The Argument from Absences

(This argument was suggested to me by Joe Schmid.)

Here’s an another argument to add to the list. It proceeds from a principle about absences that several able philosophers defend (E.g., Kris McDaniel):

Necessarily, an absence of Fs exists when there are no Fs.

Suppose the principle is true. Now go to a possible world in which God refrains from creating (assume, as traditional theism does, that God has leeway freedom in creating). In that world, there are contingent things uncreated by God (namely, absences of creatures). But according to traditional theism's aseity-sovereignty doctrine, there can be no contingent things that are not created by God. Therefore, traditional theism is false.

Smilansky's New Pascalian Wager for Atheism

Smilansky, Saul. "Reversing Pascal's Wager: Scepticism About Religious Belief and Its Value", Religious Studies (forthcoming). 

Here's the abstract:

Pascal famously argued that practical reasoning should lead people to try to form within themselves a commitment to religious practice and obedience, based upon a belief in God. I propose to take a less ambitious argument, which I call the Sensible Argument, and use it to present The Puzzle. I argue that there is a huge puzzle here, about the radical dissonance between the beliefs and practices of many of the purportedly religious. There are, I will argue, good reasons to doubt, concerning many (clearly not all or indeed most) purported religious believers, whether they are indeed believers, or at least whether their beliefs are strong; and religion seems to greatly increase the risks of deception, duplicity, and hypocrisy, as well as self-deception and inauthenticity. By turning towards a religious form of life, one will therefore be adding great morality-related risks. Arguably, if there is a God who deeply cares about individual moral behaviour, he would punish religious moral transgressors more than the secular ones. One is unlikely to be saved from hell (or other severe divine punishment) by becoming religious. If one is going to wager, it seems much more sensible to wager on the secular side.

Happy reading!

The Argument from Logic

Rough draft: Post stub.

The fact that orthodox theists, from at least Augustine and all the way to the present, have seen logic as the expression of single, rational, divine Mind is at least some evidence that theism expects and predicts logical monism. But the case against logical monism -- and for the disjunction of logical pluralism and logical nihilism -- is more plausible than the case for logical monism. But the truth of the disjunction of logical pluralism and logical nihilism is prima facie more surprising on theism than on naturalism. Therefore, the case for the disjunction of logical pluralism and logical nihilism provides at least some evidence against theism.

American Christian Majority Projected to End Around 2060 or So

 ...according to new research by the Pew Research Center. (See also NPR's recent piece on this.)

The Argument from Motivated Reasoning

Post stub. Very rough draft.

Recent empirical work on motivated reasoning indicates that it is strongly resistant to detection, even despite our best efforts (Ballantyne 2015; Pronin et al. 2002). Perhaps worse, other work shows that attempts to preempt motivated reasoning reinforce its impact (Ehrlinger et al. 2005; Schwitzgebel & Ellis 2017). This is surprising on theism, given that it's surprising that God would design our cognitive faculties in a way that's highly disposed to unreliability -- and likely without remedy -- especially in ways that can be morally pernicious. By contrast, it's not surprising on naturalism, since nature is "indifferent" to our welfare on that hypothesis, and since motivated reasoning is conducive to survival and reproduction (Mercier & Sperber 2011). Therefore, the existence of motivated reasoning is at least some evidence for naturalism vis-a-vis theism.

Oberle's New Paper on Metaphysical Infinitism and the Thomistic Cosmological Argument

Here's a new paper making a point I've been on about recently: recent work on metaphysical infinitism and coherentism undercuts certain cosmological arguments, and the metaphysical foundationalism presupposed by theism.

Oberle, Thomas. "Grounding, infinite regress, and the Thomistic cosmological argument", International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (July 2022).

Abstract: A prominent Thomistic cosmological argument maintains that an infinite regress of causes, which exhibits a certain pattern of ontological dependence among its members, would be vicious and so must terminate in a first member. Interestingly, Jonathan Schaffer offers a similar argument in the contemporary grounding literature for the view called metaphysical foundationalism. I consider the striking similarities between both arguments and conclude that both are unsuccessful for the same reason. I argue this negative result gives us indirect reason to consider metaphysical infinitism as a genuine possibility, the view that chains of ontological dependence or ground can descend indefinitely.

The Ontological Argument and the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Modality

Draft: Post stub.

It's not clear that there's a metaphysics and epistemology of modality that can vindicate a cogent modal ontological argument for classical theism. Theistic activism and theistic conceptualism with respect to possible worlds are a bad fit with the modal ontological argument (circularity). But so is Platonism about possible worlds (runs afoul of the aseity-sovereignty doctrine). Perhaps a dispositionalist/powers-based account of modality is compatible with the modal ontological argument, but prima facie, dispositionalism entails moderate modal skepticism (cf. Jacobs, Vetter), thereby undermining the possibility premise in the modal ontological argument. What's left? Modal fictionalism? That's already been shown to imply devastating problems for the modal ontological argument. 

Upshot: Cogent modal ontological arguments (at least ones friendly to classical theism) seem to have no suitable home in the metaphysics and epistemology of modality.