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. 

Quinone's New Argument Against Perfect Being Theism

Resto Quiñones, J. Incompatible and incomparable perfections: a new argument against perfect being theism. Int J Philos Relig (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09910-8.

Abstract: Perfect being theism is the view that the perfect being exists and the property being-perfect is the property being-God. According to the strong analysis of perfection, a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies all perfections. On the other hand, the weak analysis of perfection says that a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies the best possible combination of compatible perfections. Strong perfect being theism accepts the former analysis while weak perfect being theism accepts the latter. In this paper, I argue that there are good reasons to reject both versions of perfect being theism. On the one hand, strong perfect being theism is false if there are incompatible perfections; I argue that there are. On the other hand, if either no comparison can be made between sets of perfections, or they are equally good, then there is no best possible set of perfections. I argue for the antecedent of this conditional statement, concluding that weak perfect being theism is false. In the absence of other analyses of perfection, I conclude that we have reason to reject perfect being theism.

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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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Ricki Bliss's Cambridge Element on Grounding, Fundamentality, and Ultimate Explanations

 ...is now out, and available for free download for a limited time. Required reading.

Schmid's Excellent New Paper on the Kalam Cosmological Argument

Schmid, Joseph C. "Benardete paradoxes, patchwork principles, and the infinite past", Synthese, forthcoming.

Abstract: Benardete paradoxes involve a beginningless set each member of which satisfies some predicate just in case no earlier member satisfies it. Such paradoxes have been wielded on behalf of arguments for the impossibility of an infinite past. These arguments often deploy patchwork principles in support of their key linking premise. Here I argue that patchwork principles fail to justify this key premise.

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Launonen's Nice Forthcoming Paper Critiquing the Evidential Force of Everyday Religious Experiences

Launonen, Lari. "Hearing God speak? Debunking arguments and everyday religious experiences", International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, forthcoming.

Abstract: Against claims that cognitive science of religion undercuts belief in God, many defenders of theistic belief have invoked the Religious Reasons Reply: science cannot undercut belief in God if one has good independent reasons to believe. However, it is unclear whether this response helps salvage the god beliefs of most people. This paper considers four questions: (1) What reasons do Christians have for believing in God? (2) What kinds of beliefs about God can the reasons support? (3) Are the reasons rationalizations? (4) Can cognitive science undercut the reasons? Many Christians invoke everyday religious experiences (EREs)—such as experiences of divine presence, guidance, and communication—as reasons to believe. Unlike another popular reason to believe in God (the appearance of design and beauty in nature), EREs can support beliefs about a relational God who is present to me, who guides my life, and who speaks to me. EREs are not rationalizations since they seem to cause and sustain such beliefs. Nonetheless, EREs like experiences of hearing God speak are problematic reasons to believe. ‘Soft’ voice-hearing experiences are easily undercut. ‘Hard’ experiences of an external, audible voice are probably underpinned by similar cognitive processes as audio-verbal hallucinations.

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Two Important Recent Papers on Cosmological Arguments from Alexandre Billon

"Are infinite explanations self-explanatory?", Erkenntnis 88 (5): 1935-1954. 2021.

Abstract: Consider an infinite series whose items are each explained by their immediate successor. Does such an infinite explanation explain the whole series or does it leave something to be explained? Hume arguably claimed that it does fully explain the whole series. Leibniz, however, designed a very telling objection against this claim, an objection involving an infinite series of book copies. In this paper, I argue that the Humean claim can, in certain cases, be saved from the Leibnizian “infinite book copies” objection, and that this provides an interesting way to defuse some cosmological arguments for the existence of God and to give a non-theistic but complete explanation of the Universe. In the course of my argumentation, I also show that circular explanations can be “self-explanatory” as well: explaining two items by each other can explain the couple of items tout court.

"A recipe for complete non-wellfounded explanations", Dialectica, forthcoming.

Abstract:In a previous article on cosmological arguments, I have put forward a few examples of complete infinite and circular explanations, and argued that complete non-wellfounded explanations such as these might explain the present state of the world better than their well-founded theistic counterparts (Billon, 2021). Although my aim was broader, the examples I gave there implied merely causal explanations. In this article, I would like to do three things: • Specify some general informative conditions for complete and incomplete non-wellfounded causal explanations that can be used to assess candidate explanations and to generate new examples of complete non-wellfounded explanations. • Show that these conditions, which concern chains of causal explanations, easily generalize to chains of metaphysical, grounding explanations and even to chains involving other “determination relations” such as supervenience. • Apply these general conditions to the recent debates against the existence of nonwellfounded chains of grounds and show, with a couple of precise examples, that the latter can be complete, and that just like in the case of causal explanations, non-wellfoundedness can in fact be an aset rather than a liability.

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