ex-apologist: 2024

Robert M. Adams (1937-2024)

Robert M. Adams, a seminal figure in philosophy of religion, has passed. Details here.

Adams was a good man. I recall fondly when he and his wife, the late Marilyn McCord Adams, visited our department when I was a graduate student. Robert Adams' seminal defense of divine command meta-ethics, Finite and Infinite Goods, had just come out, and I was taking John Martin Fischer's graduate seminar that was devoted to studying and evaluating the book. Robert and Marilyn attended the seminar while visiting, and Robert was gracious in answering some hard-hitting objections.

Quinone's New Argument Against Perfect Being Theism

Resto Quiñones, J. Incompatible and incomparable perfections: a new argument against perfect being theism. Int J Philos Relig (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09910-8.

Abstract: Perfect being theism is the view that the perfect being exists and the property being-perfect is the property being-God. According to the strong analysis of perfection, a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies all perfections. On the other hand, the weak analysis of perfection says that a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies the best possible combination of compatible perfections. Strong perfect being theism accepts the former analysis while weak perfect being theism accepts the latter. In this paper, I argue that there are good reasons to reject both versions of perfect being theism. On the one hand, strong perfect being theism is false if there are incompatible perfections; I argue that there are. On the other hand, if either no comparison can be made between sets of perfections, or they are equally good, then there is no best possible set of perfections. I argue for the antecedent of this conditional statement, concluding that weak perfect being theism is false. In the absence of other analyses of perfection, I conclude that we have reason to reject perfect being theism.

Happy reading!

Li & Saad's New Critique of the Multiverse Theodicy

Li, H. & Saad, B., (2024) “The Multiverse Theodicy Meets Population Ethics”, Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10: 56. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.5193

Abstract: The multiverse theodicy proposes to reconcile the existence of God and evil by supposing that God created all and only the creation-worthy universes and that some universes like ours are, despite their evils, creation-worthy. Drawing on work in population ethics, this paper develops a novel challenge to the multiverse theodicy. Roughly, the challenge contends that the axiological underpinnings of the multiverse theodicy harbor a ‘mere addition paradox’: the assumption that creating creation-worthy universes would always make the world better turns out to have morally repugnant consequences akin to those of the assumption that adding worthwhile lives to a population would always make the overall welfare of the population better. Further, the challenge leverages this difficulty into an argument against God’s having created all and only the creation-worthy universes, and hence against the multiverse theodicy. Responses to this challenge are considered but found wanting, largely because of commitments of the multiverse theodicy that have no analogs in population ethics.
Keywords: problem of evil, repugnant conclusion, mere addition paradox, multiverses, theodicies, multiverse theodicy, theism, population ethics, divine hiddenness, problem of scale

Happy reading!