Kraay's New Paper on Divine Satisficing

On other occasions, we noted Klaas Kraay's important paper on divine satisfying, as well as Chris Tucker's important reply. Kraay's rejoinder, "Is Motivated Submaximization Good Enough for God?" is now out with Religious Studies. Here's the abstract:

In a recent article (Kraay 2013), I argued that some prominent responses to two important arguments for atheism invoke divine satisficing – and that the coherence and propriety of this notion have not been established. Chris Tucker (2016) agrees with my evaluation of divine satisficing, but disagrees with my exegesis of these responses. He argues that they should be understood as invoking motivated submaximization instead. After reviewing the dialectical situation to date, I assess whether motivated submaximization can be deployed in such a way as to defeat these arguments for atheism. I argue that it's far from clear that it can.

Two New Books from Schellenberg

The first -- Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate (Bloomsbury) came out on the 8th.  Here's the blurb to whet your appetite:

Progressive Atheism shows how atheism can make progress in humanity's future. It presents a new way of arguing that God doesn't exist, based on a portrayal of God so positive that you may sometimes wonder whether you're reading the thoughts of a believer.  

Starting with the simple idea that our understanding of what it takes to be a good person has changed and grown over time, J. L. Schellenberg argues that our understanding of the goodness of God must now change too. Masculine images of God as haughty King or distant Father have to be replaced by God as a paragon of nonviolence and relational openness.  

This more evolved conception of God is incredibly attractive and admirable. But by the same token it has become less believable. Each moral advance, applied to God, makes it even clearer that such a being would never create a world like ours.  

Atheists have often approached the subject of God with disdain. Progressive Atheism proves that admiration will be far more powerful.

The second -- Religion After Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity (Cambridge) -- comes out in October. Here's the blurb to whet your appetite:

In this provocative work, J. L. Schellenberg addresses those who, influenced by science, take a negative view of religion, thinking of it as outmoded if not decadent. He promotes the view that transcendently oriented religion is developmentally immature, showing the consilience of scientific thinking about deep time with his view. From this unique perspective, he responds to a number of influential cultural factors commonly thought to spell ill for religion, showing the changes - changes favorable to religion - that are now called for in how we understand them and their proper impact. Finally, he provides a defense for a new and attractive religious humanism that benefits from, rather than being hindered by, religious immaturity. In Schellenberg's view, religion can and should become a human project as monumental as science.

Both look to be required reading for those interested in philosophy of religion.

My New Book With Joshua Rasmussen Is Now Out

Readers of this blog might be interested in my new book with Joshua Rasmussen, Is God the Best Explanation of Things? A Dialogue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). If you've enjoyed anything I've written and/or enjoy work in philosophy of religion, please consider buying a copy. If you have a copy and enjoyed the book, please consider ranking the book on Amazon (or another bookseller venue) and leaving a comment.

Reviews:
“This is a terrific book. It is bold in its approach, and interesting in its details. Rasmussen and Leon are to be congratulated both for the spirit in which their investigation is conducted and for the contributions that they make to advancing discussion.” (Graham Oppy, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University, Australia)

“The authors of this clear and absorbing volume are intent on saying the best that can presently be said on behalf of theism and naturalism. Energetically, they produce clever arguments for their respective views, many of them new or interestingly refashioned, grounded in the latest relevant results from a wide range of areas. But Leon and Rasmussen have also adopted a more deliberately collaborative and constructive approach than is visible in any similar work. And by this means they succeed in exposing how much more flexible and variously construable are the concepts of theism and naturalism themselves than the history of their discussion would have led one to expect. One almost dares to think that a future agreement on the God question is possible!” (J.L. Schellenberg, Professor of Philosophy, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada)

“Felipe Leon and Joshua Rasmussen bravely tackle the most profound ontological question we can ask: what is the foundation of existence? Exploring this question in dialogue, they offer a fascinating exchange of ideas regarding such philosophical issues as causation, morality, evolution, the fine-tuning of the universe, consciousness, and the existence of God. I found this to be one of the most engaging, informative, and thought-provoking philosophical dialogues I have ever read.” (Yujin Nagasawa, H. G. Wood Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, University of Birmingham, UK)

“Is God the Best Explanation of Things?  is an exemplar of the virtues a philosophical dialogue should display.  It is about fundamental issues, is engagingly written, and offers original arguments.  Moreover, it is a genuinely open-minded series of exchanges that exhibit the philosophical progress that can be achieved when the interlocutors are eager to learn from one another and see themselves as partners in their search for the truth of the matter.” (Evan Fales, Professor of Philosophy (emeritus), University of Iowa, USA)

“This book brings together the formidable talents of two philosophers to bear on one of the most intractable problems in philosophy: the question of whether or not we have good reason to accept the existence of God. The prose is clear and accessible, and the arguments are well-developed and rigorous. It should be of interest and value to a wide range of readers and would make an excellent text for courses in the philosophy of religion, in particular.” (Andrei Buckareff, Associate Professor of Philosophy; Co-Director of the Cognitive Science Program, Marist College, USA)



Some of my points rely on my previous work in modal epistemology. Those interested in seeing further development and defense of that sort of view might be interested in reading the contributions of myself and others in a book I co-edited with Bob Fischer: Modal Epistemology After Rationalism (Springer, 2017).

For a Limited Time: Free Downloads of Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Religion!

Several new books have recently been released in the excellent Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of  Religion Series:

• God and Abstract Objects

• Einar Duenger Bøhn

• God and Human Freedom

• Leigh C. Vicens, Simon Kittle

• God and Morality

• Anne Jeffrey
• 
  

• God, Soul and the Meaning of Life

• Thaddeus Metz

For a limited time, they are available for free download Check them out!

Special Issue: Alternative Concepts of God

Andrei Buckareff and Yujin Nagasawa guest edited a terrific new issue of the European Journal for Philosophy of Religion on alternative concepts of God. Here is the table of contents:


Guest Editors’ Introduction
Andrei Buckareff, Yujin Nagasawa

The Awe-some Argument for Pantheism
T. Ryan Byerly

Against Mereological Panentheism
Oliver D. Crisp

Being Perfect is Not Necessary for Being God
Jeanine Diller

Panentheism, Transhumanism, and the Problem of Evil - From Metaphysics to Ethics
Benedikt Paul Göcke

Nothing Else
Samuel Lebens

Infinity and the Problem of Evil
John Leslie

Personalistic Theism, Divine Embodiment, and a Problem of Evil
Chad Meister

Neoplatonic Pantheism Today
Eric Steinhart

By Whose Authority: A Political Argument for God's Existence
Tyler McNabb, Jeremy Neill

God, Elvish, and Secondary Creation
Andrew Pinsent

Assessing the Resurrection Hypothesis: Problems with Craig's Inference to the Best Explanation
Carlos Alberto Colombetti, Robert G. Cavin

Check it out!

Soul-Making Theodicies and Lack-of-Character Data

Soul-making theodicies aim to defeat the problem of evil. In broad outline, they argue that moral virtues  (e.g., patience, kindness, compassion, etc.) are among the greatest possible goods, and that God must allow suffering in order to give us the opportunity to develop virtue (e.g., developing patience requires undergoing hardships; developing courage requires facing danger; developing compassion requires experiencing suffering yourself (to empathize) and seeing and responding to the suffering of others, etc.). Therefore, God is justified in permitting evil or suffering in order to allow for these goods.

The problem is that, as John Doris and others have recently argued, there is a robust set of data regarding human behavior that casts serious doubt on the hypothesis that humans have the capacity to develop virtue. And if that's right, then soul-making theodicies are thereby undercut.

It seems to me that the point can also be used as the basis for an argument against theism. For by similar reasoning, theism predicts an arena for free moral choices which in turn serve as the basis of moral development. It's therefore surprising on theism that character formation for virtue is ineffective. By contrast, such phenomena is not at all surprising on naturalism. For on that hypothesis, there is no antecedent reason to think evolution would aim at producing bodies capable of cultivating stable virtuous character traits. Therefore, lack of character data provide at least some confirming evidence for naturalism vis-a-vis theism.

Two Notions of Necessity (and the Theistic Arguments that Conflate Them)

There are two notions of necessity floating around that easily get conflated: (i) exists in all possible worlds, and (ii) can't not exist. But (ii) can't be captured by (i); (ii) is more fine-grained than (i).  Indeed, it's epistemically possible that a being is necessary in sense (i), but not in sense (ii). 

To see this, say that a world stub is some initial temporal segment of a possible world (whether beginningless or not). Now consider that it it's epistemically possible for a god (an uncreated, metaphysically independent being) G to exist in the world stub of every possible world, and yet go out of existence at some time downstream of the world stub of at least one -- but perhaps many, and perhaps even every -- possible world (say it commits suicide due to eternal boredom, or it's annihilated by some other being downstream of one or more world stubs). It's therefore epistemically possible for G to be necessary in sense (i), but not in sense (ii).

This has non-trivial implications for some theistic arguments. Some contemporary theistic arguments --  "minimal modal ontological arguments" (as van Inwagen defines them), certain Leibnizian cosmological arguments, etc. --  deploy S5 modal logic to show that an Anselmian being currently exists. In particular, they aim to show that

1. A necessary being exists in at least one possible world.

and then infer from (1) and Axiom S5 of S5 modal logic to infer that

2. A necessary being exists in every possible world.

And finally, from (2) they infer that

3. A necessary being exists.

Now of course many -- myself included -- have raised doubts about (1). But the preceding discussion raises a problem for the inference from (2) to (3). For as we've seen above, (3) doesn't follow from (2). Therefore, even if one establishes that there is a necessary being in the sense captured by sense (i) above -- viz., the necessity operator of modal logic --, one has not thereby established that such a being currently exists. And because of this, theistic arguments of the sort mentioned above that rely on an inference from (2) to (3) to establish God's existence are bound to fail.