ex-apologist

Plantinga Discusses His New Book on NPR

2012-01-29T17:24:00.001-08:00

Here.

HT: W.M.

2012-01-28T21:25:00.001-08:00

What's Wrong With Plantinga's Proper Functionalism? (Second Draft)

2012-01-28T16:20:00.001-08:00

I. Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology and His Mature Account of Warranted Belief
Since the 60s, Alvin Plantinga has been arguing that belief in God is "properly basic". That is, belief in God can be rational wholly apart from propositional evidence and argument. This thesis constitutes the core idea of his version of so-called "Reformed Epistemology".

Plantinga's mature defense of his thesis is grounded in a proper functionalist version of epistemic externalism. Plantinga summarizes his account as follows:

"Put in a nutshell, then, a belief has warrant for a person S only if that belief is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly (subject to no dysfunction) in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for S's kind of cognitive faculties, according to a design plan that is successfully aimed at truth."[1]

So that's what's required for a belief to have any warrant at all on Plantinga's account. But he allows that warrant admits of degrees, and he ties the degree of warrant a belief enjoys to the degree of firmness with which it is believed: "We must add, furthermore, that when a belief meets these conditions and does enjoy warrant, the degree of warrant it enjoys depends on the strength of the belief, the firmness with which S holds it."[2] Thus, for such a belief to have a degree of warrant sufficient for knowledge, it must be held with a very high degree of firmness.

Putting these points together, Plantinga's account can be summed up as follows:

I. Conditions of warrant are met + high degree of firmness = high degree of warrant.
II. Conditions of warrant are met + low degree of firmness = low degree of warrant.

So that's Plantinga's account of warranted belief in a nutshell. But how does this account connect to his account of warranted theistic belief in particular?

II. Plantinga's Mature Account of Warranted Theistic Belief: The A/C Model[3]
Plantinga argues that it's epistemically possible (consistent with what we know or reasonably believe) that God has designed us in such a way that we are naturally endowed with a cognitive faculty -- what he (following John Calvin) calls the sensus divinitatis -- that, when functioning properly in an epistemically congenial environment, spontaneously and reliably produces true beliefs about God. So, for example, when one looks at the starry heavens, the sensus divinitatis is (when functioning properly) naturally disposed to spontaneously trigger the belief, "God made all this"; when doing something wrong, it's disposed to trigger the belief, "God disapproves of what I've done"; etc. And since such belief meets all of the conditions of warrant -- viz., (a) it's produced by a properly functioning cognitive faculty (viz., the sensus divinitatis), (b) the faculty is successfully aimed at truth, and (c) the environment in which such beliefs are formed is epistemically congenial --, Plantinga's account entails that such belief enjoys at least some measure of warrant. And if (d) such belief is held with a very high degree of firmness, the degree of warrant it enjoys is sufficient to constitute knowledge (assuming the belief isn't subject to undefeated defeaters).[4]

We've now looked at Plantinga's account of warranted belief in general and his account of warranted theistic belief in particular. It is now time to take a look at his account of warranted Christian belief.

III. Plantinga's Mature Account of Warranted Christian Belief: The Extended A/C Model[5]
Very roughly, on Plantinga’s model of warranted Christian belief, the Holy Spirit acts on the believer by repairing the sensus divinitatis from the ravages of sin, so that it naturally, spontaneously, and reliably produces true belief about God in the basic (i.e., non-inferential) way. It also repairs the person's affective equipment, so that it is no longer hostile to God and his purposes, but is rather attracted to them and delights in them. Finally, the Holy Spirit functions as an analogue to a properly functioning cognitive faculty by acting directly on the "heart" of a person to produce belief in the core truths of Christianity (what Plantinga calls the Great Things of the Gospel) when they are presented to them (if the person wills to accept the gospel message). Therefore, as with warranted theistic belief as described in Plantinga's A/C model, Christian belief formed in the way described in his Extended A/C model meets all the conditions of warrant: (a) it's produced by properly functioning cognitive faculties[6], (b) the faculties are successfullly aimed at truth, and (c) the environment in which they're formed is epistemically congenial. And if (d) (due to the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit) the belief is held with a very high degree of firmness, the degree of warrant it enjoys is sufficient to constitute knowledge (again, assuming the belief isn't subject to undefeated defeaters).

We've now seen a sketch of Plantinga's account of warranted belief in general, warranted theistic belief, and warranted Christian belief. What to make of these accounts? I mention seven criticisms below that have real bite (for more elaboration, click on the links).

IV. Criticisms of Plantinga's Account of Warranted Belief that Have Real Bite
With respect to his accounts of warranted theistic and Christian belief: (i) His analysis of warranted Christian belief can't adequately account for the variability of belief among Christians[7]; (ii) his postulation of a sensus divinitatis in human beings is at odds with the empirical evidence[8]; and (ironically) (iii) his account entails that the belief of most Christians has little by way of warrant[9]. But deeper problems lie with his basic account of warrant (see below).

With respect to his account of warranted belief in general: (i) His case for a theistic version of proper functionalism is undercut[10]; indeed, (ii) his theistic version of proper function entails that no beliefs have warrant[11]; (iii) his proper functionalist amendment to straight reliabilism is unmotivated[12]; and (iv) his account of warrant is subject to counterexamples[13] with respect to both to the necessity and sufficiency of the conditions he proposes.

For these reasons, Plantinga's proper functionalism fails to show that Christian or theistic belief can be warranted in the basic or non-inferential way, or even how beliefs can be warranted in general.

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[1] Warranted Christian Belief, p. 156.
[2] Ibid.
[3] (Plantinga calls his account of warranted theistic belief The A/C Model, inspired as it is by the writings of Aquinas and Calvin.) The following is a rough summary of some key points in ch. 6 of Warranted Christian Belief.
[4] Question: If all human beings are endowed with a sensus divinitatis, then why do very many people fail to form theistic belief -- at least in the basic, non-inferential way Plantinga describes? Answer: The sensus divinitatis has been damaged by the Fall of Man and human sin. More on this in the next section.
[5] The following is a very rough summary of some key points in chs. 7-9 of Warranted Christian Belief.
[6] This part is a bit tricky. For, again, according to the model, the Holy Spirit doesn't produce warranted Christian belief via the cognitive faculty of the sensus divinitatis. Rather, it produces it by acting directly on the "heart" of the person. Therefore, strictly speaking, specifically Christian belief isn't produced by a reliable cognitive faculty, but rather by a reliable process. As you might have guessed, people have raised concerns about this. See, for example, Craig and Moreland's Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (IVP, 2003), pp. 168-169; Beilby, James. Epistemology as Theology: An Evaluation of Alvin Plantinga's Religious Epistemology (Ashgate, 2005), pp.151-153.
[7] Cf. Beilby, Epistemology as Theology, pp. 153-156.
[8] Cf. Maitzen, Stephen. "Divine Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism" (Religious Studies 42 (2006), pp. 177-191.
[9] See, for example, Beilby. "Plantinga's Model of Warranted Christian Belief", in Peter-Baker, Deane. Alvin Plantinga (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 146; DeRose, Keith."Are Christian Beliefs Properly Basic?" APA Eastern talk, 1998. Available here; Chignell, Andrew. "Epistemology for Saints: Alvin Plantinga's Magnum Opus", Books & Culture (March/April 2002), p. 21.
[10] Cf. Wunder, Tyler. "Anti-Naturalism and Proper Function”, Religious Studies 44 (2008), pp. 209-224; Bardon, Adrian. “Reliabilism, Proper Function, and Serendipitous Malfunction”, Philosophical Investigations 30:1 (Jan. 2007), pp. 47-64; Graham, Peter. "Intelligent Design and Selective History: Two Sources of Purpose and Plan" (in Jonathan Kvanvig, ed. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Volume 3, 2011). (A link to the paper can be found here)
[11] In addition to my formulation of the objection at the link above, see R. Douglass Geivett and Greg Jesson. "Plantinga's Externalism and the Terminus of Warrant-Based Epistemology", Philosophia Christi 3:2, pp. 329-340.
[12] Feldman, Richard. “Proper Functionalism”, Nous 27 (1993), pp. 34-50.
[13] See, for example, Greco, J. 2003. “Virtue and Luck, Epistemic and Otherwise,” Metaphilosophy 34:3, 353-6; Lehrer, Keith. "Proper Function vs. Systematic Coherence", in Kvanvig, Jonathan. Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga's Theory of Knowledge (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 25-46, esp. pp. 32-33; Feldman, “Proper Functionalism”, pp. 34-50; Senor, Thomas. “A Critical Review of Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief”, International Philosophical Quarterly 42:3, Issue 167 (September 2002), 395-396.

Omnipotence, Suicide, Counterpossibles, and Aseity

2012-01-27T19:23:00.000-08:00

Here's a question I'm toying with: Can an omnipotent being commit suicide? It seems to me that it could, at least in one sense:

1. If God were to attempt to commit suicide, he would (or might) succeed.

Richard Swinburne seems to agree (cf. his The Coherence of Theism). But if that's right, then it seems to me that no being -- not even a theistic God -- could be inherently indestructible. But if not, then there can be no being that is inherently metaphysically necessary.

Here's a half-baked objection and reply:

Objection: A theistic god is by definition essentially morally perfect. Therefore, while God could commit suicide (in virtue of his essential omnipotence), there is no possible world in which he would do so (in virtue of his essential moral perfection). The objection therefore depends on the thesis that there are non-trivially true counterpossibles, viz., (1). But there are no non-trivially true counterpossibles; so, the objection fails.

Reply: I disagree. First, I seriously doubt that moral perfection precludes suicide. But more importantly, I think there are non-trivially true counterpossibles (e.g., (1)). But at the very least, such a criticism is controversial, as accounts of non-trivially true counterpossibles are all the rage at the moment, and many philosophers who study such things (theist and non-theist alike, fwiw) accept the existence of non-trivially true counterpossibles. As such, one would like to see a good reason to think that all such accounts are bound to fail before one accepts the objection. Pending a case, (1) seems to indicate that while there may be something intrinsic to God's nature qua morally perfect being that prevents his non-existence (via suicide), there is nothing intrinsic to God's nature qua aseity, considered in itself, that prevents his non-existence. For given God's omnipotence, it seems to follow that he can annihilate himself. But if that's right, then it casts doubt on the thesis that a substance (e.g., God), qua type of substance, could be metaphysically necessary merely in virtue of its self-existence. Or in other words, the "stuff" of God's being, so to speak, isn't inherently indestructible. And if not, it's not inherently metaphysically necessary.

Comic Relief

2012-01-27T17:08:00.001-08:00

Nailed it.

Wierenga on Plantinga, Defeaters, and the EAAN

2012-01-27T15:07:00.000-08:00

In "Plantinga's 'Defeat'" (draft -- don't cite) Edward Wierenga evaluates Plantinga's analysis of defeaters. Near the end of the paper, he raises some interesting criticisms of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.

The Real Problem With Craig's Version of Reformed Epistemology (Slightly Revised)

2012-01-27T15:03:00.001-08:00

In Reasonable Faith, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, and in several places online (here, for example), William Lane Craig endorses a modified version of Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology. According to Craig's version, the Christian can know that Christianity is true in the basic (i.e.,immediate, non-inferential) way by means of "the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit". As Craig summarizes his view:

. . . the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premiss in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as "God exists," "I am condemned by God," "I am reconciled to God," "Christ lives in me," and so forth; that such an experience provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity's truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth; and that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends fully to it.

Although both Plantinga's and Craig's models of warrant-basic belief in Christian theism make essential reference to the activity of the Holy Spirit, Craig's model differs from Plantinga's in terms of the means by which the Holy Spirit's activity generates such belief:

Plantinga's model involves crucially what is usually called the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. In his model the Holy Spirit functions on the analogy of a cognitive faculty, producing beliefs in us. I myself prefer to think of the Spirit's witness either as a form of literal testimony or else as part of the experiential circumstances which serve to ground belief in God and the great truths of the Gospel. In either case His deliverances are properly basic.(ibid)

Furthermore, Craig is a bit more explicit than Plantinga with respect to whether he thinks such Holy-Spirit-generated belief can function as an intrinsic defeater-defeater for objections to Christianity:

Plantinga does not to my knowledge clearly commit himself to the view that the witness of the Holy Spirit is an intrinsic defeater-defeater. Such a thesis is independent of the model as presented. But I have argued that the witness of the Spirit is, indeed, an intrinsic defeater of any defeaters brought against it. For it seems to me inconceivable that God would allow any believer to be in a position where he would be rationally obliged to commit apostasy and renounce Christ. It seems to me rather that in such a situation a loving God would intensify the Spirit's witness in such a way that it becomes an intrinsic defeater of the defeaters such a person faces. (Ibid. Emphasis mine.)

Two common complaints about William Lane Craig's "Holy Spirit epistemology" (to borrow an expression from Michael Martin) are that (i) it's a form of fideism and that (ii) it's an unacceptable form of dogmatism. According to (i), Craig is asserting that one can know that Christianity is true without evidence (or at least without sufficient evidence). According to (ii), Craig inappropriately asserts that one can and should believe that Christianity is true even if no arguments for God are persuasive, and even if there is very strong evidence against Christianity. I think that both criticisms of Craig's Holy Spirit epistemology fail. However, I think there is a successful criticism of it that grants the failure of (i) and (ii).

First, though, here is why I think criticisms (i) and (ii) fail. The basic problem is that both fail to appreciate the core idea of Craig's Holy Spirit epistemology: Craig takes the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit to present the truth of the Christian faith in such a way that it's on a par with ordinary Moorean facts (or at least beliefs roughly analogous to such in terms of force, vivacity, and warrant. Hereafter I leave this qualification implicit). That is, (following Plantinga) Craig thinks the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit presents the truth of the Christian faith in such a way that it's on a par with the claims that I exist, that material objects exist, and that there are other minds besides my own. This comes out in the analogies he mentions in his discussions of his account. Thus, he appeals to Plantinga's "purloined letter case" to illustrate the notion of an intrinsic defeater-defeater, which can be summarized as follows:

The Purloined Letter Case: Suppose I have means, motive, and opportunity to steal an embarrassing letter that was in fact stolen from the office of my department chair. There is also very strong evidence against me (e.g., I've been known to steal in the past; a trustworthy colleague says he saw someone who looks like me enter the Dean's Office on the day of the incident, etc.). However, I have a clear and vivid memory of being alone in the woods all day on the day of the incident. In this case, I'm rational to retain my belief that I didn't steal the letter because of my memory, even without propositional evidence and argument that could defeat the reasons brought against me. My memory of being alone in the woods all day on the day of the incident is thus an intrinsic defeater-defeater of the claim that I stole the letter.

Or consider the illustration he offers here, regarding the certainty that one is alive:

The "I'm Alive" Case: "Pick any belief that you hold confidently and then imagine a state of affairs in which that belief would be false if that state of affairs obtained. For example, I am absolutely sure that I am alive; but if someone were to discover a grave containing my bones, then that belief would be falsified. Should I worry?"

In both cases, it's not prima facie implausible that the corresponding beliefs (that I was alone in the woods all day; that I'm alive, etc.) are justified or warranted in the basic (i.e., direct, non-inferential) way. Furthermore, it's not prima facie implausible to think that in such cases, the force, vivacity, and warrant such beliefs enjoy is so strong that they can function as intrinsic defeaters of very strong evidence against them. And Craig (following Plantinga) is arguing that Christian belief, when grounded in attentiveness to the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, is sufficiently relevantly similar to such cases in terms of force, vivacity, and warrant. Therefore, since the latter can function as intrinsic defeaters to virtually any evidence that comes into conflict with them, so, likewise, can the former.

Given this sketch of Craig's variation on Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology, we can see why criticisms (i) and (ii) fall far short of being persuasive. First, criticism (i) is less than persuasive, since most will not find the acceptance of ordinary Moorean facts to be a form of fideism. So if the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit presents the truth of Christianity in such a way that it's on a par with ordinary Moorean facts, then such people should likewise grant that acceptance of the former is not a form of fideism.

Criticism (ii) is less than persuasive as well. For it's not obviously inappropriate to accept Moorean facts even in the face of seemingly good arguments and evidence to the contrary (cf. The Purloined Letter Case and the "I'm Alive" Case). So if the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit presents the truth of Christianity in such a way that it's on a par with ordinary Moorean facts, then it might well be appropriate for such people to likewise accept the former in the face of seemingly good arguments to the contrary. (At least I grant this for the sake of argument.)

Although I find criticisms (i) and (ii) less than persuasive, I think there is a simple yet decisive criticism of Craig's Holy Spirit epitemology: at least for the majority of Christians, the Holy Spirit (if such there be) fails to present the truth of Christianity in such a way that it's anywhere near being on a par with ordinary Moorean facts. In this regard, Craig's Holy Spirit epistemology suffers from a key problem shared by Plantinga's account of warranted Christian belief. Therefore, as with Plantinga's account, Craig's account fails to provide an epistemically possible account of how Christian belief can be warrant-basic for the typical Christian (or at least how Christian belief can enjoy sufficient warrant to function as an intrinsic defeater-defeater for strong objections to it).

Review of Davies' Thomas Aquinas on Good and Evil

2012-01-26T19:49:00.000-08:00

Fergus Kerr (Edinburgh) reviews the book for NDPR.

The Real Problem with Craig's Version of Reformed Epistemology

2012-01-22T10:39:00.000-08:00

The Purloined Letter Case: Suppose I have means, motive, and opportunity to steal an embarrassing letter that was in fact stolen from the office of my department chair. There is also very strong evidence against me (e.g., I've been known to steal in the past; a trustworthy colleague says he saw someone who looks like me enter the Dean's Office on the day of the incident, etc.). However, I have a clear and vivid memory of being alone in the woods all day on the day of the incident. In this case, I'm rational to retain my belief that I didn't steal the letter because of my memory, even without propositional evidence and argument that could defeat the reasons brought against me; My belief that I was alone in the woods all day on the day of the incident is thus an intrinsic defeater-defeater of the claim that I stole the letter.

Or consider the illustration he offers here, regarding the certainty that one is alive:

Criticism (ii) is less than persuasive as well. For it's not obviously inappropriate to accept Moorean facts even in the face of seemingly good arguments to the contrary. So if the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit presents the truth of Christianity in such a way that it's on a par with ordinary Moorean facts, then it might well be appropriate for such people to likewise accept the former in the face of seemingly good arguments to the contrary. (At least I grant this for the sake of argument.)

Although I find criticisms (i) and (ii) less than persuasive, I think there is a simple yet decisive criticism of Craig's Holy Spirit epitemology: at least for the majority of Christians, the Holy Spirit (if such there be) fails to present the truth of Christianity in such a way that it's anywhere near being on a par with ordinary Moorean facts. In this regard, Craig's Holy Spirit epistemology suffers from a key problem shared by Plantinga's account of warranted-basic Christian belief. Therefore, as with Plantinga's account, Craig's account fails to show how Christian belief can be warrant-basic -- at least in the sense that Christian belief enjoys sufficient warrant to function as an intrinsic defeater-defeater for strong objections to Christian theism.

The Secular Outpost: Christian Philosopher Michael Sudduth Converts to ...

2012-01-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

The Secular Outpost: Christian Philosopher Michael Sudduth Converts to ...: Bill Vallicella has posted a long letter from Sudduth on his blog, describing what has happened and how. This is not the kind of thing one ...

Post Roundup: Criticisms of Plantinga's Argument from Proper Functionalism to Theism

2012-01-19T21:35:00.000-08:00

-Wunder, Tyler. "Anti-Naturalism and Proper Function”, Religious Studies 44 (2008), pp. 209-224. (Notes here.)
-Bardon, Adrian. “Reliabilism, Proper Function, and Serendipitous Malfunction”, Philosophical Investigations 30:1 (Jan. 2007), pp. 47-64. (Notes here.)
-Graham, Peter. "Intelligent Design and Selective History: Two Sources of Purpose and Plan" (in Jonathan Kvanvig, ed. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Volume 3, 2011). (A link to the paper can be found here)

What's Wrong With Plantinga's Proper Functionalism? (Draft)

2012-01-19T21:22:00.000-08:00

DRAFT
I. Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology and His Mature Account of Warranted Belief
Since the 60s, Alvin Plantinga has been arguing that belief in God is "properly basic". That is, belief in God can rational wholly apart from propositional evidence and argument. This thesis constitutes the core idea of his version of so-called "Reformed Epistemology".

Plantinga's mature defense of his thesis is grounded in a proper functionalist version of epistemic externalism. Plantinga summarizes his account as follows:

"Put in a nutshell, then, a belief has warrant for a person S only if that belief is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly (subject to no dysfunction) in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for S's kind of cognitive faculties, according to a design plan that is successfully aimed at truth."[1]

So that's what's required for a belief to have any warrant at all. But Plantinga allows that warrant admits of degrees, and he ties the degree of warrant a belief enjoys to the degree of firmness with which it is believed.[2] Thus, for a belief to have a degree of warrant sufficient for knowledge, it must be held with a very high degree of firmness. Putting these points together, Plantinga's account can be summed up as follows:

I. Conditions of warrant are met + high degree of firmness = high degree of warrant.
II. Conditions of warrant are met + low degree of firmness = low degree of warrant.

So that's Plantinga's account of warranted belief in a nutshell. But how does this account connect to his account of warranted theistic belief in particular?

II. Plantinga's Mature Account of Warranted Theistic Belief: The A/C Model[3]
Plantinga argues that it's epistemically possible (consistent with what we know or reasonably believe) that God has designed us in such a way that we are naturally endowed with a cognitive faculty -- what he calls the sensus divinitatis -- that, when functioning properly in epistemically congenial environments reliably and spontaneously produces true beliefs about God. So, for example, when one looks at the starry heavens, the sensus divinitatis is (when functioning properly) naturally disposed to spontaneously trigger the belief, "God made all this"; when doing something wrong, it's disposed to trigger the belief, "God disapproves of what I've done"; etc. And since such belief meets all of the conditions of warrant (viz., (a) it's produced by a properly functioning cognitive faculties (viz., the sensus divinitatis), (b) the faculty is successfully aimed at truth, (c) the environment in which such beliefs are formed is epistemically congenial, Plantinga's account entails that such belief enjoys at least some measure of warrant. And if (d) the belief is held with a very high degree of firmness, the degree of warrant enjoyed by the believer’s belief is sufficient to constitute knowledge (assuming that the belief isn't subject to undefeated defeaters).

We've now looked at Plantinga's account of warranted belief in general and his account of warranted theistic belief in particular. It is now time to take a look at his account of warranted Christian belief.

III. Plantinga's Mature Account of Warranted Christian Belief: The Extended A/C Model[4]
Very roughly, on Plantinga’s model of warranted Christian belief (what he calls the Extended A/C Model, inspired as it is by the writings of Aquinas and Calvin), the Holy Spirit acts on the believer by repairing the sensus divinitatis from the ravages of sin, so that it naturally, spontaneously, and reliably produces true belief about God in the basic (i.e., non-inferential) way. Furthermore, the Holy Spirit acts directly on the spirit of a person true produce a firm and unwavering belief in the core truths of Christianity (what he calls the Great Things of the Gospel).[5] And since such belief meets all of the conditions of warrant (viz., (a) it's produced by properly functioning cognitive faculties, (b) the faculties are successfullly aimed at truth, (c) the environment in which they're formed is epistemically congenial; therefore, Plantinga's account entails that such Christian belief enjoys at least some measure of warrant. And if (d) (due to the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit and its repairs to the sensus divinitatis) the belief is held with a very high degree of firmness, the degree of warrant enjoyed by the believer’s belief is sufficient to constitute knowledge (assuming that the belief isn't subject to undefeated defeaters).

We've now seen a sketch of Plantinga's account of warranted belief in general and of warranted Christian belief in particular. What to make of his accounts? I mention seven criticisms below that have real bite (for more elaboration, click on the links).

IV. Criticisms of Plantinga's Account of Warranted Belief that Have Real Bite
With respect to his account of warranted Christian belief in particular: (i) His analysis of warranted Christian belief can't adequately account for the variability of belief among Christians[6]; (ii) his postulation of a sensus divinitatis in human beings is at odds with the empirical evidence[7]; and (ironically) (iii) his account entails that the belief of most Christians has little by way of warrant[8]. But deeper problems lie with his basic account of warrant (see below).

With respect to his account of warranted belief in general: (i) His case for a theistic version of proper functionalism is undercut[9]; indeed, (ii) his theistic version of proper function entails that no beliefs have warrant[10] (iii) his proper functionalist amendment to straight reliabilism is unmotivated[11] and (iv) his account of warrant is subject to counterexamples[12] with respect to both to the necessity and sufficiency of the conditions he proposes.

For these reasons, Plantinga's proper functionalism fails to show that Christian or theistic belief can be warranted in the basic or non-inferential way, or even how beliefs can be warranted in general.

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[1] Warranted Christian Belief, p. 156.
[2] "We must add, furthermore, that when a belief meets these conditions and does enjoy warrant, the degree of warrant it enjoys depends on the strength of the belief, the firmness with which S holds it." (Ibid.)
[3] The following is a rough summary of some key points in ch. 6 of Warranted Christian Belief.
[4] The following is a very rough summary of some key points in chs. 7-9 of Warranted Christian Belief.
[5] This part is a bit tricky. For according to the model, the Holy Spirit doesn't produce warranted Christian belief via the cognitive faculty of the sensus divinitatis. Rather, it produces it directly. Therefore, strictly speaking, specifically Christian belief isn't produced by a reliable cognitive faculty, but rather by a reliable process. As you might have guessed, people have raised concerns about this. See, for example, Craig and Moreland's Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (IVP, 2003), pp. 168-169; Beilby, James. Epistemology as Theology: An Evaluation of Alvin Plantinga's Religious Epistemology (Ashgate, 2005), pp.151-153.
[6] Cf. Beilby, Epistemology as Theology, pp. 153-156.
[7] "Divine Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism" (Religious Studies 42 (2006), pp. 177-191.
[8] See, for example, Beilby. "Plantinga's Model of Warranted Christian Belief", in Peter-Baker, Deane. Alvin Plantinga (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 146; DeRose, Keith."Are Christian Beliefs Properly Basic?" APA Eastern talk, 1998. Available here; Chignell, Andrew. "Epistemology for Saints: Alvin Plantinga's Magnum Opus", Books & Culture (March/April 2002), p. 21.
[9] Cf. Wunder, Tyler. "Anti-Naturalism and Proper Function”, Religious Studies 44 (2008), pp. 209-224; Bardon, Adrian. “Reliabilism, Proper Function, and Serendipitous Malfunction”, Philosophical Investigations 30:1 (Jan. 2007), pp. 47-64; Graham, Peter. "Intelligent Design and Selective History: Two Sources of Purpose and Plan" (in Jonathan Kvanvig, ed. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Volume 3, 2011). (A link to the paper can be found here)
[10] In addition to my formulation at the link above, see R. Douglass Geivett and Greg Jesson. "Plantinga's Externalism and the Terminus of Warrant-Based Epistemology", Philosophia Christi 3:2, pp. 329-340.
[11] Feldman, Richard. “Proper Functionalism”, Nous 27 (1993), pp. 34-50.
[12] See, for example, Greco, J. 2003. “Virtue and Luck, Epistemic and Otherwise,” Metaphilosophy 34:3, 353-6; Lehrer, Keith. "Proper Function vs. Systematic Coherence", in Kvanvig, Jonathan. Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga's Theory of Knowledge (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 25-46, esp. pp. 32-33; Feldman, “Proper Functionalism”, pp. 34-50; Senor, Thomas. “A Critical Review of Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief”, International Philosophical Quarterly 42:3, Issue 167 (September 2002), 395-396.

Post Roundup: Counterexamples to Plantinga's Proper Functionalism

2012-01-19T21:11:00.000-08:00

Here, here, and here.

Plantinga's Proper Functionalism Unmotivated

2012-01-19T21:05:00.000-08:00

Plantinga argues that internalist accounts of warrant are inherently inadequate, and thus that some form of externalism must be correct. However, he also argues that standard versions of externalism -- e.g. Goldmanian reliabilism -- are inadequate as well, on the grounds that they can't account for the fact that a belief can't be warranted if it's formed by a mechanism or process that is only accidentally reliable:

"Suppose I am struck by a burst of cosmic rays, resulting in the following unfortunate malfunction. Whenever I hear the word 'prime' in any context, I form a belief, with respect to a randomly chosen natural number less than 100,000, that it is not prime. So you say "Pacific Palisades is prime residential area" or "Prime ribs is my favorite"...; I form a belief, with respect to a randomly selected natural number between 1 and 100,000 that it is not prime. The process or mechanism in question is indeed reliable (given the vast preponderance of non-primes...) but my belief -- that, say, 41 is not prime -- has little or no positive epistemic status. The problem isn't simply that the belief is false; the same goes for my (true) belief that 631 is not prime, if it is formed in this fashion. So reliable belief formation is not sufficient for positive epistemic status." (Warrant: The Current Debate (OUP, 1993), p. 210.).

Plantinga then goes on to argue that an externalist about warrant can avoid the problem of accidental reliability if they go proper functionalist, as a properly functioning truth-aimed cognitive process or faculty precludes accidental reliability. Or so argues Plantinga.

However, Richard Feldman (“Proper Functionalism,” Nous 27 (1993), pp. 34-50) has constructed a variation on Plantinga's "primes" counterexample above to show that the problem of reliably-formed-yet-unwarranted beliefs arises for Plantinga's proper functionalist version of externalism as well. Thus, Feldman changes the counterexample so that the cause of the beliefs about primes is not a burst of cosmic rays, but rather a cognitive faculty formed by an intelligent designer who designs the person to naturally and spontaneously form such beliefs about prime numbers whenever they hear the word 'prime'. In such a case, all of Plantinga's conditions of warrant are satisfied: according to the thought experiment, we have a cognitive faculty that, when functioning properly, reliably produces sufficiently firmly-held true beliefs when in epistemically congenial environments. However, such beliefs have little by way of warrant.

Therefore, the conditions laid out in Plantinga's proper functionalism are not sufficient for warrant. And since his proper functionalist amendment to straight reliabilist externalism fails to rule out the problem cases he raises for the latter, the former appears to be unmotivated.

Tim Maudlin on Philosophy of Cosmology

2012-01-19T14:44:00.001-08:00

Here.

HT: Leiter Reports

New Issue of Faith & Philosophy

2012-01-19T14:13:00.000-08:00

As indicated in the RSS feed on the right (scroll down a bit), Faith & Philosophy 28:4 is now out. Here is a link to the full ToC.

de Ridder's Reply to Baldwin and Thune

2012-01-16T20:46:00.000-08:00

In "Religious Exclusivism Unlimited" (Religious Studies 47:4 (2011)), Jeroen de Ridder (VU University, Amsterdam) replies to Baldwin and Thune's recent critique of Plantinga's account of warrant-basic Christian belief. Here is the link.

2012-01-16T14:51:00.001-08:00

Alain de Botton on Atheism 2.0

2012-01-15T09:04:00.001-08:00

...on Philosophy Bites. The podcast episode can be found here.

Quote(s) for the Day

2012-01-15T01:00:00.000-08:00

“I, however, have not been blessed with Plantinga faith. I believe that I have been blessed enough to have had experiences that are in some ways like those Plantinga describes, but for me, the most I have received directly from the Holy Spirit have been gentle nudges toward belief, certainly nothing even approaching the firm and certain conviction of which Plantinga speaks. And if the people I’ve talked to are to be believed — and they are — there are many who would be thrilled to receive faith as Plantinga describes it, but who have not, despite Plantinga’s claim that faith — presumably as he defines it, as a firm and certain conviction — “is given to anyone who is willing to accept it”

-Keith DeRose, "Are Christian Beliefs Properly Basic?" APA Eastern talk, 1998. Available here.

"Plantinga's theological minimalism can be seen in the lack of applicability of his Extended A/C model to the faith of typical Christians. While he speaks a great deal about the recipients of faith, those who have had their religious affections cured and who have been given the divine gift of firm and certain belief in the great things of the gospel, it is far from clear whether there are any people whose faith looks like that in Plantinga's model . . .While it is undoubtedly easier to describe and defend the warrant of "epistemological saints", because the Extended A/C model describes the ideal, fully formed faith of paradigmatic believers rather than the usual, in-process faith of typical believers, Plantinga's attempt to use the Extended A/C model to provide a good way for Christians (including, I assume, typical Christians) to think about the epistemology of Christian belief is in jeopardy. Since the faith of typical believers looks very different from that described in Plantinga's model, they have a choice between questioning the warrant of their belief about God or rejecting Plantinga's model as a good explanation of the warrant of their religious beliefs. Since Plantinga himself argues that the beliefs of "most Christians" are "both externally rational and warranted", the most reasonable option for the typical Christian is the latter."

-James K. Beilby, "Plantinga's Model of Warranted Christian Belief", in Peter-Baker, Deane. Alvin Plantinga (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 146.

(Andrew Chignell makes the same point in "Epistemology for Saints: Alvin Plantinga's Magnum Opus", Books & Culture, March/April 2002, p. 21)

The passages above underscore the point I'm getting at here: Plantinga's model of warranted belief states that a belief enjoys at least some degree of warrant if (and only if) it's produced by properly functioning, truth-aimed cognitive faculties operating in a congenial epistemic environment. However, it also states that the degree of warrant such a belief enjoys is a function of the degree of firmness or conviction with which it's held. But if so, then Plantinga's model entails if one's faith falls far short of "a firm and certain conviction", then it has little by way of warrant. And the worry is that the latter is the predicament of perhaps most Christians, in which case Plantinga's model entails that their beliefs have little by way of warrant (at least if they're not based on propositional evidence and argument).

Manson on the "Why Design?" Question

2012-01-14T20:55:00.000-08:00

Manson, Neil A. "The "Why Design?" Question", in Nagasawa, Yujin and Erick Wielenberg (eds.) New Waves in Philosophy of Religion (Ashgate 2008).

The Secular Outpost: The Parsons Test of Biblical Literalism

2012-01-13T15:28:00.000-08:00

The Secular Outpost: The Parsons Test of Biblical Literalism: A number of posts and commentaries recently have argued that even conservative Christian apologists have now largely abandoned the old-fashi...

New IEP Entry on Platonism and Theism

2012-01-05T22:39:00.001-08:00

Here.

Interview with Plantinga on His New Book on Science and Religion

2012-01-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

...at Philosophy News (here).

2011-12-30T22:23:00.001-08:00

A Quick and Dirty Refutation of Plantinga's Parity Thesis

2011-12-23T17:17:00.000-08:00

Belief in the existence and endurance of material objects, a past, and other minds are Moorean facts; theistic belief is not; Therefore, ~parity.

Q.E.D.

Old Epistemology, New Epistemology, and Natural Theology

2011-12-23T08:34:00.000-08:00

As we near the end of another year, it's natural to look back on the highlights of the year's events. In a similar spirit, I've been looking back on the highlights of recent and semi-recent work in philosophy of religion, with special focus on religious epistemology. Epistemology has come a long way over the last several decades, and the insights gained along the way have, for the most part, been helpfully applied to issues in philosophy of religion. Two familiar examples include:

(i) Bayesianism and IBE: Theists (most prominently, Richard Swinburne) have employed Bayes' Theorem and inferences to the best explanation in their formulations of individual arguments (e.g., the cosmological argument, the design argument, etc.) and cumulative case arguments for theism. And non-theists (e.g., Paul Draper and William Rowe) have done the same for (e.g.) the problem of evil.

(ii) Epistemic externalism: Theists (most prominently, Alvin Plantinga) have argued that belief in God can be warrant-basic for a person if their beliefs are formed in a suitably reliable way, even if one doesn't know that such a belief is reliably formed.

But more recent trends include:

(iii) The epistemology of disagreement: It seems that when a person becomes aware that an equally competent andinformed person disagrees with them about an issue, this undermines their evidenceto some extent. A number of philosophers (e.g., Conee, Feldman, Kraft, et al.) have applied the point to religious propositions, arguing that disagreement between epistemic peers A and B with respect to some religious proposition P functions as at least a partial defeater for their respective beliefs about P.

(iv) Contextualism/pragmatic encroachment: A number of philosophers (e.g., DeRose, Fantl & McGrath, et al.) have argued that whether one knows (or is justified in believing) something depends, at least in part, on the practical stakes involved in getting it right: higher practical stakes entail higher standards for knowledge (or justified belief); lower practical stakes entail lower standards for knowledge (or justified belief). Rizzieri has brought this thesis to bear on the rationality of theistic belief; McBrayer has employed it in a defense of the skeptical theist response to the evidential problem of evil; and John Hawthorne has a research project underway that aims to justify the rationality of religous belief via appeal to a contextualism/pragmatic encroachment.

(v) Phenomenal conservatism: A number of philosophers (e.g., Huemer, Conee, Feldman, et al.) have argued that the way things seem is at least prima facie, pro tanto justification for the way things are (absent defeaters). Chris Tucker has used phenomenal conservatism to defend the rationality of theistic belief, and Trent Dougherty recently employed something like phenomenal conservatism in his recent "devil's advocate" defense of the problem of evil in F&P.

(vi) The epistemology of testimony: Ever since at least the publication of C.A.J. Coady's Testimony: A Philosophical Study, much attention has been focused on whether testimony can function as a basic source of at least prima facie pro tanto justification for beliefs. Some theists (e.g., Thomas Crisp) have applied insights in epistemology of testimony literature to argue that it can be reasonable to believe religious claims (including, e.g., the inspiration of the Bible) on the basis of testimony.

Ruse and Coyne Critique Plantinga's New Book on Science and Religion

2011-12-22T18:55:00.000-08:00

Well, sort of. Their remarks can be found here and here.

Underexplored Epistemological Resources for the Cosmological Argument (and Other Arguments in Natural Theology)

2011-12-22T17:58:00.000-08:00

Cosmological arguments standardly include a causal or explanatory premise, and proponents of cosmological arguments have argued that such premises are supported in virtue of being analytic or synthetic a priori truths, or via induction, or via claiming that they are presuppositions of reason. However, these bases are often criticized: they don't seem to be analytic or synthetic a priori truths; the sample size of evidence isn't sufficiently large or representative to support them via induction; they aren’t presuppositions of reason.

But there are at least two more avenues of support for such premises that seem worthy of further exploration. The first has recently been explicitly appealed to, but so far as I know, the second has not:

(i) Reflective equilibrium: we have the data of our intuitions or reflective judgements about whether this or that particular case has, doesn't have, or must have a cause or sufficient reason for its existence or occurrence. We also have general causal or explanatory principles. And the goal is to eliminate the tension between the two by revising our judgements and our principles so that they are no longer in tension, but in harmony -- the cases reflect the principles, and the principles explain the cases. Perhaps it's worth exploring whether this can be done in a way that supports a version of PSR or causal causal principle(s) sufficiently robust to play a legitimate role in a cosmological argument. Timothy O'Connor is one of the few exceptions who appeals to reflective equilibrium in his defense of the cosmological argument.

(ii) Phenomenal conservatism: the way things seem serves as at least prima facie pro tanto evidence for how things are. Therefore, if it seems to one that some causal or explanatory principle involved in a cosmological argument is true, then one could thereby receive (perhaps) sufficient support for the premise to accept it. I think William Lane Craig should take this route in his defense of the causal premise in his kalam cosmological argument, as well as his defense of a version of PSR in his Leibnizian cosmological argument (as opposed to his current "more plausible than their denials" approach, which Morriston and others rightly point out as inadequate).

I of course don't mean to imply that the use of such epistemological resources is restricted to the cosmological argument. So, for example, they can be used to support arguments for atheism (Cf. Trent Dougherty's recent (devil's advocate) defense of the problem of evil in F&P, which employs something like phenomenal conservatism in support of a key premise).

On Mass Hallucinations and the Resurrection of Jesus

2011-12-20T19:45:00.000-08:00

Here.

Not really a straight philosophy of religion topic, but perhaps of interest to some who visit this blog.

John Hawthorne Wins Million-Plus Grant to Work on Religious Epistemology

2011-12-20T06:47:00.000-08:00

Here. It looks like my desire to see more application of insights from the contextualism/pragmatic encroachment literature to issues in philosophy of religion will finally be fulfilled!

HT: Leiter Reports.

Details here.

Louise Antony's NYT Piece, "Good Minus God"

2011-12-18T15:23:00.001-08:00

Here.

Quote for the Day

2011-12-18T15:19:00.001-08:00

God might have made us so that when we consider evidence for the non-existence of God or the unreliability of the Scriptures or the illusory nature of religious experience, the strength of our theistic belief would actually increase. Maybe all such evidence is in the end deeply misleading and God does not want us to err in matters of ultimate importance. So a student, call her “Faith", takes a philosophy of religion class from a brilliant atheist who presents convincing versions of arguments for all the above theses. She cannot see a thing wrong with any of them. But in accordance with her design-plan, the strength of Faith’s conviction in the central tenets of Christianity is thereby strengthened, not weakened. Indeed, perhaps with enough apparently sound arguments for the falsity of Christianity her belief will become maximally warranted!

Now Plantinga can, of course, say that her design plan is not like this. There are potential defeaters for God’s existence and the claims of Christianity, and we are not made to believe more strongly when we confront them. That is probably true (although given Plantinga’s assumptions about the damage that the Fall has done to our faculties where our belief in God is concerned, I am not sure how he can be confident in reading off the design-plan from our actual cognitive function). But, even if that’s right, the counter-example still remains in place. For Faith’s belief is produced by a successfully truth-aimed, properly functioning cognitive faculty operating in an appropriate environment and believed with maximal firmness. Plantinga’s epistemological theory entails that beliefs with these properties are maximally warranted – hence, they are as warranted as one’s belief in one’s own existence.

Senor, Thomas. “A Critical Review of Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief”, International Philosophical Quarterly 42:3, Issue 167 (September 2002), 395-396.

New Blog Look

2011-12-18T11:19:00.000-08:00

Hi gang,

As you can see, the blog looks a bit different than it did yesterday. I'm not sure, though, if I'm going to keep it. Thoughts?

Also, I haven't been able to figure out how to get the RSS feeds and links to display with the new look. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Best,
EA

A Quick Thought About the Phenomenon of Reasonable Religious Disagreement

2011-12-18T09:38:00.000-08:00

Here's a hypothesis I'm toying with that's inspired by recent work in the pragmatic encroachment literature and the epistemology of disagreement literature (although it employs the notions from both bodies of literature in a bit of an unorthodox way):

Suppose that A and B are true epistemic peers, and that they are aware of the same body of evidence E for some religious proposition P. E pushes A to accept P; E fails to push B to accept P; A and B bring up the topic of P, and then discuss E. After patient and careful discussion of E, A and B still disagree about whether E is sufficient to put one in a position to know (or be justified in believing) that P is true. What's going on here? Are they both epistemically in the right, or has the awareness of their disagreement deflated their evidence at least a bit, (in which case they should each move at least a bit closer toward the other in terms their propositional attitudes)?

Here's my tentative hypothesis: It depends. For whether one knows (or is justified in believing) something depends, at least in part, on the practical stakes involved in getting it right: higher practical stakes entail higher standards for knowledge (or justified belief); lower practical stakes entail lower standards for knowledge (or justified belief). Therefore, if the practical stakes for (say) A are lower than they are for B with respect to P, then it might be that A is entitled to say that she knows (or is justified in believing) that P is true on the basis of E, and B is entitled to say that she doesn't know (or is justified in believing) that P is true on the basis of E. In other words, there might be cases where both are right to hold their current propositional attitudes, even after their discussion of the evidence. On the other hand, if it turns out that the practical stakes for A and B are the same with respect to P, then both A and B ought to move at least a bit closer toward the other in terms their propositional attitudes.

In any case, that's the basic idea. Thoughts?

More Forthcoming Books to Look For from OUP

2011-12-17T13:49:00.000-08:00

Leftow, Brian. God and Necessity.

Blurb:

An original account of necessity and possibility
A new argument for God's existence
A detailed theory of the mind of God
Engages with medieval and modern philosophy and theology
A landmark work at the intersection of metaphysics and philosophy of religion

Brian Leftow offers a theory of the possible and the necessary in which God plays the chief role, and a new sort of argument for God's existence. It has become usual to say that a proposition is possible just in case it is true in some 'possible world' (roughly, some complete history a universe might have) and necessary just if it is true in all. Thus much discussion of possibility and necessity since the 1960s has focussed on the nature and existence (or not) of possible worlds. God and Necessity holds that there are no such things, nor any sort of abstract entity. It assigns the metaphysical 'work' such items usually do to God and events in God's mind, and reduces 'broadly logical' modalities to causal modalities, replacing possible worlds in the semantics of modal logic with God and His mental events. Leftow argues that theists are committed to theist modal theories, and that the merits of a theist modal theory provide an argument for God's existence. Historically, almost all theist modal theories base all necessary truth on God's nature. Leftow disagrees: he argues that necessary truths about possible creatures and kinds of creatures are due ultimately to God's unconstrained imagination and choice. On his theory, it is in no sense part of the nature of God that normal zebras have stripes (if that is a necessary truth). Stripy zebras are simply things God thought up, and they have the nature they do simply because that is how God thought of them. Thus Leftow's essay in metaphysics takes a half-step toward Descartes' view of modal truth, and presents a compelling theist theory of necessity and possibility.

Table of contents:

Introduction
1: Modal Basics
2: Some Solutions
3: Theist Solutions
4: The Ontology of Possibility
5: Modal Truthmakers
6: Modality and the Divine Nature
7: Deity as Essential
8: Against Deity Theories
9: The Role of Deity
10: The Biggest Bang
11: Divine Concepts
12: Concepts, Syntax, and Actualism
13: Modality: Basic Notions
14: The Genesis of Secular Modality
15: Modal Reality
16: Essences
17: Non-Secular Modalities
18: Theism and Modal Semantics
19: Freedom, Preference, and Cost
20: Explaining Modal Status
21: Explaining the Necessary
22: Against Theistic Platonism
23: Worlds and the Existence of God
Bibliography
Index

Almeida, Michael. Freedom, God, and Worlds.

Blurb: Michael J. Almeida presents a powerful argument which holds that several widely believed and largely undisputed objections to the idea of the existence of God are in fact just philosophical dogmas. He challenges some of the most well-entrenched principles in philosophical theology, which have served as basic assumptions in influential apriori, atheological arguments. But most theists also maintain that the principles express apriori necessary truths, including those principles that are presumed to follow from the nature of an essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially perfectly good and necessarily existing being. Among the atheological arguments that deploy these philosophical dogmas are the Logical Problem of Evil, the Logical Problem of the Best Possible World, the Logical Problem of Good Enough Worlds, the Problem of Divine Freedom, the Problem of No Best World, and the Evidential Problem of Evil. In Freedom, God, and Worlds Almeida claims that these arguments present no important challenge to the existence of an Anselmian God. Not only are these philosophical principles false, they are necessarily false.

Table of contents:

Introduction
1: A Moderate Anselmian Plea
2: Metaphysical Atheological Arguments and the Free Will Defense
3: Three Important Objections
4: Unrestricted Actualization, Freedom and Morally Perfect Worlds
5: The Logical Problem of Evil Redux
6: Four Important Objections
7: Four More Objections
8: Redeeming Worlds
9: Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 4

2011-12-17T11:29:00.000-08:00

It looks like it'll be a while until it hits the presses (Aug. 2012!), but as has come to be expected with the series, it looks to be very good. Below is the table of contents:

Jonathan Kvanvig: Editor's Introduction
List of Contributors
1: Yuval Avnur: In Defense of Secular Belief
2: Daniel Bonevac: Two Theories of Analogical Predication
3: William L. Craig: Nominalism and Divine Aseity
4: Neal Judisch: Meticulous Providence and Gratuitous Evil
5: Shieva Kleinschmidt: Many-One Identity and the Trinity
6: Christian Miller: Atheism and Theistic Belief
7: Paul Moser: God, Flux, and the Epistemology of Agape Struggle
8: Duncan Pritchard: Wittgensteinian Quasi-Fideism
9: Meghan Sullivan: Semantics for Blasphemy
10: Dennis Whitcomb: Grounding and Omniscience

2011-12-17T09:52:00.001-08:00

Christopher Hitchens: RIP

2011-12-16T18:30:00.000-08:00

(photo of a younger Hitchens, taken at a protest in the 60s)

Although I could never quite understand his defense of the Iraq War during the Bush (Jr.) Administration, he was of course a great man and a sharp mind.

Slate has a nice collection of remembrances (here).

The Secular Outpost -- Revamped!

2011-12-16T11:18:00.000-08:00

Jeff Lowder has done a great job of reviving the Secular Outpost. There is now a regular stream of interesting posts, and he has gotten a lot of excellent philosophers and other scholars on board as contributors (e.g, Graham Oppy, Louise Antony, Bradley Monton, Stephen Law, and Julian Baggini, to name a few). I have a link to the blog in the column on the right, but here is a link to save you the trouble of scrolling and searching for it.

Thomas Kelly's Paper on the Theistic Argument from Common Consent

2011-12-16T09:02:00.001-08:00

"Consensus Gentium: Reflections on the ‘Common Consent’ Argument for the Existence of God", in Kelly Clark and Raymond Van Arragon (eds.) Evidence and Religious Belief (OUP): 135-156 (2011)

Phillip Kitcher on Talk Atheist Radio

2011-12-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

Here.

HT: Leiter Reports

Doom.

2011-12-15T07:15:00.001-08:00

"Critics accused the president of caving in again to pressure from some Republicans on a counter-terrorism issue for fear of being painted in next year's election campaign as weak and of failing to defend America.

Human Rights Watch said that by signing the bill Obama would go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law."

Details here.

My only hope is that Obama did what he did because he thinks his concession to the GOP won't go through, on the grounds that it will be deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: More doom.

"About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure."

ANNOUNCEMENT: The Monist: Special Call for Papers

2011-12-14T14:44:00.000-08:00

96:3 (July 2013)
Naturalizing Religious Belief

Deadline for Submissions: July 31, 2012
Advisory Editor: James Beebe, University at Buffalo (jbeebe2@buffalo.edu)

The cognitive science of religion brings the methods and resources of the cognitive sciences to bear on questions about religious thought and action, such as how ordinary cognitive structures inform and constrain the transmission of religious ideas, why people believe in gods, why religious rituals tend to have the forms that they do, and why afterlife and creation beliefs are so common. Findings in the cognitive science of religion raise a variety of philosophical questions, such as whether these findings undermine, threaten or explain away religious belief; whether those who believe in the supernatural can consistently accept a strongly naturalistic explanation of those beliefs; and whether traditional notions of religious belief are compatible with the view that explicit expressions of religious commitment are often post hoc rationalizations of intuitive but often unconscious inclinations of evolved mental structures. Contributions are invited that address these and other philosophical questions raised by the cognitive science of religion.

Link to the site: here.
Submission guidelines: here.

Plantinga in the News (Again)

2011-12-14T02:28:00.001-08:00

Here.

HT: M.C.

New RSS Feeds

2011-12-13T12:17:00.000-08:00

I've recently added two new RSS feeds in the bar on the right: (i) one announcing the latest calls for papers, talks, and conferences of interest to philosophers of religion, and (ii) one for the latest papers in philosophy of religion.[*] I hope you find them useful.

Together with the extant RSS feeds for new and forthcoming issues of the standard philosophy of religion speciality journals, the blog now provides a single location for virtually all the latest available work in philosophy of religion.

[*]In providing these features, I'm indebted to David Chalmers and David Bourget for their extremely helpful philosophical tools, PhilPapers and PhilEvents.

Cheers,
EA

2011-12-13T11:40:00.001-08:00

HT: C.L.

Deng on Carnap, Le Poidevin and Theism

2011-12-13T10:24:00.000-08:00

Deng, Natalja. "Questions about ‘Internal and external questions about God’", Religious Studies (forthcoming).

Proposal for a New Entry in the Philosophical Lexicon

2011-12-11T11:51:00.001-08:00

craig, v. (a) to construe an interlocutor as offering a rebutting defeater for P when it's more charitable to construe them as offering an undercutting defeater for P; (b) to maintain a somewhat positive image of one's positions in part by choosing not to address, mention, or cite the strongest criticisms of them.

Stephen Law's New Paper on Plantinga's EAAN

2011-12-10T06:30:00.000-08:00

We've noted Stephen Law's critiques of Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) on other occasions. His latest critique is in the current issue of Analysis. Here is the link

Some Great Papers from Schellenberg Now Available Online

2011-12-09T15:54:00.000-08:00

-(forthcoming). "Skepticism as the Beginning of Religion", In Ingolf Dalferth (ed.), Skeptical Faith. Mohr Siebeck.

-(2010) "Divine Hiddenness", in Paul Draper & Charles Talliaferro (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell.

-(2009). "The Evolutionary Answer to the Problem of Faith and Reason", in Jonathan Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2.

-(2009). "Why Am I a Nonbeliever? I Wonder...", in Udo Schuklenk & Russell Blackford (eds.), 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Wiley-Blackwell.

Maitzen's Recent Lecture, "God vs. Morality"

2011-12-09T10:06:00.001-08:00

Stephen Maitzen (Acadia University) recently gave an excellent public lecture -- "God vs. Morality" -- at Amherst College in September. Here is the link.

The file is about 79 minutes, but the lecture goes until only 39:05, at which point the Q&A begins.

2011-12-08T16:50:00.000-08:00

More here.

These are great, too.

HT: KT

Robert Talisse on "Faith in Democracy"

2011-12-08T12:49:00.001-08:00

Here.

HT: The Brooks Blog

Required Reading

2011-12-07T06:34:00.000-08:00

Schellenberg, J.L."God, Free Will, and Time: The Free Will Offense Part II", International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, forthcoming (Published Online Nov 2011).

As indicated in the title, the paper further develops Schellenberg's line of argument in his "The Free Will Offense" (IJPR 56, pp. 1-15), and ch. 12 of his The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (Cornell UP, 2007).

A Note on Craig's Standard Reply to Mackie on the Kalam Cosmological Argument

2011-12-04T08:56:00.001-08:00

Suppose one were to believe in the possibility of a beginningless past on the basis of the following inference:

1. Every finite subset of events in a beginningless past is traversable.
2. Therefore, the whole set of events in a beginningless past is traversable.

This is obviously a bad reason for that belief. For to infer (2) from (1) is to commit the fallacy of composition.

Interestingly, William Lane Craig attributes this fallacious inference to the late J.L. Mackie in reply to Mackie's criticism of the Kalam argument in the latter's The Miracle of Theism.[1] It's perhaps worth noting that Craig repeats this reply to Mackie's criticism in virtually all of his books and contributing chapters in which he defends the kalam cosmological argument. Furthermore, Mackie's is arguably the main criticism he raises to his argument in these writings.

I think Craig's characterization of Mackie's criticism of the kalam argument here is uncharitable at best, and mistaken at worst. In what follows, I'll attempt to point out where Craig goes wrong in this rejoinder to Mackie. But before I do so, I'll need to set things up with a brief discussion of the relevant part of the dialectic between Mackie and Craig.

Mackie's criticism is that, ". . .[i]t assumes that, even if past time were infinite, there would still have been a starting-point of time, but one infinitely remote, so that an actual infinity would have had to be traversed to reach the present from there. But to take the hypothesis of infinity seriously would be to suppose that there was no starting point, not even an infinitely remote one, and that from any specific point in past time there is only a finite stretch that needs to be traversed to reach the present." (The Miracle of Theism, p. 93).

Craig's offers two main points in his rejoinder. First, he says that it’s Mackie, and not the proponent of the kalam argument, who fails to take a beginningless past seriously. For the latter construes such a past as having no beginning at all – not even one infinitely distant from the present. But if so, then this makes the problem worse, not better. For then one couldn’t even get going to make progress in traversing an infinite set of events to reach the present moment.[2] Second, Mackie’s point that each event in a beginningless past is only finitely distant from the present is irrelevant. For the issue isn’t whether any finite segment of a beginningless past can be traversed to reach the present, but rather whether the whole infinite past can be so traversed. To think that a whole infinite set can be traversed because each finite segment can be traversed is to commit the fallacy of composition.[3]

What to make of this exchange? Mackie is correct, and Craig has misunderstood him -- or at least he has given Mackie's reply an uncharitable gloss. First, Mackie is correct to say that proponents of the kalam argument have misconstrued a beginningless traversal. For to say that the past is beginningless is to say that some infinite set of events or other has been traversed before every point in the past. But if so, then if a beginningless past is possible -- which is the very issue under dispute -- there can be no going from a state of not having traversed to having traversed an infinite series of events in a beginningless past. The only sort of scenario that involves a transition from a finite to an infinite traversal is one involving a beginning of the traversal at some point. And on the most charitable and forceful interpretation of Mackie's criticism, this is why he says that the proponent of the kalam argument conflates a beginningless past (i.e., {…, -3, -2, -1}) with a past that had a beginning an infinite amount of time ago (i.e., {1, 2, 3, …} or, say, {1, …-3, -2, -1}).

Second, in light of the previous point, we see why Craig is mistaken, or at least uncharitable, in saying that Mackie has committed the fallacy of composition. For on the more charitable and forceful construal of Mackie's reply, Mackie is not arguing that because every finite segment of a beginningless past is traversable, the whole infinite past traversable. Rather, he’s saying that if the past is beginningless -- which, again, is the very issue under dispute -- then an infinite set of events has already been traversed before every point of a beginningless past, and that is why there is only a finite set of subsequent events between that point and the present.[*]

[1] See, for example, "The Cosmological Argument", in Copan, Paul and Paul K. Moser, eds. The Rationality of Theism (Routledge, 2003, 124-135.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[*] An exposition of the standard criticisms of Craig's philosophical arguments against the existence and traversability of actual infinites can be found here.

Robert Audi Discusses His New Book, Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State

2011-12-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

...at New Books in Philosophy (here).

Orwell Was Right, Installment 9,457

2011-11-26T20:56:00.001-08:00

"The United States gets reassuring stories on stress and overwork. The rest of the world learns about the fight for democracy in Egypt"

Two Helpful Papers for Evaluating van Inwagen's The Problem of Evil

2011-11-26T13:06:00.001-08:00

Fischer, John Martin and Neal Tognazzini. "Exploring Evil and Philosophical Failure: A Critical Notice of Peter van Inwagen's The Problem of Evil", Faith & Philosophy 24:4 (October 2007), 458-474.

Boyce, Kenneth and Justin McBrayer. "Van Inwagen on the Problem of Evil: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly"

McBrayer's New Contextualist/Contrastivist Twist on Skeptical Theism

2011-11-26T11:07:00.000-08:00

Justin McBrayer (Fort Lewis College) is an excellent young philosopher. He's also an up-and-comer in philosophy of religion, with special focus on the skeptical theist response to the problem of evil (We've noted his overview of recent work on skeptical theism in Philosophy Compass, and his IEP entry on the topic on other occasions). His most recent contribution makes an advance in the discussion by applying recent work on epistemic contextualism (and also, in this case, Schaeffer's contrastivism) to the topic. The paper can be found here.

A while back, I complained about the strange dearth of work in philosophy of religion that applies the recent hot topic of contextualism in epistemology. It's nice to see that things are starting to change in that regard.

Excellent Online Collection of van Inwagen's Work

2011-11-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

Andrew M. Bailey has done the philosophical community a great service by providing an online collection of Peter van Inwagen's papers.

A teaser: two of van Inwagen's most important papers on the problem of evil:

"The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: A Theodicy"

"The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence"

UPDATE: Bailey also has an online collection of John Martin Fischer's papers (here)! HT: Paul

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T11:06:00.001-08:00

HT: D.F.

The Secular Outpost: Paul Draper, the Fallacy of Understated Evidence, ...

2011-11-23T23:23:00.000-08:00

The Secular Outpost: Paul Draper, the Fallacy of Understated Evidence, ...: Paul Draper has usefully identified a fallacy of inductive reasoning he calls the "fallacy of understated evidence." According to Draper, in...

A Serious Discussion of Divine Omnipotence

2011-11-23T07:35:00.000-08:00

Here. ;)

Review of McCabe's God and Evil in the Theology of St. Thomas

2011-11-21T06:14:00.000-08:00

John Haldane (St. Andrews) reviewed the book for NDPR.

Oppy, Moreland, and the Common Apologetic Strategy

2011-11-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

Over at the Secular Outpost, Graham Oppy recently noted a series of exchanges he's been having with J.P. Moreland on the argument from consciousness for theism. One of Oppy's main points in the post is that a naturalist can (a la Chalmers) take consciousness or proto-conscious representational properties as fundamental features of the natural world, thereby undercutting the argument from consciousness.[1] As Oppy puts it:

The most important point to note -- vis a vis this discussion -- I think, is this: The worst case for the naturalist is one in which 'conscious state' is an ideological primitive, with an ideologically primitive connection to 'neural state' (or the like). But, for theists like Moreland, 'conscious state' is evidently an ideological primitive -- for, of course, Moreland thinks that God is conscious, and does not suppose that God's consciousness is explained in terms of something else -- and the connection between consciousness and the rest of God's 'state' is also ideologically primitive. So, on a proper accounting of theoretical costs, the worst case for the naturalist is no worse than par with the view that Moreland defends.

And as Oppy points out, Moreland completely ignores this reply, choosing instead to argue that less "liberal" forms of naturalism can't account for consciousness.

I think this is an excellent demonstration of the failure of what I have called the Common Apologetic Strategy.
-------------------------
[1] I've tried to make this point as well. See, for example, here and here.

2011-11-16T11:40:00.001-08:00

2011-11-15T20:28:00.000-08:00

Podcast Interview with Graham Oppy

2011-11-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

Here.

HT: The Secular Outpost

Quote for the Day

2011-11-14T20:41:00.000-08:00

"I’ll conclude with a brief comment on the exceedingly low standard Bill [Craig] sets for a “good” philosophical argument. The premises don’t even need to be “plausible,” he says – “just more plausible than their opposites.” But surely, when you don’t know enough even to say, “This is plausible,” you don’t have a foundation on which to build an argument for a conclusion that you can believe! To see just how bad the problem is, suppose that each of the logically independent premises Bill needs to get all the way to the conclusion that a personal God created the universe meets this low standard. By way of illustration, suppose that there are just four logically independent premises, and make the very generous assumption that the probability is two to one in favor of each of them. Then the probability that all of them are true is less than 0.2, and the probability that at least one of them is false is greater than 0.8! Imagine a ladder with four rungs, and suppose that the probability that at least one of them will break is in the neighborhood of 0.8. Would you trust that ladder? No? Then you shouldn’t put too awfully much weight on this version of the cosmological argument!"

-Wes Morriston (from his opening statement in is dialogue with William Lane Craig)

Wes's comments on the dialogue with Craig can be found here.

Update on the Synthese Affair

2011-11-14T15:04:00.000-08:00

Here.

2011-11-13T19:14:00.001-08:00

ANNOUNCEMENT: Killeen Chair Conference on Religious Disagreement

2011-11-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

HT: Prosblogion

Killeen Chair Conference on Religious Disagreement

Hosted by St. Norbert College, Green Bay, Wisconsin
April 14th through 15th, 2012

https://sites.google.com/site/killeenchair/

The organizing committee for the Killeen Chair of Theology & Philosophy announces a conference on the epistemology of religious disagreement, to be held at St. Norbert College on April 14-15, 2012.

Keynote Speakers:
Michael Bergmann (Purdue)
Thomas Kelly (Princeton)
Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern)

Additional Speakers:
Nathan King (Whitworth)
Jonathan Matheson (North Florida)
Andrew Moon (Missouri)
Tim Pickavance (Biola)

The organizing committee invites the submission of papers for two or three additional speakers. Papers should relate in some way to the epistemic significance of religious disagreement, and each should be suitable for a thirty-five minute presentation (roughly 3,500 words).

Papers should be prepared for blind review and submitted electronically. Please send your file attached to an e-mail message in which you state your name, contact information, and the title of your paper. Preferred file formats include Word 97-2003 (.doc), Word 2007 (.docx), and PDF. Please send submissions to tomas DOT bogardus AT snc DOT edu.

The deadline for submissions is Friday, February 10th, 2012.

The organizing committee warmly invites all interested philosophers to attend and participate in the conference. If you plan to attend, please email Tomas Bogardus at the above address so that we can plan to accommodate the group's size.

Commentators will be selected for some papers. If you would be willing to comment, please indicate your interest in an email (with a current CV attached) by Friday, February 10th, 2012. One need not present a paper in order to serve as a commentator.

For further information on the Killeen Chair in Theology & Philosophy, please visit http://www.snc.edu/killeen/

New IEP Entry on Omnipotence

2011-11-09T06:30:00.001-08:00

Here.

New SEP Entry on Religious Experience

2011-11-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

Here.

Interesting Discussion of Schellenberg's Argument from Divine Hiddenness

2011-11-08T06:35:00.001-08:00

Here and here.

5th Anniversary

2011-11-07T08:20:00.000-08:00

I recently realized that last month marked this blog's 5th anniversary. I'm still enjoying it quite a bit, so I plan on continuing for the foreseeable future. Thanks to all of you for visiting and/or commenting.

~EA

Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality

2011-11-03T17:20:00.001-07:00

... is the name of a new book by R. Scott Smith (Biola). Here is the blurb:

Philosophical naturalism is taken to be the preferred and reigning epistemology and metaphysics that underwrites many ideas and knowledge claims. But what if we cannot know reality on that basis? What if the institution of science is threatened by its reliance on naturalism?

R. Scott Smith argues in a fresh way that we cannot know reality on the basis of naturalism. Moreover, the "fact-value" split has failed to serve our interests of wanting to know reality. The author provocatively argues that since we can know reality, it must be due to a non-naturalistic ontology, best explained by the fact that human knowers are made and designed by God. The book offers fresh implications for the testing of religious truth-claims, science, ethics, education, and public policy. Consequently, naturalism and the fact-value split are shown to be false, and Christian theism is shown to be true.

And here is the table of contents:

Introduction

Part 1 Direct Realism: An introduction to direct realism:
-The views of D.M. Armstrong
-The representationalism of Dretske, Tye, and Lycan
-Searle's naturalism and the prospects for knowledge

Part 2 Philosophy as Science: Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy and Naturalized Epistemology:
-Cognitive science, philosophy, and our knowledge or reality, part 1: the views of David Papineau
-Cognitive science, philosophy, and our knowledge of reality part 2: the views of Daniel Dennett
-Can the Churchlands' neurocomputational theory of cognition ground a viable epistemology? (Errin Clark)

Part 3 Other Alternatives and Naturalism's Future:
-Other proposals: Pollock's internalism, Kim's functionalism (with Peggy Burke) and more externalist considerations
-The future directions of naturalism and the scientific method, and other implications

I haven't read it yet, but it looks like yet another instance of The Common Apologetic Strategy.

An Excellent Overview of St. Thomas's Five Ways

2011-11-02T20:25:00.000-07:00

Timothy Pawl (St. Thomas) provides an extremely clear explication of Aquinas's five proofs of God's existence, as well as key objections and replies, in "The Five Ways", forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas (ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump).

Lisa Hannigan: Tiny Desk Concert

2011-10-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

I've always thought Lisa Hannigan was the better singer in Damien Rice's duo.

Philosophy TV: Owen Flanagan and Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, Meaning, and Morality

2011-10-28T21:38:00.000-07:00

Here.

A Quick Note on Geivett's Argument from Evil to God

2011-10-26T21:13:00.001-07:00

Jeffrey Jay Lowder recently noted Doug Geivett's argument from evil to God, which runs as follows:

1. Evil exists.
2. Evil is a departure from the way things ought to be.
3. If there is a departure from the way things ought to be, then there is a way things ought to be.
4. Therefore, there is a way things ought to be.
5. If there is a way things ought to be, then there is a design plan for things.
6. If there is a design plan for things, then there must be a Designer.
7. Therefore, there must be a Designer.

It appears that Geivett's argument is a variation on Plantinga's argument from proper function to God. In both arguments, there is a claim about the existence of normativity in the natural world that's grounded in purpose and plan. And in both arguments, there is a claim that such purpose and plan can only come from an intelligent designer (or at least that intelligent design is the only known way to get purpose and plan, and the prospects for a naturalistic account of purpose plan are unpromising).

The problem is that the claim that purpose and plan in nature requires an intelligent designer has been undercut by recent papers from Adrian Bardon, Tyler Wunder, and Peter J. Graham. These papers focus on Plantinga's use of the claim in his argument from proper function to God. But since the premise is the same in Geivett's argument, his argument from evil to God is likewise undercut.

How Fox News Rolls

2011-10-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

W.K. Clifford Was Right, Take 45,753

2011-10-21T17:45:00.000-07:00

It really, really matters whether your beliefs are proportioned to the evidence. Case in point: Steve Jobs.

Scanlon's Critique of Libertarianism

2011-10-19T14:30:00.000-07:00

Here.

HT: Crooked Timber

Review of Reasonable Atheism

2011-10-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

Michael Antony reviews the book for The Philosopher's Magazine (here).

IEP Entry on the New Atheist Movement

2011-10-14T20:03:00.001-07:00

Here.

Plantinga in the News

2011-10-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Seeing that Plantinga hired a Dutch Reformed air conditioner repairman was an especially nice touch.

Hat tip: MD and SC

Craig’s Case Against the Existence of Actual Infinites, Part 5: More Objects than Numbers (Revised)

2011-10-11T01:28:00.001-07:00

(The rest of the posts in this series can be found here).

Consider the following argument from Craig:

"Suppose...that each book in the library has a number printed on its spine so as to create a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. Because the collection is actually infinite, this means that every possible natural number is printed on some book. Therefore, it would be impossible to add another book to this library. For what would be the number of the new book? . . .Every possible number already has a counterpart in realty, for corresponding to every natural number is an already existent book. Therefore, there would be no number for the new book. But this is absurd, since entities that exist in reality can be numbered."[1]

We can put the argument more carefully as follows:

1. If concrete actual infinites are possible, then a library L with an infinite set of books is possible.
2. If L is possible, then it’s possible to assign a natural number to each book in L.
3. If it’s possible to assign a natural number to each book in L, then it’s possible to assign all the natural numbers to books in L without remainder.
4. If it’s possible to assign all the natural numbers to books in L without remainder, then if it’s possible to add a new book B to L, then it’s impossible to assign a natural number to B.
5. It’s possible to add B to L.
6. It’s possible to assign a natural number to B.
Therefore,
7. Concrete actual infinites are impossible.

This argument is valid.[2] Furthermore, (1), (2), (3), and (5) look to be true. Unfortunately, (4) seems false. Thus, consider library L again. Now suppose we reassign the natural numbers to the books in L as follows: assign ‘2’ to the first book, ‘3’ to the second book, and so on all the way through the rest of the books in L. Then we can free up ‘1’ to be assigned to the new book. But if so, then it is possible to assign a natural number to B, in which case (4) is false.[3] What does seem true, though, is not (4) but rather:

(4’) If it’s possible to assign all the natural numbers to books in L without remainder, then if it’s possible to add a new book B to L, then it’s impossible to assign a natural number to B if we hold fixed the original assignment of numbers to books.

Let’s revise the argument accordingly. To preserve the argument’s validity, we’ll also need to revise (6) to account for the new qualification:

(6’) It’s possible to assign a natural number to B (even) if we hold fixed the original assignment of numbers to books.

Does the revised version of Craig’s argument fare any better?

No, it doesn’t. For while (4’) seems clearly true, (6’) seems clearly false. For if we hold fixed the assignment of natural numbers to the books in L prior to the addition of B, then of course no unique natural number remains that can be assigned to B. But the problem here lies not with actual infinites, but rather with the internal coherence of Craig’s assertion that it must be possible to assign a unique natural number to a new book, even under the stipulation that all the unique natural numbers have already been assigned to other books.

What went wrong in Craig's argument? Recall premise (6) in the initial version of the argument:

(6) It’s possible to assign a natural number to B.

As Craig indicates in the quoted passage above, he accepts (6) on the grounds that:

(a) Any entity that exists in reality can be numbered.

This seems to be true. But (a) is not what Craig needs to derive (6). What he needs instead is

(b) Any entity that exists in reality can be numbered via a natural number.

Unfortunately, (b) looks to be false. For consider a library L’ that contains a set of books that can be put in a 1-1 correspondence with the real numbers. Such a set of books would be non-denumerably infinite; that is, it’d be actually infinite, but it couldn’t be put into a 1-1 correspondence with the natural numbers. Therefore, while all such books in L’ can be numbered, they can’t all by numbered via the natural numbers.

This example illustrates two salient points: (i) some sets of entities can’t be numbered via the natural numbers, and (ii) such entities can yet be numbered via other numbers, as there are more numbers than just the naturals. But given (i) and (ii), the door is open for numbering the new book in Craig’s library with a unique non-natural number.

We can sum up the problem with Craig's argument as follows. Either we hold fixed the assignment of natural numbers to books in Craig's infinite library or we don't. If we don't, then it's possible to reassign the natural numbers so as to free up a unique natural number for the new book. On the other hand, if we do hold fixed the original assignment of numbers to books, then it is impossible to assign a unique natural number to the new book. But of course there are more numbers than the naturals, and the new book can be numbered with one of these. If Craig yet demands that the new book be numbered with a natural number, even after all the natural numbers have been assigned to other books, then the problem lies not with the possibility of his infinite library, but rather with the coherence of the task demanded for it. Either way, then, Craig's argument is unsuccessful.

-------------------------------------
[*] Thanks to D.D. for reminding me of this argument of Craig's.
[1] Craig, William Lane. The Kalam Cosmological Argument (London: MacMillan, 1979), p. 83.
[2] Proof:

Let:
P=concrete actual infinites are possible
Q= a library L with an infinite number of books is possible
R=It’s possible to assign a unique natural number to each book in L
S=It’s possible to assign all the natural numbers to books in L without remainder
T= It’s possible to add a new book B to L
U=It’s impossible to assign a natural number to B

Then we have:

1. P -> Q Premise
2. Q -> R Premise
3. R -> S Premise
4. S -> (T - > U) Premise
5. T Premise
6. ~U Premise
----------------------------
7. P Assumption
8. Q 1, 7 MP
9. R 2, 8 MP
10. S 3, 9 MP
11. T -> U 4, 10 MP
12. U 5, 11 MP
13. ~T 6, 11 MT
14. T 5 R
15. ~P 7-14 ~I
Q.E.D.
[3] Wes Morriston makes this criticism in "Craig on the Actual Infinite", Religious Studies 38 (2002), pp. 147-166, esp. 149-150.

Forthcoming Book on Plantinga's Work

2011-10-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

As you'll recall, there was a conference at Notre Dame early last year to celebrate Alvin Plantinga's retirement. The papers delivered at the conference (or rather, polished descendants of them) are forthcoming in a volume with OUP: Reason, Metaphysics, and Mind: New Essays on the Philosophy of Alvin Plantinga (Kelly James Clark and Michael Rea, eds.).

Here's the book's description from OUP:
In May 2010, philosophers, family and friends gathered at the University of Notre Dame to celebrate the career and retirement of Alvin Plantinga, widely recognized as one of the world's leading figures in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Plantinga has earned particular respect within the community of Christian philosophers for the pivotal role that he played in the recent renewal and development of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. Each of the essays in this volume engages with some particular aspect of Plantinga's views on metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of religion. Contributors include Michael Bergman, Ernest Sosa, Trenton Merricks, Richard Otte, Peter VanInwagen, Thomas P. Flint, Eleonore Stump, Dean Zimmerman and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The volume also includes responses to each essay by Bas van Fraassen, Stephen Wykstra, David VanderLaan, Robin Collins, Raymond VanArragon, E. J. Coffman, Thomas Crisp, and Donald Smith.

Videos of the original talks at the conference can be found here.

Review of Divine Hiddenness: New Essays

2011-10-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I never posted about this, but there's an old (but excellent) review of Divine Hiddenness: New Essays at NDPR by Robert McKim.

As many of you know, McKim wrote a superb book on the problems of divine hiddenness (more specifically, the problem of religious ambiguity) and religious diversity a while back, and has another book on the problem of religious diversity forthcoming with OUP.

U.S. Debt: Which President Did Best?

2011-09-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

A tip of the hat to The Brooks Blog.

Probability in the Philosophy of Religion

2011-09-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

Jake Chandler (University of Leuven) and Victoria S. Harrison (University of Glasgow) have co-edited what looks to be an excellent new book: Probability in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP, forthcoming).

Here's the blurb:

*A fresh approach to philosophy of religion
*Covers a range of key topics in the field
*Brings together prominent philosophers of science, epistemologists, and philosophers of religion

Probability theory promises promising to deliver an exact and unified foundation for inquiry in epistemology and philosophy of science. But philosophy of religion is also fertile ground for the application of probabilistic thinking. This volume presents original contributions from twelve contemporary researchers, both established and emerging, to offer a representative sample of the work currently being carried out in this potentially rich field of inquiry. Grouped into five parts, the chapters span a broad range of traditional issues in religious epistemology. The first three parts discuss the evidential impact of various considerations that have been brought to bear on the question of the existence of God. These include witness reports of the occurrence of miraculous events, the existence of complex biological adaptations, the apparent 'fine-tuning' for life of various physical constants and the existence of seemingly unnecessary evil. The fourth part addresses a number of issues raised by Pascal's famous pragmatic argument for theistic belief. A final part offers probabilistic perspectives on the rationality of faith and the epistemic significance of religious disagreement.

And here's the table of contents:

1: Jake Chandler and Victoria S. Harrison: Probability in the Philosophy of Religion
Part I: Testimony and Miracles
2: Benjamin C. Jantzen: Peirce on Miracles: The Failure of Bayesian Analysis
3: Tim McGrew and Lydia McGrew: The Reliability of Witnesses and Testimony to the Miraculous'
4: Luc Bovens: Does it Matter whether a Miracle-Like Event Happens to Oneself rather than to Someone Else?
Part II: Design
5: David H. Glass: Can Evidence for Design be Explained Away?
6: Richard Swinburne: Bayes, God, and the Multiverse
Part III: Evil
7: Richard Otte: Comparative Confirmation and the Problem of Evil'
8: Michael Tooley: Inductive Logic and the Probability that God Exists: Farewell to Sceptical Theism
Part IV: Pascal's Wager
9: Alan Hájek: Blaise and Bayes
10: Paul Bartha: Many Gods, Many Wagers: Pascal's Wager Meets the Replicator Dynamics
Part V: Faith and Disagreement
11: Joshua C. Thurow: Does Religious Disagreement Actually Aid the Case for Theism?
12: Lara Buchak: Can it be it Rational to Have Faith?

ANNOUNCEMENT: The 2012 St. Thomas Summer Seminar in Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology

2011-09-21T15:18:00.000-07:00

The 2012 St. Thomas Summer Seminar in Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology

Recent PhDs and current graduate students are invited to apply to participate in the 2012 St. Thomas Summer Seminar in Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology, a three-week long seminar organized by Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers) and Michael Rota (University of St. Thomas). The seminar will be held at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota, from June 17th to July 6th, 2012. Participants will receive a stipend of $3000, as well as room and board.

http://www.stthomas.edu/philosophy/templeton/project.html

Topics and speakers:

Dualism and Materialism Chris Hill (Brown)
Hud Hudson (Western Washington)
Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers)

Freedom and Foreknowledge Linda Zagzebski (Oklahoma)
David Hunt (Whittier)

The Atonement Eleonore Stump (Saint Louis University)
Michael Rea (Notre Dame)
Resurrection Timothy O’Connor (Indiana)

Pascal’s Wager Thomas Kelly (Princeton)
Michael Rota (St. Thomas)

Neuroscience and Philosophy Hans Halvorson (Princeton)
Jeffrey Schwartz (UCLA School of Medicine)

The deadline for receipt of applications is December 1, 2011.

For more information, including information on how to apply, go to

http://www.stthomas.edu/philosophy/templeton/project.html

This seminar program is funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Williamson vs. Rosenberg on Naturalism -- In the New York Times

2011-09-18T23:07:00.000-07:00

Williamson's piece can be found here, and Rosenberg's reply can be found here.

HT: Leiter Reports

UPDATE: Williamson's rejoinder to Rosenberg (here).

Quote for the Day

2011-09-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

"It is somewhat misleading to characterize theorists like Adams and Craig as providing a theistic foundation for objective morality. This characterization can easily give the impression that, on their approaches, all objective ethical facts are explained by God. But this is not at all the case. What is really going on is that some objective ethical facts are explained by appeal to other basic ethical facts (some of which are also supernatural facts). Adams, Craig, and I all agree, then, that objective morality is somehow built into reality. We all posit a moral foundation of substantive, metaphysically necessary brute ethical facts. They also see divinity as built into reality, whereas I do not. But it is a mistake to think that on their approaches, the divinity that is built into reality provides a complete external foundation for objective morality. On both types of views, the bottom floor of objective morality rests ultimately on nothing.

The ethical shopping list of Adams, Craig, and Moreland contains items like this: (a) there is a being that is worthy of worship, (b) if the Good commands you to do something, then you are morally obligated to do it, and (c) the better the character of the commander, the more reason there is to obey his or her commands. My ethical shopping list contains items like this: (d) pain is intrinsically bad, (e) inflicting pain just for fun is morally wrong, and (f) it is just to give people what they deserve. None of us can provide an external foundation for every item on our list; each of our lists contains some brute ethical facts."

-Wielenberg, "In Defense of Non-Natural, Non-Theistic Moral Realism", Faith & Philosophy 26:1 (Jan 2009), 39-40.

Kraay on Theistic Multiverse Hypotheses

2011-09-14T08:22:00.001-07:00

Although multiverse hypotheses were once commonly resisted by theistic philosophers, a number of such philosophers now see them as having great theoretical utility in natural theology and philosophical theology. As noted on other occasions, Klaas Kraay has written extensively on the relationship between theism and multiverse hypotheses. It's therefore worth pointing out that he has kindly posted his "The Theistic Multiverse: Problems and Prospects" (which is a chapter in the forthcoming book, Scientific Approaches to Philosophy of Religion (Ed. Yujin Nagasawa, Palgrave MacMillan). The chapter is at once an excellent overview of the topic, and a contribution to the current debate.

Many of his other papers can be found here.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Winners of the 2010 Excellence in Philosophy of Religion Prize

2011-09-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

The 2010 Excellence in Philosophy of Religion Prize attempts to
identify the three best papers, in English, published in 2010 in the
areas of philosophy of religion or philosophical theology. Out of
forty-four submissions, our selection panel has chosen the following
three winners:

W. Matthews Grant , “Can a Libertarian hold that Our Free Acts are
Caused by God?” Faith and Philosophy 27:1 (January 2010): 22-44.

David M. Holley , “Treating God’s Existence as an Explanatory
Hypothesis” American Philosophical Quarterly 47:4 (October 2010):
377-88.

Yujin Nagasawa, “The Ontological Argument and the Devil,”
Philosophical Quarterly 60 (October 2010): 72-91.

For more information on this award, including instructions for
submitting a paper for the 2011 prize, go to

http://www.stthomas.edu/philosophy/templeton/awards.html.

Exposition of Morriston's New Paper

2011-09-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

Over at Philosophical Disquisitions, John Danaher is expositing Wes Morriston's recent paper, "Ethical Criticism of the Bible: The Case of Divinely Mandated Genocide", Sophia (2011). Below are the installments so far:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Things, Stuff, and the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument (draft)

2011-09-10T20:13:00.000-07:00

A key move in standard Leibnizian cosmological arguments is the claim that:

(UCB) The universe -- or (if the universe doesn't exhaust physical reality) all physical reality -- is a contingent being.

Now the primary means of support for UCB is a conceivability-possibility inference. Richard Taylor's use of such an inference is representative in this regard. Thus, he argues that for any object in the universe, we can imagine that it fails to exist (e.g., a six-foot-in-diameter translucent sphere). But if imaginability is evidence of possibility, then this is evidence that for any arbitrary object in the universe (whether a stamp or a solar system), it's possible for it not to exist. But we can just as easily imagine the whole universe failing to exist. Therefore, we can say with equal justification that the universe can fail to exist, in which case it's a contingent being.

Is the line of reasoning above for the contingency of the universe a good one? One might think not, on the grounds that Taylor conflates evidence for the possible non-existence of a material object (a stamp, a solar system, etc.) with evidence for the possible non-existence of the stuff of which it's composed (matter-energy).

William Lane Craig is aware of this sort of worry. However, he thinks he can get around it and make legitimate use of a conceivability-possibility inference to support UCB by cutting to the chase and asking us to imagine the most fundamental constituents of reality -- quarks (assuming the string theorists are wrong) -- failing to exist; alternatively, he asks us to imagine a universe composed of different quarks.[1] Given this modification of the thought experiment, he assumes that we can adequately imagine this, and further that this is sufficient prima facie evidence that such things are possible.

I've raised worries for Craig's defense of the Leibnizian cosmological argument on other occasions. Here's another one: Craig's defense of UCB makes no real advance over Taylor's. For it seems to assume a "thing" ontology about fundamental reality, while a "stuff" ontology of fundamental reality is epistemically possible.

Let me explain a bit. For simplicity's sake, suppose there are just nine things (quarks, say), and these, in turn, are composed of a more fundamental "stuff" (matter-energy, say). Suppose further that the latter is a metaphysically necessary substance. Finally, suppose the stuff is capable of an unlimited number of modes of existing (e.g., as nine particles, as 18 smaller particles, as one big particle, etc.). If so, then while the particles -- the things -- are contingent beings, matter-energy -- the "stuff" -- is not. But if this scenario is epistemically possible, then as with Taylor's defense of UCB, Craig's defense of UCB fails to rule out that he's conflating the contingency of things within the universe with the contingency of the stuff of which it's composed. And if that's right, it doesn't seem to me that Craig's defense of UCB makes an advance over Taylor's.

Now one might try to push Craig's point here by saying that we can adequately imagine the universe (or a universe) as composed of different matter-energy, or of our universe (or a universe) ceasing to exist (or of a possible world at which no material objects exist), but at the very least, this isn't clear. For even if one grants that imaginability can provide sufficient justification for very many possibility claims, one might yet sensibly worry that its justification-conferring ability does not extend to states of affairs as remote from ordinary experience as the non-existence of all matter-energy, or the existence of a different kind of matter-energy. In this regard, she may find such claims to be on a par with the controversial modal premise of (say) Plantinga’s modal ontological argument (Possibly, an Anselmian Being exists), or of conceivability arguments for dualism (Possibly, I exist apart from my body).

One might object that the previous criticism relies on an arbitrarily selective form of modal skepticism, on the grounds that the demand for justification for exotic possibility claims should then apply to humdrum possibility claims as well. And since the sensible non-theist accepts the latter without argument, she should, to be consistent, accept the former. But this objection is less than persuasive. For a number of plausible accounts of the epistemology of modality have been proposed that provide a basis for distinguishing between justified humdrum possibility claims and unjustified exotic possibility claims. So, for example, it has been argued that our knowledge of metaphysical possibility is grounded in (i) our survival-conducive facility with counterfactual reasoning in ordinary contexts (e.g., Williamson, Nichols) and (ii) arguments from analogy/relevant similarity with the actual world (e.g., Hawke, yours truly). Such theories receive confirmation in a number of ways, such as their ability to explain the epistemic force of paradigm-case thought experiments (e.g., Gettier cases), as well as the lack of such conviction with respect to the more exotic modal thought experiments (involving, e.g., the possible existence of Anselmian Beings and disembodied existence). For the former thought experiment can be grounded in such accounts, while the latter cannot.

Most saliently for our purposes, it’s not at all clear how such accounts of our knowledge of metaphysical possibility could adequately support the possible non-existence of all matter-energy, or of the possible existence of a different kind of matter energy. Thus, it’s not clear how the evolutionary pressures that gave rise to our competence with counterfactual reasoning in daily life (e.g., reliable reasoning about what would happen if one tried to cross a busy intersection) would make us competent to determine something so remote from ordinary experience as the possible non-existence of all matter-energy, or of a different sort of matter-energy.

Nor are such possibility-candidates sufficiently similar to our experience and knowledge of the actual world so as to ground a solid analogical inference from the latter to the former. For the relevant sorts of experiences here would involve observations of the absolute origination and annihilation of matter-energy. But in all of our actual experiences, what we observe is relevantly dissimilar to this, viz., the mere rearrangement of preexisting materials, as well as their decomposition into simpler elements. It therefore appears that a non-theist could sensibly reject an imaginability-possibility inference in support of such exotic claims without thereby engaging in an unprincipled or arbitrarily selective form of modal skepticism.

In short, it seems to me that Craig's recent defense of UCB fails to rule out the epistemic possibility of a stuff ontology of fundamental physical reality. Because of this, his defense of UCB fails to rule out that he's conflating the contingency of things within the universe with the contingency of the stuff of which it's composed. And because this was the worry that Craig's defense of UCB was supposed to avoid, it fails to make a significant advance over Taylor's defense of it.

-------------------------
[1] Joshua Rasmussen has suggested to me that one can also imagine the universe as composed of more or fewer quarks, and that this in turn might confer sufficient justification on UCB. Below I'll raise an objection that challenges these thought experiments as well.

ex-apologist

Plantinga Discusses His New Book on NPR

What's Wrong With Plantinga's Proper Functionalism? (Second Draft)

Omnipotence, Suicide, Counterpossibles, and Aseity

Comic Relief

Wierenga on Plantinga, Defeaters, and the EAAN

The Real Problem With Craig's Version of Reformed Epistemology (Slightly Revised)

Review of Davies' Thomas Aquinas on Good and Evil

The Real Problem with Craig's Version of Reformed Epistemology

The Secular Outpost: Christian Philosopher Michael Sudduth Converts to ...

Post Roundup: Criticisms of Plantinga's Argument from Proper Functionalism to Theism

What's Wrong With Plantinga's Proper Functionalism? (Draft)

Post Roundup: Counterexamples to Plantinga's Proper Functionalism

Plantinga's Proper Functionalism Unmotivated

Tim Maudlin on Philosophy of Cosmology

New Issue of Faith & Philosophy

de Ridder's Reply to Baldwin and Thune

Alain de Botton on Atheism 2.0

Quote(s) for the Day

Manson on the "Why Design?" Question

The Secular Outpost: The Parsons Test of Biblical Literalism

New IEP Entry on Platonism and Theism

Interview with Plantinga on His New Book on Science and Religion

A Quick and Dirty Refutation of Plantinga's Parity Thesis

Old Epistemology, New Epistemology, and Natural Theology

Ruse and Coyne Critique Plantinga's New Book on Science and Religion

Underexplored Epistemological Resources for the Cosmological Argument (and Other Arguments in Natural Theology)

But there are at least two more avenues of support for such premises that seem worthy of further exploration. The first has recently been explicitly appealed to, but so far as I know, the second has not:

On Mass Hallucinations and the Resurrection of Jesus

John Hawthorne Wins Million-Plus Grant to Work on Religious Epistemology

Louise Antony's NYT Piece, "Good Minus God"

Quote for the Day

New Blog Look

A Quick Thought About the Phenomenon of Reasonable Religious Disagreement

More Forthcoming Books to Look For from OUP

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 4

Christopher Hitchens: RIP

The Secular Outpost -- Revamped!

Thomas Kelly's Paper on the Theistic Argument from Common Consent

Phillip Kitcher on Talk Atheist Radio

Doom.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The Monist: Special Call for Papers

96:3 (July 2013)Naturalizing Religious Belief

Deadline for Submissions: July 31, 2012Advisory Editor: James Beebe, University at Buffalo (jbeebe2@buffalo.edu)

Plantinga in the News (Again)

New RSS Feeds

Deng on Carnap, Le Poidevin and Theism

Proposal for a New Entry in the Philosophical Lexicon

Stephen Law's New Paper on Plantinga's EAAN

Some Great Papers from Schellenberg Now Available Online

Maitzen's Recent Lecture, "God vs. Morality"

Robert Talisse on "Faith in Democracy"

Required Reading

A Note on Craig's Standard Reply to Mackie on the Kalam Cosmological Argument

Robert Audi Discusses His New Book, Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State

Orwell Was Right, Installment 9,457

Two Helpful Papers for Evaluating van Inwagen's The Problem of Evil

McBrayer's New Contextualist/Contrastivist Twist on Skeptical Theism

Excellent Online Collection of van Inwagen's Work

Happy Thanksgiving

The Secular Outpost: Paul Draper, the Fallacy of Understated Evidence, ...

A Serious Discussion of Divine Omnipotence

Review of McCabe's God and Evil in the Theology of St. Thomas

Oppy, Moreland, and the Common Apologetic Strategy

Podcast Interview with Graham Oppy

Quote for the Day

Update on the Synthese Affair

ANNOUNCEMENT: Killeen Chair Conference on Religious Disagreement

New IEP Entry on Omnipotence

New SEP Entry on Religious Experience

Interesting Discussion of Schellenberg's Argument from Divine Hiddenness

5th Anniversary

Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality

An Excellent Overview of St. Thomas's Five Ways

Lisa Hannigan: Tiny Desk Concert

Philosophy TV: Owen Flanagan and Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, Meaning, and Morality

A Quick Note on Geivett's Argument from Evil to God

How Fox News Rolls

W.K. Clifford Was Right, Take 45,753

Scanlon's Critique of Libertarianism

96:3 (July 2013)
Naturalizing Religious Belief

Deadline for Submissions: July 31, 2012
Advisory Editor: James Beebe, University at Buffalo (jbeebe2@buffalo.edu)