Studies In Philosophy Of Religion Research Articles

On Roger Pouivet’s Religious Exclusivism

In the contemporary discussion of religious diversity, religious exclusivism is a minority theory but well defended by some leading philosophers of religion like Alvin Plantinga. Recently, in his article, The Right to Believe that Only One Religion is True, published recently in “Philosophy of Religion: Analytic Researches”, Roger Pouivet has defended a version of religious exclusivism based on the assumption of theological realism. In this article, I discuss Pouivet’s religious exclusivism with a dual purpose. On the one hand, accepting the premises of theological realism, I agree with Pouivet’s view that religious exclusivism is not a blatant expression of arrogance about religious diversity but a plausible theory that can be justified in the light of the contemporary debate on epistemology of religious disagreement. On the other hand, I sustain that theological realism supports religious exclusivism as well as religious inclusivism, but the latter is a more consistent theory, capable of avoiding the soteriological problems raised by the first. In this perspective, I suggest that religious inclusivism is properly supported by natural theology insofar as the latter relates to divine attributes which are common to various religious traditions. Accordingly, natural theology must not be reduced, like Pouivet thinks, to a philosophical theology that assumes the immediate rationality of religious beliefs, guaranteed by the way they are formed. On the contrary, I suggest that natural and philosophical theology can work together, in their distinction, to rationally justify theistic faith and the belief that only one religion is true. In the light of the aforesaid one can believe that the issue of the correlation between philosophical theology and natural theology has sound methodological significance in various contexts of studies in philosophy of religion.

Paul M. Gould, Beyond the Control of God?: Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion), Bloomsbury, 2014

Paul M. Gould, Beyond the Control of God?: Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion), Bloomsbury, 2014

Natural theology in the scientific revolution. By Katherine Calloway. (Pickering Studies in Philosophy of Religion.) Pp. ix + 205 incl. 1 fig and 1 table. London–Brookfield, Vt: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. £60. 978 1 84893 464 1

Natural theology in the scientific revolution. By Katherine Calloway. (Pickering Studies in Philosophy of Religion.) Pp. ix + 205 incl. 1 fig and 1 table. London–Brookfield, <scp>Vt</scp>: Pickering &amp; Chatto, 2014. £60. 978 1 84893 464 1

Omnisubjectivity and Incarnation

In her 2013 Aquinas lecture and a previous article (Zagzebski in Oxford studies in philosophy of religion. Oxford University Press, New York, 231–247, 2008), Linda Zagzebski argues for a new divine trait, that of omnisubjectivity. In brief, omnisubjectivity is God’s ability to know what it is like for each of God’s creatures to be themselves. This knowledge is not merely propositional but ascribes to God knowledge of the sort that one typically associates with a first-person perspective on the self. Zagzebski’s considered opinion about what grounds omnisubjectivity appears to be that it is grounded in simulations of creaturely experiences that God imagines. My answer is that God experiences your experiences in experiencing you. Getting clearer on the basis of omnisubjectivity provides some novel results for thinking about what it would mean on the Christian story for Christ to become incarnate and in particular, for how it could be that an incarnate deity could learn something new even if that deity is omnisubjective.

Paul M. Gould. Beyond the Control of God: Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion). Bloomsbury, 2014.

Paul M. Gould. Beyond the Control of God: Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion). Bloomsbury, 2014.

Oxford studies in philosophy of religion, v.6

Oxford studies in philosophy of religion, v.6

Book Review: The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination

The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination. By Charles Taliaferro and Jil Evans. Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion. York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. vi + 213 pp. $140.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).Charles Taliaferro is a philosopher, Jil Evans is an artist, both are Episcopalians, and this volume-co-authored by them and including a series of paintings by Evans-provides a useful introduction to contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. Their distinctive emphasis is to highlight the essential role of the imagination, and especially images (both mental and visual), in thinking through the ongoing intellectual conflict between and naturalism.The dominant worldview in contemporary Western science and philosophy is arguably naturalism, which is itself a philosophical (rather than a scientific) position holding that nature (variously and contentiously defined) is all that exists. Naturalists can be divided into two basic groups, and broad. Strict naturalists want a thoroughgoing, physical (or materialistic) account of the world (p. 6). When it comes to human nature, strict naturalists insist that mind and brain are identical, and thus reduce all mental activities to chemical processes. To be consistent, strict naturalists bite the bullet and claim that our subjective sense of ourselves as having conscious intentions, experiences, and even beliefs is an illusion. Consciousness, therefore, does not exist, our subjective experience of it notwithstanding. A prominent contemporary strict naturalist is the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, also well known as one of the New Atheists.Broad naturalists, on the other hand, share the strict naturalist position that the cosmos is not, at base, purposive or teleological. But they differ insofar as they allow that consciousness, experience, values, aesthetic properties, and the like have emerged (p. 7). That is, broad naturalists admit that apparently non-material realities exist, but they are still explainable through natural material processes, and do not pre-date their gradual evolutionary emergence in the lives of certain animals, ourselves certainly and others possibly. Taliaferro and Evans state that both strict and broad naturalists reject theism, the soul, any concept of an individual afterlife, and so on. Indeed, this negation of and its associates (sometimes referred to as supernaturalism) is the almost universal mark of naturalism (p. 7). Naturalism is thus the positive philosophical face of atheism.In contrast to all forms of naturalism, which they find problematic on multiple counts both rational and imaginative, Taliaferro and Evans advocate theism (p. 8) and integrative dualism (p. 98) as the best general framework to account for reality as we actually experience it from within rather than from the third-person perspective of the sciences. When it comes to dealing with the challenge of evils both natural and moral, Taliaferro and Evans move from this general Platonic framework to a more Christian theological mode, arguing that the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, combined with a potential afterlife, can redeem rather than justify the evils in creation (pp. …

On Whitcomb's Grounding Argument for Atheism

Dennis Whitcomb argues that there is no God on the grounds that (i) God is omniscient, yet (ii) nothing could be omniscient due to the nature of grounding. We give a formally identical argument that concludes that one of the present co-authors does not exist. Since he does exist, Whitcomb’s argument is unsound. But why is it unsound? That is a difficult question. We venture two answers. First, one of the grounding principles that the argument relies on is false. Second, the argument equivocates between two kinds of grounding: instance-grounding and quasi-mereological grounding. Happily, the equivocation can be avoided; unhappily, avoidance comes at the price of a false premise. I. Parody One way to argue for atheism is to argue that one of the properties God is supposed to have could not be had by anything. Thus, for example, one might argue that there is no God because God is supposed to be omnipotent and nothing could be omnipotent due to a suitably subtle version of the paradox of the stone. And there are other well-known arguments of this form. Continuing in this grand tradition, Dennis Whitcomb argues that there is no God because God is supposed to be omniscient and nothing could be omniscient due to the nature of grounding and its relation to knowledge. 1 Whitcomb offers two versions of his argument, one informal and the other formal. In what follows we assess both versions. The informal version goes like this: Suppose for reductio that someone is omniscient. Then his being omniscient is partly grounded by his knowing that he is omniscient (which is one of the knowings that helps make him all-knowing). And his knowing that he is omniscient is partly grounded by his being omniscient (for knowledge is partly grounded by the truth of what is known). Since partial grounding is transitive, it follows that his being omniscient is partly grounded by his being omniscient. But this result is absurd, for nothing can partly ground itself. Hence our reductio assumption is false. That is to say, it is false that someone is omniscient. But if God exists, then he is omniscient. Therefore, God does not exist. 2 1 Dennis Whitcomb, “Grounding and Omniscience,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 4 (2012). 2 Ibid., 5 (manuscript).

New Studies in Philosophy of Religion.

New Studies in Philosophy of Religion.