ex-apologist

Metaphysical Grounding and the Cosmological Argument...

...is the title of Thomas Oberle's new paper in Phil. Studies. Here's the abstract:

A premise of the Leibnizian cosmological argument from contingency says that no contingent fact can explain why there are any contingent facts at all. David Hume and Paul Edwards famously denied this premise, arguing that if every fact has an explanation in terms of further facts ad infinitum, then they all do. This is known as the Hume–Edwards Principle (HEP). In this paper, I examine the cosmological argument from contingency within a framework of metaphysical explanation or ground and defend a ground-theoretic version of HEP which says, roughly, that the plurality of contingent facts is grounded in its members.

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Review of Van Leeuwen's Religion as Make-Believe

Eric Schwitzgebel reviews the book for NDPR.

New Paper on the Evidential Challenge of Petitionary Prayer

Oren N. The evidential challenge for petitionary prayer. Religious Studies. Published online 2024:1-18. doi:10.1017/S0034412524000209.

Abstract: In the past decade, philosophers have devoted a great deal of attention to the practice of petitionary prayer. Philosophical inquiries have posed a priori problems – issues that arise from an analytical investigation of the concept of God, the concept of petitionary prayer, and the relationship between the two. Taking a different direction, this article shifts the focus from possibility to actuality. Accordingly, this article does not deal with the question ‘Can God answer petitionary prayers?’ but rather with the question ‘Does God answer petitionary prayers?’ and, mainly, its implications. More accurately, I will present the tension between the religious belief that petitionary prayers can be effective and the fact that this does not seem to be so in reality, a claim that has been the conclusion of several empirical studies. Then I will present and examine several solutions to this tension. Although I will try to promote my preferred solution, my main aim is to clarify the problem and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the solutions offered to solve the problem under discussion.

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New Book on the Ontology of Divinity

Miroslaw Szatkowski's new book, Ontology of Divinity (De Gruyter, 2024) is now out. It's a massive volume (818 pages), containing 35 newly-commissioned chapters by 38 contributors (including yours truly). Kudos to Miroslaw and all of the contributors for their excellent work.

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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.

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

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