Fascinating Interview with Eric Steinhart...
...at Prosblogion. I found his description of his religious experiences particularly fascinating. It's worth quoting at some length:
Much of my interest in philosophy of religion has been driven by a series of religious or mystical experiences. I have had five or six of these. Of them, three have been overpowering, ego-shattering experiences, while three have been gentler. But all have been profoundly moving. None of them have involved God. Other philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, Hick, and Plantinga have reported their own mystical experiences. So it’s worth thinking more about how such experiences inspire philosophies.
I would not say that I really gained much new knowledge during these experiences. The content of my experiences was shaped by what I had already studied and found interesting in philosophy, theology, and mathematics. I already thought that reality was a certain way, but my thoughts were merely very abstract outlines of that way. During my mystical experiences, I saw with intense vividness that reality is this way. Much of what I have written philosophically is an effort to verbally express the content of these visions. I regard all these efforts as failures. The vision really is ineffable.
To some, the term “vision” might suggest hallucination. But I would not say that I have hallucinated. Rather, my visions are more purely mathematical. During one, which came close to the violence of a seizure, I saw the iterative hierarchy of pure sets. I had been studying a lot of set theory; but then I saw it. Along with this vision there was an extreme flood of joy, as well as a kind of pain that comes from being cognitively broken up. Another vision involved something like the totality of recursive functions on the ordinal number line, and the recognition that these functions are the meanings which produce reality as they generate themselves. The forest dissolved into a network of computations. I had already experienced something like this while reading Josiah Royce. This vision was again extremely joyous, and I knew that death is nothing.
On the basis of these experiences, as well as plenty of discursive reasoning, I identify myself as a religious naturalist. However, I do not take this naturalism to entail simply materialism or logical positivism. Unfortunately, religious naturalism today is mostly intellectual, and has little in the way of social practice. So I am primarily interested in developing social practices for religious naturalism. Rather than my practices driving my beliefs, my beliefs are driving my search for practices. And much of my search is for practices which cohere with my mystical experiences.On a related note, if you haven't already, you should really read his fascinating paper, "On the Plurality of Gods" (Religious Studies 49 (2013), 289-312.) And of course you know about his book, Your Digital Afterlives.
Recent Papers from Howard-Snyder on Evil, Hiddenness, and Faith
Faith:
Daniel Howard-Snyder (2013). Propositional Faith: What It is and What It is Not. American Philosophical Quarterly 50 (4):357-372.
Daniel Howard-Snyder (forthcoming). The Skeptical Christian. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion.
Evil:
Daniel Howard-Snyder (2014). Agnosticism, the Moral Skepticism Objection, and Commonsense Morality. In Justin McBrayer Trent Dougherty (ed.), Skeptical Theism: New Essays. Oxford University Press.
Daniel Howard-Snyder (2014). Agnosticism, the Moral Skepticism Objection, and Commonsense Morality. In Justin McBrayer Trent Dougherty (ed.), Skeptical Theism: New Essays. Oxford University Press.
Daniel Howard-Snyder (2015). How Not to Render an Explanatory Version of the Evidential Argument From Evil Immune to Skeptical Theism.International Journal for Philosophy of Religion:1-8.
Divine Hiddenness:
Daniel Howard-Snyder (2016). Divine Openness and Creaturely Non-Resistant Non-Belief. In Adam Green & Eleonore Stump (eds.), Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief: New Perspectives. Cambridge.
More of his past and recent work can be found here on PhilPapers.
The Spring 2015 Edition of The European Journal for Philosophy of Religion...
...is now out. The issue focuses on atheistic challenges to religious belief.
Intriguing Book in PoR Forthcoming With OUP
Mulgan, Tim. Purpose in the Universe: The Moral and Metaphysical Case for Ananthropocentric Theism (OUP, forthcoming).
Here's the blurb:
Here's the blurb:
- A controversial new approach to ultimate philosophical questions
- Brings contemporary analytic moral philosophy into dialogue with philosophy of religion
Although of course I'll have to read it first, I suspect that a case for this sort of view will raise a powerful challenge to classical theism.
Further details here.
Two Other Good Posts from The Critique
Previously, we noted Oppy's nice post on the last 60 years of atheistic philosophy of religion over at The Critique. Two others are from Klaas Kraay on analytic philosophy and Christian theism, and Mike Almeida on why lovers of C.S. Lewis' writings should be reading Plantinga instead. Happy reading!
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