John Searle holds that social reality is created by the deontology of institutions, the understanding of which requires an account of prelinguistic-intentionality.A tentative explanation is presented as to how the recognition of rudimentary rights and obligations developed from genetic preparedness and the conditions of survival for minimally-linguistic hominids. Searle’s rationality explanation of why people fulfill their obligations is contrasted with an alternative instrumentalist view. It is suggested that respect for the positive deontic powers of institutions contributes a sense of belonging that increases social cohesiveness and lowers social viscosity.

The logical threat natural evil poses to theistic belief has been primarily ignored in the literature because Alvin Plantinga’s solution to the logical problem of natural evil is considered by most to be definitive. I will argue that it is not; Plantinga misunderstands the logical problem of natural evil and thus fails utterly in responding to it. This failure is significant because once the problem of natural evil is properly understood, it is clear that no existing solution to any version of the problem of evil can be adapted to solve it. Consequently, more attention needs to be paid by theists to the logical problem of natural evil.

In his book, The Last Word, Thomas Nagel expresses the hope that there exists no God. Guy Kahane, in his paper ‘Should We Want God to Exist?’, attempts to defend Nagel from an argument that concludes such a hope may be impermissible. In this paper we present a new defense for the hope that God does not exist.

Alvin Plantinga notes that if what Christians believe is true, their beliefs are warranted. It follows, he argues, that the only decisive objection to Christian belief is a de facto one: an argument that shows that what Christians believe is false. We disagree. A critic could mount a direct attack on the Christian’s claim to warrant by offering a more plausible account of the causal mechanism giving rise to belief, one that shows that mechanism to be unreliable. This would represent a powerful de jure argument against Christian belief.

The main conclusion of Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science? is that we should all be atheists. Remarkably, however, the book contains no argument whatsoever for atheism. Philipse defends the argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddenness, but those arguments count only against an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God, not against just any god. He also defends the claim that there cannot be any bodiless spirits, but, of course, not all religions take their gods to be bodiless. However, because his main target of criticism is monotheism and adherents of monotheism usually claim that God is a bodiless spirit, this paper discusses Philipse’s arguments against the existence of a bodiless spirit. I argue that his three main claims about religious belief in a bodiless spirit are false. First, contrary to what he says, there is good reason to think that the expression “bodiless spirit” is meaningful. Among other things, the Wittgensteinian semantic theory of psychological attribute ascription on which his argument relies turns out to be untenable. Second, Philipse’s thesis that the existence of a bodiless spirit is impossible is also problematic. We can properly use the word person for bodiless spirits. Also, an attribute such as presence or omnipresence can be understood metaphorically without the definition of “God “thereby losing too much meaning. And we do not need any criterion for diachronic personal identity of bodiless spirits; such identity may very well be a primitive fact. Third and finally, there is no reason to think that the existence of a bodiless spirit is improbable. The fact that science has discovered a dependence relation between mental states and brain states and the fact that science has never been able to detect bodiless spirits provide no reason to think otherwise.

I discuss the primary aims of my book God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason, which critically assesses the most promising apologetic strategies defending the reasonable endorsement of religious creeds. These apologetic strategies may be schematized as the end nodes of a decision tree for religious believers, as I explain in section 2. In section 3, the structure of the book is elucidated, and in section 4 I illustrate its argumentative strategy by some examples.

According to Herman Philipse, well-educated Western people can no longer reasonably accept a religious faith on the basis of special revelation. Rather, they (or at least some experts in their community) should account for their religious views in terms of natural theology—i.e., using only arguments based on evidence that is generally accessible. Many believers, however, do not base their faith on natural theology. I argue that there is a sound reason for their reluctance: when it comes to views of life, rationality and faith commitments are inextricably interconnected. Drawing on an analysis of George Mavrodes, I argue that this is due to the fact that “proofs” are person-relative. From this perspective, I briefly show why each of Philipse’s six arguments for the priority of natural theology over revealed theology is mistaken.

Herman Philipse argues that Christian belief cannot be warranted in Alvin Plantinga’s sense. More specifically, he thinks it is impossible for intellectually responsible and modern believers to hold their religious beliefs in the manner of properly basic beliefs, not on the basis of explicit evidence or arguments. In this paper, we consider his objections to Plantinga’s work and argue that they all fail.

In his 2012 book God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason, Herman Philipse argues that all known deductive versions of the cosmological argument are untenable. His strategy is to propose a few objections to two classical deductive cosmological arguments. The first argument is from the impossibility of there being contingent entities that are the sufficient cause for the existence of a contingent entity: the second argument is from the impossibility of there being an infinite causal regress. In this article I argue that Philipse’s attempt to write off all deductive cosmological arguments fails.

Swinburne’s The Existence of God purports to provide evidence that God very probably exists. While most of the evidence considered is publicly available, Swinburne’s Argument from Religious Experience considers private evidence gained from private religious experiences. Philipse, in God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason argues that one of the premises of this argument, the Principle of Credulity, is not applicable to religious experiences. The present paper focuses on a second premise, the Principle of Testimony. It defends the claim that even if the Principle of Credulity holds for religious experiences, testimonial evidence about religious experience does not offer the unbeliever sufficient grounds for the rational adoption of a belief in the existence of God.

In the book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that: (1) modern secularism carries in it more than a trace residue of the explicitly religious way of thinking that it supersedes, and (2) the secular ensemble would not survive if the residue were filtered out. Modern secularism is not, in short, exclusively humanistic. Many who profess exclusive humanism, even perhaps the majority, are therefore—according to Taylor—exclusive humanists in name alone. My position is that Judeo-Christianity, in its teachings about men and women, is humanism. Humanism is what Western religion is all about at its core. This I defend by close examination of Taylor’s argument and by exposing some of the philosophical core of the Bible.

Naturalism is normally taken to be an ideology, censuring non-naturalistic alternatives. But as many critics have pointed out, this ideological stance looks internally incoherent, since it is not obviously endorsed by naturalistic methods. Naturalists who have addressed this problem universally foreswear the normative component of naturalism by, in effect, giving up science’s exclusive claim to legitimacy. This option makes naturalism into an empty expression of personal preference that can carry no weight in the philosophical or political spheres. In response to this dilemma, I argue that on a popular (but largely unarticulated) construal of naturalism as a commitment to inference to the best explanation, methodological naturalism can be both normative and internally coherent.

This article seeks to reconceptualize Rawlsian public reason as a critical tool against ideological propaganda. The article proposes that public reason, as a standard for public discourse, must be conceptualized beyond its mandate for comprehensive neutrality to additionally emphasize critique of ideologically driven ignorance and propaganda in the public realm. I connect uncritical hospitality to such ideological propaganda with Harry Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit. This paper proposes that philosophers have a unique moral obligation to engage bullshit critically in the public sphere. The obligation for such critique, I argue, represents philosophy’s essential moral component in a society committed to the protection of free speech and deliberative democracy.

Paul Gould has recently defended Quentin Smith’s conceptualist argument for a single omniscient mind by developing a sub-argument for a crucial premise of Smith’s argument, namely, a premise that asserts that, nec­essarily, for any proposition p, p must be the effect of a mind. In this paper, I argue via reductio that Gould’s argument for this particular premise fails.

According to a (once) venerable tradition, our knowledge of the external world is crucially dependent on divine favor: our ability to obtain knowledge of the world around us is made possible by God’s having so ordered things. I argue that this view, despite its unpopularity among con­temporary philosophers, is supported by a certain inference to the best explanation: namely, it provides an effective way of reconciling two widely held beliefs that, on the assumption of naturalism, appear incompatible: (1) that knowledge is incompatible with the kind of luck present in Gettier sce­narios and (2) that arguments for external world skepticism can be effectively rebutted by “shifting” them in the style of G. E. Moore.

Interest in the nature of religious and mystical experiences (henceforth RMEs) is old. Recently, this interest has shifted toward understanding the relationship between brain function and RMEs. In the first section, I introduce neurocognitive data from three experiments that strongly correlate the report of religious mystical experiences with specific neural activity. Although correlations cannot be considered as “absolute” proof, strong correlations provide us with inductive grounds for justifying the belief or nonbelief of some proposition. These data suggest that the human brain plays a key role in having an RME and will provide support for the claim that our explanations for phenomena should be located in the natural world. In the next section, I explore the meaning of an RME from a Jamesian perspective and discuss the use of RMEs and the apparent design of the world as proof for God’s existence. My point is to show that the whole enterprise of using phenomena “that only God could have brought about” as the proof for God’s existence is inherently question begging and so is no proof that God exists. In the third section, I lay out in detail my assumptions for my main argument in the final section. There, I argue that belief in the supernatural is not justifiable given the data we have from contemporary science and basic rules of reasoning.

What Neoplatonism and scholasticism did for Plato and Aristotle, Renaissance humanism did for Cicero and Epicurus. Renaissance humanists were critical of efforts to reconcile Plato and Aristotle with Christianity, yet their own efforts to reconcile philosophy with Christianity were hardly faith­ful to the originals. Plato’s idealism was easily appropriated for Neoplatonist dualism. Aristotle’s metaphysics became orthodoxy for the scholastics. The Renaissance humanists transformed Stoic constancy into acquiescence, aca­demic skepticism into learned ignorance, and Epicureanism into an affirma­tion of material pleasure without the philosophical materialism. The further from Plato’s idealism, the more obscurantism was required to reconcile phi­losophy with dualist theology.

Victor Reppert’s paper (pp. 33-45) supposes that there are objectively indistinguishable properties between possible worlds that resultin the property of intentionality existing in one world but not in another objectively indistinguishable world, differing only in their histories. It is also a supposition of Reppert’s paper that proposed ensembles of purely natural properties that lead to the emergence of intentionality fail to do so, but instead only have referential power on the basis of imputed or projected intentionality from human beings. This brief essay examines this supposition and consequence and attempts to provoke more detailed examination of the underlying issues.