Many pantheists have claimed that their view of the divine is motivated by a kind of spiritual experience. In this paper, I articulate a novel argument, inspired by recent work on moral exemplarism, that gives voice to this kind of motivation for pantheism. The argument is based on two claims about the emotion of awe, each of which is defended primarily via critical engagement with empirical research on the emotion. I also illustrate how this pathway to pantheism offers pantheists distinctive (...) resources for responding to persistent objections to their view, and how it might lead to more exotic views incorporating pantheistic elements. (shrink)

Yujin Nagasawa presents a new, stronger version of perfect being theism, the conception of God as the greatest possible being. Nagasawa argues that God should be understood, not as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, but rather as a being that has the maximal consistent set of knowledge, power, and benevolence.

It has been about fifty years since the topic of divine impassibility was the subject of book-length philosophical treatments in English. In recent years process and analytic philosophers have returned this issue to the forefront of professional attention. Divine Impassibility traces the issue of classical sources, relates the positions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books, and surveys the writings of contemporary British analytic philosophers such as Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Richard Swinburne, John Hick, and H. P. Owen, American analytic philosophers (...) such as Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, Nelson Pike, Robert Adams, and Bruce Reichenbach, and process philosophers such as Charles Hartshorne and Lewis Ford. The author shows that clear, adequate analysis of the issue must distinguish four respects in which God might be passible or impassible: nature, will, knowledge, and feeling. He shows also how decisions on this topic bear on numerous others in philosophical theology such as creation, eternality, evil, and human freedom. His creative proposals on these and other topics attempt to go beyond the difficulties of both classical and process conceptions of God. (shrink)

In _Contemporary Philosophical Theology_, Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister focus on key topics in contemporary philosophical theology within Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism. The volume begins with a discussion of key methodological tools available to the philosophical theologian, such as faith and reason, science and religion, revelation and sacred scripture, and authority and tradition. The authors use these tools to explore subjects including language, ineffability, miracles, evil, and the afterlife. They also grapple with applied philosophical (...) theology, including environmental concerns, interreligious dialogue, and the nature and significance of political values. A concluding discussion proposes that philosophical theology can contribute to important reflections and action concerning climate change. (shrink)

This book examines the divine nature in terms of maximal greatness. It investigates each attribute associated with maximal greatness - omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, eternity, and beauty, arguing that maximal greatness is necessary and sufficient for divinity.

This paper is a discussion of an ontological argument defended by E. J. Lowe in the *Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion* (edited by C. Meister and P. Copan, at pp.332-40). The volume to which this paper belongs contains an article by Lowe which defends a different ontological argument from the one that I discuss.

While the impassibility debate has traditionally been construed in terms of whether God suffers, recent philosophy of religion has interpreted it in terms of whether God has emotions more generally. This article surveys the philosophical literature on divine im/passibility over the last 25 years, outlining major arguments for and against the idea that God has emotions. It argues that questions about the nature and value of emotions are at the heart of the im/passibility debate. More specifically, it suggests that presuppositions (...) about the dichotomy between emotions and reason (or the ‘heart and the head’) have negatively impacted the debate. It contends that the debate can only move forward in response to serious reflection on our affects as we experience them, aided by historical and anthropological as well as contemporary philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

The book is really an Introduction to Contemporary Religious Philosophy, and, is a helpful guide to the students.

This chapter is a case for the pantheist conception considered as a species of theism, rather than a rival to it. The starting point, the premise of the argument, is properly anthropomorphic metaphysics, which I propose as a rival to scientific naturalism; I begin, then, by stating my version of pantheism, by expounding PAM, and by sketching my argument.

This chapter suggests how certain problematic claims of pantheism might be made more intelligible. It shows, first, that some pantheistic God-talk is comparable to talk involving mass terms; treating “God” as a mass term affords us a way of understanding, for example, how parts can seemingly be identified with the wholes of which they are the parts, as per the claim that “God is everything and everything is God”. This chapter then goes on to describe a contemporary variant of panpsychism, (...) a variant speculatively predicated on the affinity between intentional states and causal dispositions. This allows for a conception of the world as God’s brain, cashed out in terms of a “panintentionalism” that admits of various organizational possibilities for causal dispositional states, comparable to the organization of intentional states in human brains. (shrink)