Faith and Philosophy

The traditional doctrine that God is impassible (here, invulnerable to suffering) is subject to the objection that it is incompatible with belief that God is loving and compassionate. However, the doctrine that God is passible has grave difficulties as well. I argue that Christian believers should take an analogical approach, by believing that God does something relevantly similar to loving us in a way that involves vulnerability to suffering, and thus conceiving of God as loving us in that way, while simultaneously believing that God is in fact impassible. I conclude with answers to several likely objections.

William Rowe argues that if an omnipotent, omniscient being were faced with an infinite hierarchy of better and better worlds to create, that being could not also be unsurpassably morally excellent. His argument assumes that, at least in ideal circumstances, degree of moral goodness must be perfectly expressed in the degree of goodness of the outcomes chosen. Reflection upon the application of analogous expression principles for certainty and desire shows that such principles can be expected to fail for anyone capable of facing an infinite range of options.

What does it mean to be an embodied thinker of abstract concepts? Does embodiment shape the character and quality of our understanding of universals such as “dog” and “beauty,” and would a non-embodied mind understand such concepts differently? I examine these questions through the lens of Thomas Aquinas’s remarks on the differences between embodied (human) intellects and non-embodied (angelic) intellects. In Aquinas, I argue, the difference between embodied and non-embodied intellection of extramental realities is rooted in the fact that embodied and non-embodied intellects grasp different kinds of universals by means of different kinds of intelligible species (intellectual likenesses), which elicit in them different “modes” of understanding. By spelling out what exactly it means to be an embodied knower, on Aquinas’s account, I argue, we can also shed new light on his mysterious claim that the embodied intellect “turns to phantasms”—the imagination’s likenesses of individuals—in its acts of understanding.

Some moral realists have defended moral realism on the basis of the purported fact that moral facts figure as components in some good explanations of non-moral phenomena. In this paper I explore the relationship between theism and this sort of explanationist defense of moral realism. Theistic explanations often make reference to moral facts, and do so in a manner which is ineliminable in an important respect—remove the moral facts from those explanations, and they suffer as a result. In this respect theistic moral explanations seem to differ from the sorts of moral explanations typically offered by moral explanationists.

In this article I state concisely the central features of a new logical problem of evil developed elsewhere and take account of a response to this problem recently published in this journal by Jerome Gellman. I also reflect briefly on how theology can play a role in such philosophical discussions.

Jeffrey Brower has recently articulated a way to make sense of the doctrine of divine simplicity using resources from contemporary truthmaker theory. Noël Saenz has advanced two objections to Brower’s account, arguing that it violates constraints on adequate metaphysical explanations at various points. I argue that Saenz’s objections fail to show that Brower’s account is explanatorily inadequate.