An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this paper we further explicate this (...) definition and show that it escapes the standard objections to divine omnipotence. (shrink)

In reply to certain cosmological arguments for theism, critics regularly argue that the causal principle ex nihilo nihil fit may be false. Various theistic counter-replies to this challenge have emerged. One type of strategy is to double down on ex nihilo nihil fit. Another, very different strategy of counter-reply is to grant for the sake of argument that the principle is false, while maintaining that sound cosmological arguments can be formulated even with this concession in place. Notably, one can employ (...) a weaker opening premise formulated in modal terms, proceeding for instance from the proposition that for any contingent object coming into existence it is at least possible that it have a cause. My aim here is to try out a related strategy for weakening the relevant opening premise. Granting that it is possible for a contingent object to come into existence out of nothing without a cause, I proceed from the extremely modest claim that the obtaining of exceptionless longstanding contingent regularities demands an explanation. As such, the contingent regularity that empirically accessible macro-level contingent objects do not pop into existence causelessly demands explanation. And as it turns out, that explanation will have to be in terms of an object or objects possessed of at least some of the traditional divine attributes. (shrink)

I argue that the existence of a necessary concrete being can be derived from an exceedingly weak causal principle coupled with two contingent truths one of which falls out of very popular positions in contemporary analytic metaphysics. I then show that the argument resists a great many objections commonly lodged against natural theological arguments of the cosmological variety.

In this paper, I introduce a problem to the philosophy of religion – the problem of divine moral standing – and explain how this problem is distinct from (albeit related to) the more familiar problem of evil (with which it is often conflated). In short, the problem is this: in virtue of how God would be (or, on some given conception, is) “involved in” our actions, how is it that God has the moral standing to blame us for performing those (...) very actions? In light of the recent literature on “moral standing”, I consider God’s moral standing to blame on two models of “divine providence”: open theism, and theological determinism. I contend that God may have standing on open theism, and – perhaps surprisingly – may also have standing, even on theological determinism, given the truth of compatibilism. Thus, if you think that God could not justly both determine and blame, then you will have to abandon compatibilism. The topic of this paper thus sheds considerable light on the traditional philosophical debate about the conditions of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Is belief in God rational? Over a century ago, Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard established one set of parameters for discussing that question, but in a language that appears opaque to many philosophers today. Very recently, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross, and George Mavrodes have been debating similar issues in a modern analytic idiom. In this essay, I want to use this modern philosophical language in an attempt to clarify certain issues surrounding the relevant notion of “rationality” and related notions essential to (...) the natural theologian, and in so doing attempt to make presentable the dispute between Hegel and Kierkegaard.For our purposes here, I take “rationality” to be predicated of an epistemological concept of belief, even if, as I believe, any such notion would have to be a special case and a logical derivative of a more general notion of “rationality” as primarily practical. (shrink)

I have found that religious philosophers sometimes commit what might be called the fallacy of misplaced argumentation. Permit me to explain. Any fully developed system of thought contains many assertions about the world. Yet this proliferation of assertions can be traced back to several underlying propositions which are their logical forebears. This is because large-scale theories generally grow out of fundamental intuitions or conceptual stances. These fundamental intuitions become formulated into theory-embedded, second-order propositions. Understanding the centrality of second-order propositions is (...) essential to understanding the theory which they generate, with its numerous first-order assertions about the world. (shrink)

The argument for modal collapse is partly responsible for the widespread rejection of the so-called Principle of Sufficient Reason in recent times. This paper discusses the PSR against the background of the recent debate about grounding and develops principled reasons for rejecting the argument from modal collapse.

This paper provides a new defence against the logical problem of evil, based on the naturalistic functional/teleological theory of mind (NFT). I argue that if the NFT is self-consistent then it is consistent with theism. Further, the NFT entails that it is not possible for created minds to exist in the absence of evil. It follows that if the NFT is self-consistent then the existence of God is consistent with the existence of evil.

The argument from contingency for the existence of God is best understood as a request for an explanation of the total sequence of causes and effects in the universe (‘History’ for short). Many puzzles about how there could be such an explanation arise from the assumption that God is being introduced as one more cause prepended to the sequence of causes that (allegedly) needed explaining. In response to this difficulty, this chapter defends three theses. First, it argues that, if the (...) argument from contingency is to succeed, the explanation of History in terms of God must not be a causal explanation; second, that a particular hypothesis about God’s relation to History—that God is what I call the foundational ground of History—is intelligible and explanatory; third and finally, that the explanatory advantages of this hypothesis cannot be had within the confines of naturalism. (shrink)