Daniel Howard-Snyder

The Evidential Argument from Evil

Preface Introduction: The Evidential Argument from Evil/Daniel Howard-Snyder The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism/William L. Rowe Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists/Paul draper Some Major Strands of Theodicy/Richard G. Swinburne Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job/Eleonore Stump Epistemic Probability and Evil/Alvin Plantinga The Inductive Argument from evil and the Human Cognitive Condition/William P. Alston Rowe(R)s Noseeum Arguments from Evil/Stephen Wypkstra The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence/Peter van Inwagen The Skeptical Theist/Paul Draper Defenseless/Bruce Russell Some Difficulties in Theistic Treatments of Evil/Richard Gale Reflections on the Essays of Draper, Russell, and Gale/Peter van Inwagen On being Evidentially Challenged/Alvin Plantinga The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look/William L. Rowe The Argument from Inscrutable Evil/Daniel Howard-Snyder Some (Temporarily) Final Thoughts on Evidential ARguments from Evil/William P. Alston Bibliography Contributors Index

Three Arguments Against Foundationalism: Arbitrariness, Epistemic Regress, and Existential Support

A particular belief of a person is basic just in case it is epistemically justified and it owes its justification to something other than her other beliefs or the interrelations of their contents; a persons belief is nonbasic just in case it is epistemically justified but not basic. Traditional Foundationalism says that, first, if a human being has a nonbasic belief, then, at bottom, it owes its justification to at least one basic belief, and second, there are basic beliefs. Call the second thesis Minimal Foundationalism. In this essay, we assess three arguments against Minimal Foundationalism which we find in recent work of Peter Klein and Ernest Sosa.1

Schellenberg on propositional faith

This paper assesses J. L. Schellenberg’s account of propositional faith and, in light of that assessment, sketches an alternative that avoids certain objections and coheres better with Schellenberg’s aims. My topic is J. L. Schellenberg on propositional faith. 1 In what follows, I will state his account and, in that sacred tradition among friends, develop three complaints about it. Finally, I’ll sketch an alternative that avoids those complaints and coheres better with its primary aims. Before I get down to work, three preliminaries are in order. First, propositional faith is a propositional attitude expressed by typical uses of ‘faith that p’, where p takes declarative sentences as instances, e.g. ‘She has faith that they’ll work out their difficulties’. Whenever I speak of ‘the object of faith’ I will mean either the proposition or the state of affairs reported by it. Second, we sometimes say things of the form ‘S has faith in x’, where x takes a name of a person or some other entity as instances, as in ‘She has faith in her husband’. Faith in something is relative to a specific domain. My wife has faith in me, as a friend and lover, not as a literary critic. I suspect that faith-that is not faith-in. For one to have faith in something is for one to entrust one’s welfare to it in some way; however, one can have faith that something is thus-and-so without entrusting one’s welfare to it or to its being thus-and-so. For example, I might have faith that Emily will survive breast cancer but I do not thereby entrust my welfare to her or to her survival. Third, in what follows, I am only concerned with faith-that, not faith-in. Unless I state otherwise, whenever I use ‘faith’, I mean propositional faith. Schellenberg’s account of propositional faith So what are Schellenberg’s aims in giving an account of propositional faith? Chief among other things, (i) to show how faith does not require belief in its

The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil

The Blackwell companion to the problem of evil / , The Blackwell companion to the problem of evil / , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

The Christian Theodicist's Appeal to Love

Many Christian theodicists believe that Gods creating us with the capacity to love Him and each other justifies, in large part, Gods permitting evil. For example, after reminding us that, according to Christian doctrine, the supreme good for human beings is to enter into a reciprocal love relationship with God, Vincent Brummer recently wrote: In creating human persons in order to love them, God necessarily assumes vulnerability in relation to them. In fact, in this relation, he becomes even more vulnerable than we do, since he cannot count on the steadfastness of our love the way we can count on his steadfastness… If God did not grant us the ability to sin and cause affliction to him and to one another, we would not have the kind of free and autonomous existence necessary to enter into a relation of love with God and with one another… Far from contradicting the value which the free will defence places upon the freedom and responsibility of human persons, the idea of a loving God necessarily entails it. In this way we can see that the free will defence is based on the love of God rather than on the supposed intrinsic value of human freedom and responsibility.

Are beliefs about God theoretical beliefs ? Reflections on Aquinas and Kant

The need to address our question arises from two sources, one in Kant and the other in a certain type of response to so-called Reformed epistemology. The first source consists in a tendency to distinguish theoretical beliefs from practical beliefs (commitments to the worlds being a certain way versus commitments to certain pictures to live by), and to treat theistic belief as mere practical belief. We trace this tendency in Kants corpus, and compare and contrast it with Aquinass view and a more conservative Kantian view. We reject the theistic-belief-as-mere-practical-belief view: it is bad descriptive anthropology, it embraces a misguided ideal of a fragmented self unattainable by human beings, and it will deter people from the most desirable sort of faith. The second source consists in the idea that since theistic beliefs function as answers to why-questions, their epistemic status hangs on whether they meet certain distinctively explanatory standards, whatever support they might receive from other sources. We argue that this is a non-sequitur and suggest questions for further research.