This article is a commentary on Opatrzność Boża, wolność, przypadek by Dariusz Łukasiewicz. The main thesis is that freedom in the sense of a non-causal free-act generator does not exist. We will experience freedom, true freedom, only in eternal life, and it will become real only when our individual essence is revealed to us. Eternal life will consist, among other things, in being able to see how all our actions flow from our individual essence

According to the author of this paper, the analytical philosophy of religion should not be closed to other spheres of culture and ignore or disregard the achievements of others, both past and contemporary philosophical currents. An analytical philosopher, including an analytical philosopher of religion, can therefore seek inspiration also outside the sphere of analytical philosophy. At the same time, this does not mean that an analytical philosopher is to disregard natural sciences or not to care about the precision of language and the right arguments. The concern for linguistic precision and the application of appropriate argumentation are crucial for the identity of the analytical philosophy. This article, taking into account the indicated metaphilosophical attitude, is devoted to a critical discussion about some of the problems raised by Professor Dariusz Łukasiewicz, in his outstanding work in the field of philosophy of religion published in Polish as Opatrzność Boża, wolność, przypadek. Studium z analitycznej filozofii religii.

The main problem of Dariusz Łukasiewicz’ book is the problem of God’s goodness, especially the question if God is perfectly good (also in moral sense). If He is perfectly good, He should always do what is best in the given circumstances, or—if there is no possibility of doing good—choose the least evil given two or more alternatives. In the paper I argue that God’s perfect goodness could not be justified neither a priori, nor a posteriori. A priori arguments are not conclusive ones because it is not possible to infer moral goodness from such ontological features as simplicity, necessity or infinity. Moral goodness also does not derive from almightiness or omniscience. Quite contrary, almightiness (and omniscience) may even be obstacles to moral goodness; for if God knows everything what is logically possible to know and can do anything that is logically possible to do, then not only should He know evil, but also should be able to do it. A posteriori arguments are not conclusive because of horrendous evil in the world, especially in the nature; after all, there is a natural and inescapable cruelty in nature, a result of the fact that some species are food for other species. Therefore, if God indeed created the world, He cannot have been sensitive to the suffering of the creatures he brought to life, especially that there is a lot of pointless evil in the world we currently inhabit.

Dariusz Łukasiewicz’s probabilistic theism arises from a non-classical understanding of the nature of God, especially the attributes of simplicity and omnipotence. The redefinition of these attributes in terms of modern analytical philosophy means that probabilistic theism is closer to open theism than to classical theism. However, an extremely important merit of this approach is the development of a comprehensive scientific component for open theism (which is built on biblical foundations), which means that probabilistic theism enables the extension of open theism to the perspective of modern natural sciences. The fundamental meaning of probabilistic theism is not so much the reconciliation of the occurrence of accidental events with the theory of providence, but rather it gives the possibility of open theism to enter into theistic debates among contemporary scientists, not only philosophers and theologians. Without this, open theism remains within a narrow theological perspective, interesting only to Christian theologians or scientists professing the Christian worldview.

Probabilistic theism according to Dariusz Łukaszewicz is a theism which ennobles the concept of chance and explains the role which chance plays in the context of Divine Providence. An epistemologist can, however, be interested in a much more basic issue and ask whether our beliefs concerning chance can be called knowledge. This article is divided into three parts. In the first one I discuss selected ways of justifying knowledge of chance, namely common sense justification, pragmatic justification, empirical justification, and a priori justification, as well as concluding that we possess tychical knowledge in reference to non-intentional chance (C2), epistemic chance (C3), probabilistic chance (C5), and causal chance (C6). In the second part I undertake the problem of skepticism in the problem of chance and I suggest that a significant role in the discussion with tychical skepticism is played by the standards of rationality. In the third section I refer to the concept of composite chance discussed by Łukasiewicz, and I claim that (i) we do not possess knowledge of composite chance as understood by Łukasiewicz, and that (ii) this fact should not be treated as a reason in favor of tychical skepticism.

The article contains an evaluation of a fragment from the book Opatrzność Boża, wolność, przypadek, written by Dariusz Łukasiewicz.

In the present paper, I analyse six concepts of a chance event (as defined by Dariusz Łukasiewicz) and also propose a definition of the term “random event.” Rejecting the existence of entirely causeless events, I discuss the relationship between random events and God. The view I formulate is based on three principles: the principle of simultaneous concurrence, the principle of complementarity, and the principle of middle knowledge (inspired by Luis de Molina). In adopting these three principles, I can reconcile the existence of God conceived in a classical manner, as Creator and Lord of all events, with the existence of random events. The model I propose provides an alternative to the conceptions offered by different currents of (more or less) revisionist (open) theism, including Łukasiewicz’s probabilistic theism.

In the paper, I reply to the objections contained in the other papers in this issue raised against my conception of providence and chance presented in the opening article and the book from 2014. I argue that the existence of variously understood random events (chance) does not imply the thesis that God, the Creator of the world is not interested in the fate of individual creatures, including human beings. The reason why God can permit random events to occur is God’s will to create a relatively autonomous world that has the ability to self-develop and self-create. In such a world, there may be pointless evil for which God is not directly responsible.

This article seeks to indicate a platform for discussion between evolutionists and creationists, which will enable dialogue and increase the chance of developing a coherent worldview that combines elements of scientific knowledge and religious faith. In the context of various types of knowledge, three levels are indicated: (1) the subject of research, (2) knowledge of this subject, and (3) interpretation of this knowledge. Dialogue can be undertaken and conducted already at the second level, but only accompanied by both respect for mutual autonomy and a focus on inspiration rather than integration. The appropriate level of dialogue is the third level: the interpretation of knowledge and building an overarching view of the world and man. The aim of dialogue at this level is to integrate all elements of a worldview and to strive to explain and understand the whole reality.

In this article I argue that metaphysical creationism that we encounter in the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, as opposed to American creationism and theological and biblical creationism, is a theory that stems from a purely philosophical explanation of the beginnings of the world and man. It is not, therefore, a biblical idea transferred to philosophy. Like the theism of the Aristotelian metaphysics, the theism of Aquinas’s metaphysics is not a religious (theological) theism, but a purely philosophical (metaphysical) theism, because it stems from a metaphysical explanation of reality. Metaphysical creationism is the ultimate explanation of the source of the existence of beings that are given to us in experience as both unnecessary in their own existence and changeable. American creationism, on the other hand, is a biological-cosmological interpretation of the biblical truth concerning the creation of the world within a certain time frame (the 7-day paradigm) and—at its starting point—refers to the data of Revelation, which it wants to confirm scientifically. This article is divided into two parts. The first part presents the key elements of the metaphysical theory of ex nihilo creation and the understanding thereof. In the second part, the elements of evolutionary theism are recalled which, from the point of view of metaphysical creationism, are the source of various paradoxes and, at times, even absurdities, and thus demand reconsideration.

Taking the standpoint of monotonicity reasoning, this paper provides a systematic way of looking at the inference pattern mou in the Mohist text. We have taken a logical, as well as a linguistic perspective, emphasizing features of classical Chinese, the role of context, and making use of any possible clues that we can find from the old text. By applying monotonicity rules we provide a uniform account of why shi er ran examples are valid inferences, and shi er buran examples are counter-examples.

My goal of this article is to analyze the argumentation lines for the correctness of standard logic. I also formulate a few critical and comparative remarks. I focus on four the most coherent and complete argumentations which try to justify the distinguished position of classical logic. There are the following argumentations: Willard van O. Quine’s pragmatic-methodological argumentation, Jan Woleński’s philosophical-metalogical argumentation, Stanisław Kiczuk’s ontological-semantic argumentation, argumentation based on metalogic. In my opinion, the thesis concerning the correctness of classical logic is rationally justified by these argumentations. The problem remains whether the analyzed standard logic is the only proper logic.

In the paper, we try to find a new, intuitive solution to the Fitch paradox. We claim that traditional expression of Knowability Principle (p → ◊Kp) is based on erroneous understanding of knowability as de dicto modality. Instead, we propose to understand knowability as de re modality. In the paper we present the minimal logic of knowability in which Knowability Principle is valid, but Fitch Paradox does not hold anymore. We characterize the logic semantically as well as by an axiomatic and tableaux procedure approach.

Analyzing situations where information is partial, incomplete or contradictory has created a demand for quantitative belief measures that are weaker than classic probability theory. In this paper, we compare two frameworks that have been proposed for this task, Dempster-Shafer theory and non-standard probability theory based on Belnap-Dunn logic. We show the two frameworks to assume orthogonal perspectives on informational shortcomings, but also provide a partial correspondence result. Lastly, we also compare various dynamical rules of the two frameworks, all seen as generalizations of classic Bayes’ conditiong.

In the article we present an extension of the minimal, normal positional logic, i.e., the logic with realization operator MR. Positional logic is a philosophical logic that makes it possible to relate sentences to contexts that can be understood in many ways. We enrich the basic language of minimal positional logic with additional expressions built with predicates and positional constants. We also accept expressions built with the realization operator and many positions, like: Ra1....an(A). Thanks to this, we increased the expressivity of minimal positional logic. In the article we point to many examples of the fact that, thanks to this small change, complex theories based on the proposed extension can be created. As a theory of proof for our logic, we assume tableau methods, showing soundness and completeness theorems. At the end, however, we show that the logic studied here is only a language extension of the MR: all theorems of the extension have their equivalents in pure MR theorems. However, theories built upon the proposed extension can express much more than theories built upon pure MR.

The objective of this paper is to formulate adequate set theoretic semantics for Tkaczyk’s positional calculi Rb, Rk and Rb (TKACZYK 2007).

I offer a reading of my book One Body on Christian sexual ethics as an application of Inference to Best Explanation based on theological and philosophical data.

This paper contests an important assumption guiding Alexander Pruss’ One Body, that marriage is intimately connected with love, including romantic love. This assumption, I argue, is the product in part of a distinctively modern understanding of marriage. To show this, Pruss’ position is set against the premodern, and in particular the Byzantine Christian, view and practice of marriage, where marriage was not grounded to any significant extent on (romantic) love. Finally, some indication is provided as to why romantic love was disassociated from marriage in medieval Christian culture.