Metaphysics

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Being Greater and Doing Better

  • February 18, 2023

Doing better does not logically entail being greater. This is easy to see in cases where the agents face different choices: a devil may make a better choice than a saint if the devil’s worst option is better than the saint’s best option!

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Higher-Order Problems of Evil

  • February 14, 2023

The problem of evil challenges theism by raising the following question: if God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why is there evil in the actual world? Theists have proposed many responses to the problem, such as the free will response, the soul-making response, the greater good response, and so on. Whether any succeeds has been debated for hundreds of years.

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Skeptical Theism and the Undercuts-Our-Moral-Life Objection

  • February 9, 2023

Let’s grant that if skeptical theism is true, then for any evil E, we have no reason to think that the prevention of E will lead to an overall better result than letting E happen, so the fact that we do not see God preventing E is not evidence against the existence of God, since we have no more reason to think that God would prevent E than that he would not. The standard objection is that then we have no reason to prevent E, since we have no reason to think that the overall result will be better if we prevent E.

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Open Challenge to Atheists

  • February 8, 2023

Well, this is really a challenge for skeptics of a necessary being (a necessarily existing, causally powerful entity), but I wanted a catchy title, and as a matter of sociological observation, atheists are typically (though not always) skeptics of a necessary being. The challenge is this …