Can One Be Cognitively Conscious of God?

How do humans ‘register’ God: attain knowledge or revelation of God? Analysis is familiar in terms of explanatory hypothesis, necessity, authority and commitment. However individuals speak also of ‘experience’ or ‘consciousness’ of God/Christ/grace – received widely, not just by an esoteric few. But may we properly hold that people can be cognitively aware of God? Undoubtedly such speech has problematic aspects. Not only do psychosis, self-deception, gullibility recur. Commentators are liable to enlist what may be termed the A-conceptual Lucidity picture, which critically fails. Various positions urged by thinkers rule out by definition the very possibility of cognitive awareness of God. Some analysts assert: a person’s experiencing x is constituted throughout by the person’s use of concepts in toto reached previously and independently. But, why adopt any a priori dismissiveness? We should favour a portrayal of people’s epistemic situation respecting God called the Consciousness Portrayal. Phrases therein include: ‘God’s gracious, guiding activity’; ‘a person’s access to God’; ‘attentive consciousness/conceptualization/knowledge of God’; ‘diverse levels or modes of consciousness’; ‘God’s guidance in a person’s creatively picking out concepts’; and ‘“cognition” which, as regards meaning, is not just a function of calculative reasoning’. Alertness to usage in non-religious contexts aids our finding the religious phrasing intelligible. The Portrayal is approachable from an internal and external angle. Opponents’ challenges to the Portrayal invoke some broad epistemological theses, often pronounced intrinsic to ‘rationality’. But we fittingly espouse certain contrasting epistemological views. And these prove to fortify the Consciousness Portrayal.     

Can Life Be Meaningful without Free Will?

Philosophia - If we lack deep free agency, like that supposed by metaphysical libertarianism, should we view life as meaningless, pointless, or not worth living? Here I present a new argument in...     

Can Models of God Compete?

Though the very task of modeling God implies that the reality of God is to some degree unknowable, there are a variety of positions one may take concerning the degree to which one has epistemic access to God. If our models of God are too influenced by subjectivity, it makes no sense to test them against each other in rational competition. In this essay, I define four possible positions that may underlie the task of God-modeling: mysteriosophy, theopoetics, critical realism, and fallibilism. Of these four, I propose that fallibilism is the most appropriate method for constructing models of God. Fallibilism simultaneously assumes that our models are able to refer to a divine reality, and yet always with a tentative stance, as absolute confirmation or universal consensus concerning them will almost certainly never be obtained. Models of God can engage in rational competition, but a final decision will probably be delayed indefinitely. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.     

Must God Be Dead? Reinventing the Sacred

Newton became a death knell for a theistic God and for a non-epiphenominal mind. The culprit is the deterministic causal closure of classical physics. Two major revolutions are taking us beyond this closure. The first is Quantum Mechanics, which is non-deterministic. The second revolution may just be happening. The emergence and evolution of life in our or any biosphere is governed by no law at all. This freedom suggests one sense of God as the natural creativity of the Universe.     

Can Illness Be Edifying?

Havi Carel has recently argued that one can be ill and happy. An ill person can “positively respond” to illness by cultivating “adaptability” and “creativity”. I propose that Carel's claim can be augmented by connecting it with virtue ethics. The positive responses which Carel describes are best understood as the cultivation of virtues, and this adds a significant moral aspect to coping with illness. I then defend this claim against two sets of objections and conclude that interpreting Carel's phenomenology of illness within a virtue-ethical framework enriches our understanding of how illness can be edifying.     

Can Internalism Be Saved?

Abstract: Richard Feldman argues that a good deal more of Chisholm's approach can be saved than I allow in “Roderick Chisholm and the Shaping of American Epistemology.” More than this, Feldman argues that there are other, and still more defensible, forms of internalism. I argue here that the problems I presented for Chisholm's view are not so easily sidestepped either within Chisholm's system or by other forms of internalism.     

Can Pragmatists Be Moderate?

In discussions of whether and how pragmatic considerations can make a difference to what one ought to believe, two sets of cases feature. The first set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic reasons for belief, is exemplified by cases of being financially bribed to believe (or withhold from believing) something. The second set, which dominates the debate about pragmatic encroachment on epistemic justification, is exemplified by cases where acting on a belief rashly risks some disastrous outcome if the belief turns out to be false. Call those who think that pragmatic considerations make a difference to what one ought to believe in the second kind of case, but not in the first, ‘moderate pragmatists’. Many philosophers – in particular, most advocates of pragmatic and moral encroachment – are moderate pragmatists. But moderate pragmatists owe us an explanation of exactly why the second kind of pragmatic consideration makes a difference, but the first kind doesn’t. I argue that the most promising of these explanations all fail: they are either theoretically undermotivated, or get key cases wrong, or both. Moderate pragmatism may be an unstable stopping point between a more extreme pragmatism, on one hand, and an uncompromising anti-pragmatism on the other.     

Can Narrative Christology Be Orthodox?

Abstract:  Questions raised about the coherence of narrative Christology in the work of James Wm McClendon, Jr, raise questions about the orthodoxy of narrative Christology on the whole. An exploration of these questions identifies at least two possible narrative formulations of the identity of Jesus Christ: in him we acknowledge two agents in one narrative and two narratives in one agent. This bending of concepts for bearing witness to the singularity of Jesus Christ follows the conciliar rules and establishes the orthodoxy of narrative Christology.