This paper accomplishes three goals. First, it reveals that God’s ethics has a radical satisficing structure: God can choose a good enough suboptimal option even if there is a best option and no countervailing considerations. Second, it resolves the long-standing worry that there is no account of the good enough that is both principled and demanding enough to be good enough. Third, it vindicates the key ethical assumption in the problem of evil without relying on the contested assumption that God’s (...) ethics is our ethics. (shrink)

Not all theists who are members of the Abrahamic faiths will sign up to a particular metaphysics of evil: some may be sceptical theists, and others may be uninterested in metaphysical questions altogether. In this paper, I argue that theists in the Abrahamic faiths who are interested in metaphysics and who are not sceptical theists should endorse a privative account of evil. This is because a privative view of evil is the only metaphysic of evil that is compatible with the (...) theism of the Abrahamic faiths. In order to persuade you of this, I will explain the religious importance of the privative view, and show how the three alternatives to the privative view that might initially appear compatible with theism are not, after all, compatible with the particular theism of the Abrahamic faiths. Privative views are often objected to on the basis that pain is an evil that does not seem like a privation. I will put forward one (non-exclusive) defence of the privative view of evil in response to this objection, drawing on the work of Herbert McCabe. (shrink)

This thesis was on how God is related to the truth-values of propositions on possible worlds - specifically, those propositions that do not seem to be about Him and constitute His ideas for what to create. It opened with a survey of some historical positions with special emphasis on Aquinas, Leibniz, Spinoza and Kant. Next, some criticisms were given for these so-called deity theories with the most space given to Brian Leftow’s critiques. The second chapter detailed Brian Leftow’s theological modality. (...) In it, secular modality is excogitated in an instant from eternity when God gets a set of creaturely natures in one imaginative act. His preferences that are based on His nature then determine the modality of what God thinks up. A number of objections were raised for the Leftowian project and the last chapter attempted to supplement an older deity theory with some insights from Leftow in order to avoid his initial criticisms. (shrink)