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1. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Meghan D. Page, Allison Krile Thornton Have We No Shame?: A Moral Exemplar Account of Atonement
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Although Christ’s atoning work on the cross is perhaps the most central tenet of Christianity, understanding precisely how the cross saves remains a theological mystery. We follow the Abelardian tradition and argue that Christ’s death on the cross acts as an example of God’s love for humanity and a means of drawing us back into communion with the triune God. However, our view avoids the standard objection to exemplar views—that they are Pelagian—by introducing an alternative conception of the problem of sin, according to which Christ’s example of God’s love is in fact required for salvation and sanctification.
2. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Gregory R. P. Stacey Simply the Best?: Ontological Arguments, Meinongianism, and Classical Theism
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Some critics claim that ontological arguments are dialectically ineffective against sceptics, whatever the sceptics’ broader metaphysical commitments. In this paper, I examine and contest arguments for this conclusion. I suggest that such critics overlook important claims about God’s nature (viz. divine simplicity and divine inimitability) typically advanced by proponents of ontological arguments who endorse classical theism. I reformulate two representative ontological arguments in light of this characterization of God, arguing that for philosophers prepared to endorse Meinongianism or modal Platonism, alongside divine simplicity and inimitability, such arguments are not invalid, question-begging, or obviously liable to parody. Accordingly, two species of ontological argument may possess some persuasive force, albeit for a select audience.
3. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Guy Kahane Should Atheists Wish That There Were No Gratuitous Evils?
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Many atheists argue that because gratuitous evil exists, God (probably) doesn’t. But doesn’t this commit atheists to wishing that God did exist, and to the pro-theist view that the world would have been better had God existed? This doesn’t follow. I argue that if all that evil still remains but is just no longer gratuitous, then, from an atheist perspective, that wouldn’t have been better. And while a counterfactual from which that evil is literally absent would have been impersonally better, it wouldn’t have been better for anyone, not even for those who suffered such evils.
4. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Timothy D. Miller On Three Varieties of Concurrentism and the Virtues of the Moderate Version
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Concurrentist views concerning Divine and secondary causes seek to establish both that secondary causes are fundamentally dependent upon God (contra deism) and that they make genuine, non-superfluous causal contributions (contra occasionalism). However, traditional (or strong) concurrentism struggles to establish a genuine, non-superfluous role for secondary causes, while weak concurrentism (aka, mere conservationism) has been accused of amounting to a sort of “weak deism” that grants too much independence to created beings. This essay introduces a moderate concurrentist alternative and argues that it preserves the most important benefits of the strong and weak varieties, while avoiding their most familiar difficulties.
5. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
William Hasker Is the Latin Social Trinity Defensible?: A Rejoinder to Scott M. Williams
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Scott Williams has provided a careful and detailed response to my critique of his Latin Social model of the Trinity. I reply to his defense, and I argue that this model is, in fact, indefensible.
6. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Scott M. Williams Gregory of Nyssa, Conciliar Trinitarianism, and the Latin (or Conciliar) Social Trinity: Response to William gHasker
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WilliamsThe disagreement between William Hasker and myself includes discussion of Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian theology, the relevance of Conciliar Trinitarianism for evaluating models of the Trinity, and the defensibility of my Latin Social model of the Trinity. I respond to Hasker’s recent objections regarding all three areas. I contest Hasker’s interpretation of Gregory and argue that Gregory is indeed a “one-power” theorist. I make historical connections between Gregory’s Trinitarian theology and Pope Agatho’s “one-power” statements that were endorsed by the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680-681ce); and I make explicit the Sixth Ecumenical Council’s interest in the general issue of how “ousia” and “hypostasis” pertain to the Trinity and the Incarnation. Lastly, I defend and develop the Latin Social model in response to Hasker’s five objections. In light of my findings in the Sixth Council, I retire the name “Latin Social Trinity” for my model and replace it with a name more apt for my model, that is, the “Conciliar Social Trinity.”
7. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
William Hasker “Latin” or “Conciliar,” but Still Incoherent: A Rejoinder to Scott M. Williams
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HaskerI argue that Scott M. Williams’s “Latin/Conciliar Social Trinity” is unable to give a coherent account of some undisputed divine actions. The reason for this lies in Williams’s failure to recognize the different senses in which the trinitarian Persons can be said to have “powers.”
book reviews
8. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
John Y. Lee Mark R. Wynn: Spiritual Traditions and the Virtues: Living Between Heaven and Earth
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9. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Elizabeth Li William Wood: Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion
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10. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Justin Matchulat Michael P. Krom: Justice and Charity: An Introduction to Aquinas’s Moral, Economic, and Political Thought
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11. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Chris Tweedt John M. DePoe and Tyler Dalton McNabb, editors: Debating Christian Religious Epistemology: An Introduction to Five Views on the Knowledge of God
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12. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Jordan Wessling Angus J. L. Menuge and Barry W. Bussey: The Inherence of Human Dignity: Foundations of Human Dignity, Volume 1
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13. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 4
Sameer Yadav Simon Hewitt: Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis: Only the Splendour of Light
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14. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 3
Paul Weithman Does Liberal Egalitarianism Depend on a Theology?
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John Rawls’s argument for egalitarianism famously depends on his rejection of desert. In The Theology of Liberalism, Eric Nelson contends that Rawls’s treatment of desert depends on anti-Pelagian commitments he first endorsed in his undergraduate thesis and tacitly continued to hold. He also contends that a broad range of liberal arguments for economic egalitarianism fail because they rest on an incoherent conception of human agency. The failure becomes evident, Nelson says, when we see that proponents of those arguments unknow­ingly assume the anti-Pelagianism on which Rawls relied. Nelson concludes that egalitarianism must be given a different political and theoretic basis than Rawls and his followers have provided. I argue that Nelson misreads Rawls and that egalitarians can avoid inconsistency without staking a theological claim they want to avoid.
15. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 3
Fabio Lampert, John William Waldrop Grim Variations
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Patrick Grim advances arguments meant to show that the doctrine of divine omniscience—the classical doctrine according to which God knows all truths—is false. We here focus on two such arguments: the set theoretic argument and the semantic argument. These arguments due to Grim run parallel to, respectively, familiar paradoxes in set theory and naive truth theory. It is beyond the purview of this article to adjudicate whether or not these are successful arguments against the classical doctrine of omniscience. What we are here interested in is a way in which these arguments can be generalized. In particular, we show how generalizations of these arguments can target, explicitly, alternatives to the classical doctrine of omniscience, including what we here call restricted omniscience and open future open theism. As a corollary, considerations of Grim-style arguments do not support these alternatives to the classical doctrine of omniscience over the classical doctrine. We conclude that what is paradoxical is not the classical doctrine of omniscience just as such; rather, what is paradoxical is a core commitment shared by the classical doctrine and its more modest alternatives, namely, the thesis that God is a perfectly logical reasoner.
16. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 3
Mohammad Saleh Zarepour On the Varieties of Finitism
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Defenders of the Kalām Cosmological Argument appeal to the so-called Hilbert’s Hotel Argument to establish the finitude of the past based on the impossibility of actual infinites. Some of their opponents argue that this proves too much because if the universe cannot be beginningless due to the impossibility of actual infinites, then, for the same reason, it cannot be endless either. Discussing four different senses of the existence of an actual infinite, I criticize both sides of the debate by showing, on the one hand, that the Hilbert’s Hotel Argument is not powerful enough to rule out the possibility of the infinitude of the past and, on the other hand, that the soundness of the argument for the finitude of the past from the impossibility of actual infinites does not establish the soundness of the parallel argument for the finitude of the future.
17. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 3
P. Roger Turner, Jordan Wessling W. Matthews Grant on Human Free Will, and Divine Universal Causation
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In recent work, W. Matthews Grant challenges the common assumption that if humans have libertarian free will, and the moral responsibility it affords, then it is impossible for God to cause what humans freely do. He does this by offering a “non-competitivist” model that he calls the “Dual Sources” account of divine and human causation. Although we find Grant’s Dual Sources model to be the most compelling of models on offer for non-competitivism, we argue that it fails to circumvent a theological version of Peter van Inwagen’s direct argument for incompatibilism. In the paper, we motivate and deploy a theological take on the direct argument, and we contend that this theological rendition of the direct argument effectively dismantles Grant’s Dual Sources account of non-competitivism.
18. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 3
Dustin Crummett Wrongful Procreation, Factory Farming, and the Afterlife
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Sometimes, I can affect whether an individual is created, but not how their life goes if they’re created. If their life will be bad enough, I apparently wrong them by allowing their creation. But sometimes, popular religious views imply that the created individual is guaranteed to have an infinitely good existence on balance. Since, I argue, I don’t wrong someone by allowing their creation when it’s infinitely good for them on balance, these views apparently have unacceptable implications for procreation ethics. After surveying various responses, I tentatively suggest that the best solution may involve adopting an unusual metaphysics of procreation.
19. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 3
Noël Blas Saenz Still Against Divine Truthmaker Simplicity
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In a 2014 paper in this journal, I put forward two objections to a version of divine simplicity I call “Divine Truthmaker Simplicity.” James Beebe and Timothy Pawl have come to Divine Truthmaker Simplicity’s defense. In this paper, I respond to Beebe and Pawl, consider an overlooked way of defending Divine Truthmaker Simplicity, and conclude by outlining an alternative account of God’s simplicity.
book reviews
20. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 38 > Issue: 3
Sarah Coakley Nicholas Wolterstorff: Acting Liturgically: Philosophical Reflections On Religious Practice
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