Concerning the Preservation of God’s Omnipotence

Numerous examples have been offered that purportedly show that God cannot be omnipotent. I argue that a common response to such examples (i.e., that failure to do the impossible does not indicate a lack of power) does not preserve God’s omnipotence in the face of some of these examples. I consider another possible strategy for preserving God’s omnipotence in the face of these examples and find it wanting.

A Further Reply to Beyer on Omniscience

I provide a further response to Jason A. Beyer’s objections to the alleged inconsistency between God’s omniscience and His other attributes.

Skeptical Theism and God’s Commands

According to Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy, adherents of skeptical theism will find their sense of moral obligation undermined in a potentially ‘appalling’ way. Michael Bergmann and Michael Rea disagree, claiming that God’s commands provide skeptical theists with a source of moral obligation that withstands the skepticism in skeptical theism. I argue that Bergmann and Rea are mistaken: skeptical theists cannot consistently rely on what they take to be God’s commands.

Divine Incoherence

In this note I show that Noreen Johnson misunderstands my argument and consequently fails to refute my thesis that God’s omnipotence conflicts with his omniscience.

‘Foolishness to Greeks’: Plantinga and the Epistemology of Christian Belief

A central theme in the Christian contemplative tradition is that knowing God is much more like ‘unknowing’ than it is like possessing rationally acceptable beliefs. Knowledge of God is expressed, in this tradition, in metaphors of woundedness, darkness, silence, suffering, and desire. Philosophers of religion, on the other hand, tend to explore the possibilities of knowing God in terms of rational acceptability, epistemic rights, cognitive responsibility, and propositional belief. These languages seem to point to very different accounts of how it is that we come to know God, and a very different range of critical concepts by which the truth of such knowledge can be assessed. In this paper, I begin to explore what might be at stake in these different languages of knowing God, drawing particularly on Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of Christian belief. I will argue that his is a distorted account of the epistemology of Christian belief, and that this has implications for his project of demonstrating the rational acceptability of Christian faith for the 21st century.

Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil,or Part of the Problem?

Theodicy, the enterprise of searching for greater goods that might plausibly justify God’s permission of evil, is often criticized on the grounds that the project has systematically failed to unearth any such goods. But theodicists also face a deeper challenge, one that places under question the very attempt to look for any morally sufficient reasons God might have for creating a world littered with evil. This ‘anti-theodical’ view argues that theists (and non-theists) ought to reject, primarily for moral reasons, the project of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’. Unfortunately, this view has not received the serious attention it deserves, particularly in analytic philosophy of religion. Taking my cues from such anti-theodicists as Kenneth Surin, D.Z. Phillips and Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, I defend several reasons for holding that the way of thinking about God and evil enshrined in theodical discourse can only add to the world’s evils, not remove or illuminate them.

Why Even a Believer Should Not Believe That God Answers Prayers

Recent studies provide some support for the idea that prayer has curative powers. It is argued that even if prayers are effective in these kinds of cases it cannot be because God is answering them. While many have challenged theological explanations for the efficacy of prayer on epistemic grounds, the argument presented here concludes that the theological explanation conflicts with the standard conception of God. In particular, if God answers prayers in these kinds of cases then God is immoral.

The extroversive unity of existence from Ibn ‘Arabi’s and Meister Eckhart’s viewpoints

A proper understanding of the Sufi doctrine of the unity of existence is essential for following the later developments of Islamic philosophy. The doctrine of the unity of existence is divided into introversive and extroversive aspects, the former dealing with the unity of the soul of the mystic with God, and the latter with the unity of the cosmos with God. Here this latter aspect of the doctrine is explained through a comparison of the views of Ibn ‘Arabi and Meister Eckhart, both of whom are profoundly influenced by Ibn Sina at precisely the same crucial points, although Meister Eckhart makes explicit reference to Ibn Sina, while Ibn ‘Arabi generally avoids naming him. The theory of the extroversive unity of existence consists of four parts, or rather, it is the product of four steps, each of which is logically based on the previous one: (1) God is the only being or the absolute existence. (2) Everything other than God (i. e., human beings and the cosmos) is nothing or nonexistence. (3) The existence of all things is God’s existence (All are He). (4) The cosmos does not have existence but manifests existence. In other words, it is God’s self-disclosure.

Chronic Pain and Praying to a Higher Power: Useful or Useless?

In the present study a Swedish sample of 118 persons with chronic pain completed online tests on two occasions in association with treatment trials. A three item subscale measuring praying as a coping strategy was derived from the Coping Strategies Questionnaire (CSQ), but adapted to refer to “a higher power” instead of “God”. Measures of pain and anxiety/depression were also included. Results revealed significant associations between praying and pain interference and impairment. Praying was also associated with anxiety and depression scores. Results also showed that prayer predicted depression scores at follow-up, and that follow-up prayer was predicted by pain interference at first measurement occasion. Overall, if prayer had any relation with the other variables it was in the negative direction of more distress being associated with more praying both concurrently and prospectively.

Compatibilism,Evil, and the Free-Will Defense

It is widely believed that (1) if theological determinism were true, in virtue of God’s role in determining created agents to perform evil actions, created agents would be neither free nor morally responsible for their evil actions and God would not be perfectly good; (2) if metaphysical compatibilism were true, the free-will defense against the deductive problem of evil would fail; and (3) on the assumption of metaphysical compatibilism, God could have actualized just any one of those myriad possible worlds that are populated only by compatibilist free creatures. The primary thesis of this essay is that none of these propositions is true. This thesis is defended by appealing to a recently proposed novel, acausal, composite, unified theory of free action – the Theory of Middle Freedom – that evades the central problems plaguing traditional theories of metaphysical compatibilism.

God Diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder

This article endorses the contention that God suffers from a mental disorder, but challenges J. Henry Jurgens’ diagnosis of bipolar disorder as reported in The Onion (“God diagnosed with bipolar disorder”, 2001) and proposes narcissistic personality disorder instead. It uses the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, Washington, DC, 1994) and various biblical citations in support of this diagnosis. It rejects the idea that a major personality change is reflected in the New Testament and claims that God did not experience a major transformation of his narcissistic personality structure as described by Heinz Kohut (Forms and transformations of narcissism, in A. P. Morrison, Ed., Essential papers on narcissism, pp. 61–87, New York University Press, New York, 1966/1986). However, it concludes that God’s creativity accounts for the stability of his narcissistic personality structure and helps to explain his lack of empathy toward human beings.

Being, <Emphasis Type="Italic">aevum</Emphasis>, and nothingness: Edith Stein on death and dying

This article seeks to present for the first time a more systematic account of Edith Stein’s views on death and dying. First, I will argue that death does not necessarily lead us to an understanding of our earthly existence as aevum, that is, an experience of time between eternity and finite temporality. We always bear the mark of our finitude, including our finite temporality, even when we exist within the eternal mind of God. To claim otherwise, is to make identical our eternity with God’s eternity, thereby undermining the traditional Scholastic argument, which Stein holds, that there is no real relation between the being (and, therefore, (a)temporality) of God and the being of human persons. Second, I will argue that Stein excludes the category of potentiality from her discussion of death as a relation between the fullness or actuality of being and nothingness. In fact, death is more a relation between possibility/potentiality and nothingness than a relation between actual fullness and nothingness. What Stein describes as fullness ought to be read as potential.

Confusion of Tongues: Christian Discipleship and the Problem of Patriotism

This article addresses the dynamics of faith manifested in Christian discipleship and patriotism. Exploration of the dynamics of faith, whether in Christian or patriotic discipleship, involves identifying the nature of the object of devotion and concomitant expectations of one’s relationship vis-à-vis the object. From this exploration, various contradictions between Christian and patriotic discipleship are identified. To resolve cognitive dissonance or smooth over contradictions, Christian patriots employ several psychosocial strategies, namely, merger, weak dissociation, rationalization, and denial.

Aquinas’s Miracles and the Luciferous Defence: The Problem of the Evil/Miracle Ratio

Miracles and the problem of evil are two prominent areas of research within philosophy of religion. On occasion these areas converge, with God’s goodness being brought into question by the claim that either there is a lack of miracles, or there are immoral miracles. In this paper I shall highlight a second manner in which miracles and the problem of evil relate. Namely, I shall give reason as to why what is considered to be miraculous may be dependent upon a particular response to the problem of natural evil. To establish this claim, I shall focus upon Aquinas’s definition of a miracle and a particular free-will defence, the Luciferous defence.

Public and Private Meaning in Hume: Comments on Ted Morris’ “Meaningfulness without Metaphysics: Another Look at Hume’s Meaning-Empiricism”

This paper raises questions concerning Ted Morris’ interpretation of Hume’s notion of meaning and investigates the private and public aspects of Hume’s notion of meaning.

Union and Difference: A Dialectical Structuring of St. John of the Cross’ Mysticism

This paper intends to append the frame of dialectic upon St. John of the Cross’ delineation of mysticism. Its underlying hypothesis is that the dialectical structuring of St. John’s mystical theology promises to unravel the web of relational concepts embedded within his immense writings on this unique phenomenon. It is hoped that as a consequence of this undertaking, relevant pairs of correlative opposites that figure prominently in mysticism can be elucidated and perhaps come to some form of resolution.

Are There Stable Factors in Preadolescent Girls’ Externalizing Behaviors?

Relatively little is known about the factor structure of disruptive behavior among preadolescent girls. The present study reports on exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of disruptive girl behavior over four successive data waves as rated by parents and teachers in a large, representative community sample of girls (N = 2,451). Five factors were identified from parent ratings (oppositional behavior/conduct problems, inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity, relational aggression, and callous-unemotional behaviors), and four factors were identified derived from teacher ratings (oppositional behavior/conduct problems/callous-unemotional behaviors, inattention, hyperactivityimpulsivity, and relational aggression). There was a high degree of consistency of items loading on equivalent factors across parent and teacher ratings. Year-to-year stability of factors between ages five and 12 was high for parent ratings (ICC = 0.70 to 0.88), and slightly lower for teacher ratings (ICC = 0.56 to 0.83). These findings are discussed in terms of possible adjustment to the criteria for children's disruptive behavior disorders found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders.

---

Decrypting ‘the Christian Thinking of the Flesh, Tacitly, the Caress, in a Word, the Christian Body’ in Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy

This article responds to the question of the ‘implicit and presupposed theological turn of phenomenology’ by providing a close reading of Jacques Derrida’s Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy (2000 French/2005 English translation), particularly concerning what Derrida alludes to as ‘the Christian thinking of the flesh’ in the French phenomenological tradition post-Husserl. In reading Derrida’s own text, the article identifies and then performs a ‘cryptonomy’ of references to the ‘Christian body,’ and of the ‘return of religion.’ The article also focuses on the more recent writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, especially Corpus (2000 French), concerning the body and its relationship to the concept of corporality (Leiblichkeit) from Husserl’s Ideas II.

Remarks on Grandi’s Comments

This note is a reply to some of Giovanni Grandi’s comments on my paper “Berkeley’s Contingent Necessities.”

Internal Realism and the Problem of Religious Diversity

This article applies Hilary Putnam’s theory of internal realism to the issue of religious plurality. The result of this application – ‘internalist pluralism’ – constitutes a paradigm shift within the Philosophy of Religion. Moreover, internalist pluralism succeeds in avoiding the major difficulties faced by John Hick’s famous theory of religious pluralism, which views God, or ‘the Real,’ as the noumenon lying behind diverse religious phenomena. In side-stepping the difficulties besetting Hick’s revolutionary Kantian approach, without succumbing to William Alston’s critique of conceptual-scheme dependence, internalist pluralism provides a solution to significant theoretical problems, while doing so in a manner that is respectful of cultural diversity and religious sensitivities.