form of eternal punishment (damnation and torment) for human sin cannot be made consistent with the idea of proportionate punishment, and it raises concerns with the notion that divine justice requires divine forgiveness and mercy. It argues that divine justice entails or at least permits retribution as the meting out of punishment by God to those who deserve it in proportion to the degree (...) and amount of harm unduly and responsibly caused by sinners to others. For God to fail to punish those who deserve it in proportion to their harmful wrongdoings would imply God’s failure to be both just and omnibenevolent. (shrink)

It is my contention here that the chapter “Of Power,” in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is not a metaphysical pronouncement upon the liberty-necessity debates but more along the lines of what those like James Harris portray it to be: a description of our experience of freedom of the will. It is also prescriptive since it is descriptive of the right use of the will. My claims are based upon two key pieces of evidence that are responses to (...) William Molyneux’s oft noted critique of the first edition of the chapter: 1) an admission by Locke in his correspondence: at least part of the reason he is attempting to avoid metaphysical pronouncements is that trying to reconcile divine and human agency is too difficult; and 2) the theological message of “Of Power”—the truly free agent is reasonable, and the truly reasonable agent will have her eyes fixed on the afterlife, thus aiming for herself to be a slave and determined, therefore, by her ever-cultivated desire for righteousness and not by her fleshly desires—and his development of it throughout the chapter eludes sectarian categorization by the avoidance of theological issues that are not unrelated to the metaphysical question of human free agency. To frame his chapter otherwise makes him out to be a theological novice or, perhaps, unconcerned with the religious background of his readership. (shrink)

Could Christians and Muslims be referring to the same God? For an account of the reference of divine names, I follow Bogardus and Urban (2017) in advocating in favour of using Gareth Evans’s causal theory of reference, on which a name refers to the dominant source of information in the name’s “dossier”. However, I argue further that information about experiences, in which God is simply the object of acquaintance, can dominate the dossier. Thus, this demonstrative use of names offers a (...) promising alternative avenue by which users of the divine names can refer to the same referent despite having different conceptions of God. I also respond to Burling’s (2019) worship-worthiness view. (shrink)

The main question of this short monograph is how the existence, supremacy, and uniqueness of an almighty and immaterial God bear on our own nature. It aims to uncover lessons about what we are by thinking about what God might be. A dominant theme is that Abrahamic monotheism is a surprisingly hospitable framework within which to defend and develop the view that we are wholly material beings. But the resulting materialism cannot be of any standard variety. It demands revisions and (...) twists on the usual views. We can indeed learn about ourselves by learning about God. One thing we learn is that, though we are indeed wholly material beings, we’re not nearly as ordinary as we might seem. (shrink)

The traditional common consent argument for the existence of God has largely been abandoned—and rightly so. In this paper, I attempt to salvage the strongest version of the argument. Surprisingly,...

In this paper, I defend the suggestion that to be God is just to be the one and only god, where to be a god is to be a supernatural being or force that has and exercises power over the natural world but that is not, in turn, under the power of any higher ranking or more powerful category of beings or forces. I then go on to defend the following further claims: (1) there can be no more than one (...) God; (2) ‘God’ is not a title-term; and (3) the use of the name ‘God’ by non-believers is not parasitic on the use of this name by believers. (shrink)

Pascal’s wager has to face the many gods objection. The wager goes wrong when it asks us to chose between Christianity and atheism, as if there are no other options. Some have argued that we’re entitled to dismiss exotic, bizarre, or subjectively unappealing religions from the scope of the wager. But they have provided no satisfying justification for such a radical wager-saving dispensation. This paper fills that dialectical gap. It argues that some agents are blameless or even praiseworthy for ignoring (...) all but one religion as they face the wager. The argument leads us to multiple Pascals: a Jewish one, a Christian one, a Muslim one, and more. (shrink)

... belief that every creature is a manifestation of God pantheism – belief that everything is divine phenomena – (Kantian) reality-as-it-appears polytheism ...

Scott Davison has raised some challenges to my case against the commensurability of meticulous providence and what I call Scheme-B Molinism, the view that God formulates his plan for the course of history consequent to his cognizance of the true counterfactuals of freedom. In this rejoinder, I attempt to clarify certain points of my argument and respond to his criticisms by showing that he has not dealt adequately with the relevant biblical texts or alleviated the worry that the Molinist view (...) of providence reduces God to just “choosing which movie to play.”. (shrink)

Philosophical atheism claims not only that there are no sufficient reasons for believing there is a God, but also that there are sufficient reasons for thinking no such deity exists. The purpose of this article is to explicate the typical commitments of this position. After distinguished several related views, the article will then consider typical grounds for the rejection of theistic commitments, first by showing that the theistic position makes a stronger claim and therefore carries the burden of proof. The (...) article will then consider rejections of theistic attempts to shift this burden and atheist responses, including considerations of both natural and revealed theology. The intent is to present the general shape of rejections and commitments rather than proffering conclusive refutations and defenses. (shrink)

Many theist as well as many atheist philosophers have maintained that if God exists, then every instance of undeserved, unwanted suffering ultimately benefits the sufferer. Recently, several authors have argued that this implication of theism conflicts with ordinary morality. I show that these arguments all rest on a common mistake. Defenders of these arguments overlook the role of merely potential instances of suffering in determining our moral obligations toward suffering.

According to Markus Gabriel, the world does not exist. This view—baptised metametaphysical nihilism—is exposited at length in his recent book Fields of Sense, which updates his earlier project of transcendental ontology. In this paper, I question whether meta-metaphysical nihilism is internally coherent, specifically whether the proposition ‘the world does not exist’ is expressible without performative contradiction on that view. Call this the inexpressibility objection. This is not an original objection—indeed it is anticipated in Gabriel’s book. However, I believe that his (...) response to it is inadequate and that I have something illuminating to say about this state of affairs. My claim is that we can distinguish between two senses of ‘the world’, one of which is benign and acceptable, the other not. The acceptable sense of ‘the world’ suffices to answer the inexpressibility objection—at a certain theoretical cost, of course. To explain what this cost is, I turn briefly to an examination of Martin Hägglund’s radical atheism. (shrink)

Raphael Lataster and Herman Philipse present an argument which they think decisively demonstrates polytheism over monotheism, if theism is assumed. Far from being decisive, the argument depends on very controversial and likely false assumptions about how to treat infinities in probability. Moreover, these problems are well known. Here, we focus on three objections. First, the authors rely on both countable additivity and the Principle of Indifference, which contradict each other. Second, the authors rely on a particular way of dividing up (...) the possibility space, when there are equally as reasonable alternative divisions which give different answers to the one the authors arrived at. Third, the authors’ argument proves too much, giving us an argument against many positions we should not be able to argue against so easily. (shrink)

This article continues a discussion initiated by Edgar Towne,2 Vaughn McTernan,3 and others, concerning divine-human interactivity. Both Towne and McTernan expressed concern about the overemphasis of the God-world dichotomy in traditional theology and thus proposed alternative conceptions of divine action, human interaction, and human interpretation of such interaction. In this article, contemporary theologians such as Wiles, Farrer, and Brümmer are consulted and integrated with contemporary religion-science dialogue, including the work of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences and the (...) Vatican Observatory project. Moreover, contemporary investigations into divine action are synthesized and categories .. (shrink)

Chapter One Divine Predication, Direct Reference, and the Attributes of Classical Theism The Church’s affirmation of statements predicating certain positive attributes to God is central to Christian doctrine. However, important biblical and doctrinal predications include ascriptions of emotion, mental states and even movement to God. It is contested whether divine predications should understood metaphorically, analogically, or univocally. The situation is further complicated when one takes into account divine attributes such as impassibility, immutability, and aseity. If classical theists are right in (...) attributing aseity and impassibility to God, it is difficult to see how predications like “God is loving” or “God is angry” should be understood. In this paper I show that contemporary philosophy of language is a surprisingly good bedfellow for religious language. I argue that language, understood in light of contemporary work on public meaning and direct reference, enables us to make meaningful predications of God while not undermining our commitments to some of the most difficult theological ascriptions. This view of divine predication in light of public meaning and reference turns out to be theory of univocal predication, one I call predication by attributive univocity. vi Chapter Two Hectoring Hector: A Thoroughgoing Critique of Hectorian Semantics Divine predication has long proved a problem for theologians and philosophers of religion. Religious speech acts are difficult to explain, as many doctrinal propositions seem to run aground on the metaphysical implications of divine reference and predication. Determining how words refer and describe God is difficult when one considers the attributes that God orted to have: transcendence, simplicity, and holiness, among others. Theology just is the practice of explaining the nature of God in terms humans can understand, and yet God’s nature seems to imply that human language will forever be inadequate to the task of divine description. Attempts to explain theological language have made use of metaphorical, analogical, or univocal predications, and more recently theologians and philosophers have resorted to explaining how theology might be worthwhile even when one accepts that humans cannot, in principle, accurately speak of the divine. Kevin Hector’s recent project, Theology without Metaphysics, is an attempt to restore theological speech acts’ status as meaningful and intelligible. This work has been well-received by theologians and philosophers alike, but it is not without its critics. In this paper, I defend Kevin Hector's Theology without Metaphysics against Sameer Yadav's criticisms. However, I ultimately argue that Hector's version of semantic externalism fails; I also argue that Hector’s rejection of “essentialist-correspondentist” metaphysics is really not the source of the problems with which he is concerned. vii Chapter Three Metaphor and the Mind of God in Nevi’im In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Yoram Hazony contrasts the uses of metaphor in Nevi’im and the New Testament. According to Hazony, metaphor is employed by Jesus to obscure teachings, but the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures use metaphor to make teachings intelligible. However, this understanding of metaphor is too simplistic to capture the scope of metaphorical statements made by the Hebrew prophets. In this paper, I suggest that an important set of philosophical arguments are advanced by the prophets in ways not captured by current interpretive methodologies. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first half, I argue against Hazony’s assessment of Nevi’im. In the second, I forward my position on the philosophical dimensions of Nevi’im: that prophetic writings reveal important moral facts about God’s nature and the ways in which we should respond to him in both action and emotion. Appealing to the works of Dru Johnson, Eleonore Stump and Linda Zagzebski, I show that the writings of the Hebrew prophets may in fact advance certain arguments about the emotions and motivations of God. Through the collected writings of Nevi’im, God functions as an exemplar for those receiving the words of the prophets. viii Chapter Four Transitive Speech Acts and Melting Away Wax-Nose Anxieties in Wolterstorff’s Divine Discourse In Divine Discourse, Wolterstorff offers five patterns that interpreters can use to deal with problematic passages of Scripture. Two strategies recommended by Wolterstorff include changing the rhetorico-conceptual structure of a text, and interpreting the passage as what Wolterstorff calls “transitive discourse.” However, anytime the interpreter takes these steps away from the most likely intended meaning given to the text by the human author, he leaves himself open to what Locke called “wax-nose anxieties.” Despite Wolterstorff’s best efforts to limit the threat posed by wax-nose anxieties, Maarten Wisse argues that the two aforementioned strategies leave Wolterstorff especially open to wax-nose concerns. In what follows, I will recount both Wolterstorff’s view and Wisse’s assessment. I will then show that there is no plausible way to save Wolterstorff from Wisse’s criticisms and offer an alternative interpretative strategy for problematic passages that are often considered transitive discourse. I argue that one of Wolterstorff’s existing strategies is sufficient for dealing with problematic passages once proper attention is given to genre, and it does so without invoking transitive discourse readings or changes in rhetorico-conceptual structure. (shrink)

This essay takes as its starting point Reinhard Hütter's analysis of the crisis of meaning of “freedom” in late modernity. The essay argues that the trinitarian theologies of John Zizioulas and Catherine Mowry LaCugna make an important contribution to the reconstruction of a theology of freedom in our postmodern era. God's ontological freedom, they explain, is both unorigination and ecstatic love. The essay concludes with reflection on how the work of these theologians can be used constructively to address the issues (...) of freedom and the modern quest for unorigination, freedom as love in a free market economy, and the relation of freedom and law. (shrink)

This book is about Divine Humanity, man's creative collaboration with God in the world. Nikolai Berdyaev's reflections on Divine Humanity lead him to outline a dramatic philosophy of destiny, a philosophy of existence which unfolds in time and passes over into eternity, into a state which is not death but transfiguration. He describes his method as existentially anthropocentric and spiritually religious; the dialectic of this book is a dialectic not of logic but of life, a living existential dialectic. He emphasizes (...) that man must not only await a divine-human revelation, but work creatively to achieve one. (shrink)

Central to Spinozism is the thesis that the immanence of the Divine Substance in the cosmos (in natural objects) is – like the immanence of the dancer in the dance –maximal or total. Just as the dance consists entirely of the dancer in aesthetically‐stylized motion, so the domain of nature is nothing in addition to God in cosmic guise. Accordingly, natural objects constitute modes of God. Hence, Spinozism and (traditional) theism are obviously irreconcilable. For it is indispensable to theism that (...) the immanence of God in the cosmos is not maximal; rather, that natural objects are distinct from the Divine Substance. Now it has standardly been presupposed by theists (and many others) that natural objects could not be distinct from God without being ontologically exterior to God; thus, that theism would readily collapse into Spinozism if the cosmos was interior to the Divine Substance. It seems to me that this is a long‐standing mistake. After demonstrating that there is probative warrant for maintaining that theism requires the interiority of natural objects to God, there is shown to be more than adequate justification for denying that this necessitates the collapse of theism into Spinozism. (shrink)

In his Edifying Discourses, Soren Kierkegaard published a sermon entitled ‘The Unchangeableness of God’ in which he reiterated the dogma which dominated Catholic, Protestant and even Jewish expressions of classical supernaturalist theology from the first century A.D. until the advent of process theology in the twentieth century. The dogma that as a perfect being, God must be totally unchanging in every conceivable respect was expressed by Kierkegaard in such ways as: He changes all, Himself unchanged. When everything seems stable and (...) in the overturn of all things, He remains equally unchanged; no change touches Him, not even the shadow of a change; in unaltered clearness He, the father of lights, remained eternally unchanged. 1. (shrink)

According to the thesis of divine ‘middle knowledge’, first propounded by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century, subjunctive conditionals stating how free agents would freely respond under counter-factual conditions may be straightforwardly true, and thus serve as the objects of divine knowledge. This thesis has provoked considerable controversy, and the recent revival of interest in middle knowledge, initiated by Anthony Kenny, Robert Adams and Alvin Plantinga in the 1970s, has led to two ongoing debates. One is (...) a theoretical debate over the very intelligibility of middle knowledge;1 the other is a practical debate over its philosophical and theological utility.2. (shrink)

In contemporary theology the doctrine of divine impassibility is a hot issue. The doubts about this doctrine in the present century have their earliest roots in British theology, where we can trace the passibilist tendency back to the last ten years of the nineteenth century. It received a powerful impetus from the First World War, and by the time the Second World War broke out it was almost generally accepted in British theology that God suffered. Since then this tendency has (...) spread to the rest of Europe, notably to France and Germany, to the United States and to Asia. Although it cannot be denied that most of the theologians who explicitly state their views on divine impassibility, hold that this doctrine is to a greater or lesser degree false, the debate over this issue is far from closed. Recently Richard Creel published a thorough study in defence of divine impassibility, which, I expect, will prove quite influential. Apart from him some other theologians defend the doctrine as well. Moreover, the fact that many authors consider it necessary at present to write books and articles in defence of divine passibility also indicates that the truth of the passibilist position is not yet taken for granted by everyone. (shrink)

The relation between morality and religion has often been discussed. However, it is not always recognized that the relation varies greatly according to the variety of religions. I shall here be concerned solely with Christian theism in its traditional form. I take the latter to signify, essentially, belief in a morally perfect Creator who exists in the threefold form of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and who, in the person of the Son, became man in Christ for our salvation. I (...) thus exclude from consideration all non-theistic accounts of God or the Absolute. Also I shall consider, not simply bare theism of the kind that Christians share with Jews and Muslims, but also the distinctively Christian form of theism that is generated by distinctively Christian revelation. Many otherwise sound descriptions of the relation between morality and theism are defective because they fail to consider the distinctively Christian contribution to the theistic concept of God and of his relation to the world. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to facilitate ongoing dialogue between open and non-open theists. First, I try to make precise what open theism is by distinguishing the core commitments of the position from other secondary and optional commitments. The result is a characterization of ‘generic open theism’, the minimal set of commitments that any open theist, qua open theist, must affirm. Second, within the framework of generic open theism, I distinguish three important variants and discuss challenges distinctive to each. (...) The significance of this approach is that it helps avoid conflating arguments bearing on specific versions of open theism with arguments pertaining to open theism simpliciter. (shrink)

The on-going debate over religious eduction in schools takes a new turn, with Brenda Watson arguing that atheism is just as much a ‘faith position’ as theism.