ex-apologist

Karofsky's New Book Defending Necessitarianism...

...is now out. Here's the blurb:

This book is the first detailed and focused defense of necessitarianism. The author’s original account of necessitarianism encourages a reexamination of commonly held metaphysical positions as well as important issues in other, related areas of philosophy.
Necessitarianism is the view that absolutely nothing about the world could have been otherwise in any way, whatsoever. Most philosophers believe that necessitarianism is just plain false and presume that some things could have been otherwise than what they are. In this book, the author argues that necessitarianism is true and the view that some things in the world are contingent—what the author terms contingentarianism—is false. The author assesses various theories of contingency, including the possible worlds theory, combinatorialism, and dispositionalism, and argues that no theory can successfully explain why an entity is such as it is rather than not. She then lays out a case for necessitarianism and provides responses to various objections. The book concludes with an explanation of the ways in which necessitarianism is relevant to issues in ethics, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy.
A Case for Necessitarianism will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of science.

For obvious reasons, the book should be of interest to philosophers of religion.

Climenhaga's New Paper Raises a Problem for Skeptical Theists

Climenhaga, Nevin. "If We Can't Tell What Theism Predicts, We Can't Tell Whether God Exists: Skeptical Theism and Bayesian Arguments from Evil", Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Vol. 11), forthcoming.

Abstract: According to a simple Bayesian argument from evil, the evil we observe is less likely given theism than given atheism, and therefore lowers the probability of theism. I consider the most common skeptical theist response to this argument, according to which our cognitive limitations make the probability of evil given theism inscrutable. I argue that if skeptical theists are right about this, then the probability of theism given evil is itself largely inscrutable, and that if this is so, we ought to be agnostic about whether God exists.

Oppy and Pearce's Excellent New God Debate Book

I'm really enjoying Oppy and Pearce's new debate book, Is There a God? A Debate (Routledge, 2021).

Here's the blurb:

Bertrand Russell famously quipped that he didn’t believe in God for the same reason that he didn’t believe in a teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars: it is a bizarre assertion for which no evidence can be provided. Is belief in God really like belief in Russell’s teapot? Kenneth L. Pearce argues that God is no teapot. God is a real answer to the deepest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Graham Oppy argues that we should believe that there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal properties—and hence should believe that there are no gods. Beginning from this basic disagreement, the authors proceed to discuss and debate a wide range of philosophical questions, including questions about explanation, necessity, rationality, religious experience, mathematical objects, the foundations of ethics, and the methodology of philosophy. Each author first presents his own side, and then they interact through two rounds of objections and replies.

Pedagogical features include standard form arguments, section summaries, bolded key terms and principles, a glossary, and annotated reading lists. In the volume foreword, Helen De Cruz calls the debate "both edifying and a joy," and sums up what’s at stake: "Here you have two carefully formulated positive proposals for worldviews that explain all that is: classical theism, or naturalistic atheism. You can follow along with the authors and deliberate: which one do you find more plausible?"

Though written with beginning students in mind, this debate will be of interest to philosophers at all levels and to anyone who values careful, rational thought about the nature of reality and our place in it.

Important Recent Work on Theodicy

Hill, Scott. "Why God Allows Undeserved Horrendous Evil", Religious Studies (Online First 28 Sept. 2021). In the paper, Hill applies recent work on the non-identity problem in ethics to the problem of evil. Vince Vitale has recently written a monograph applying insights from the non-identity problem literature to the problem of evil as well. Required reading for anyone working on the problem of evil today.