Consummation Anyway: A Reformed Proposal

The central claim of a Consummation Anyway (CA) model is that God could bring about eschatological consummation sans the fall—the intended telos of created humanity—apart from the incarnation of Christ. As such, the CA model is an alternative to an Incarnation Anyway (IA) model, according to which Christ’s incarnation is a necessary means by which a state of eschatological glory would be achieved sans the fall. This essay seeks to propose an argument for the CA model by drawing from the covenant theology of the Reformed tradition, and it moves in four steps. Firstly, I shall summarize Marc Cortez’s recent arguments for IA, homing in on the major moves that are most relevant for sketching a CA model. Secondly, I will highlight the challenges Cortez has offered against those interested in defending a CA model. Thirdly, I shall sketch a Reformed account of the CA model that seeks to address Cortez’s objections. Fourthly, then, I’ll consider two potential objections against the sketch I have offered for CA, inspired by a recent argument offered by James T. Turner (2019). Finally, I close with a brief conclusion that summarizes some salient features of the proposed thesis. This paper thus proposes at least one way in which the CA thesis could remain a real and live option within this debate.

Frailty and Forgiveness

My aim in this chapter is to characterize the change of heart that plays a role in forgiveness—in giving up warranted blaming reactive attitudes. I present this in the context of developing a Kantian account of what forgiveness is and why we need it, drawing on his moral psychology to characterize the relevant change of heart. I appeal in particular to Kant’s account of human frailty and its relation to his account of human evil. I argue that it is frail and flawed agents who lack an entirely fixed and stable character for whom forgiveness is a live option and a need. For such agents, there may be space to interpret us in the light of better willing than our wrongdoing indicates.

Internalism and externalism in epistemology

The internalism/externalism debate in epistemology is primarily concerned with the conditions or factors by virtue of which beliefs acquire the status of being epistemically justified. Internalism holds that these justification-conferring factors must all be ‘internal’ to the subject’s perspective on the world. However, depending on how the notion of internal is understood, internalism ap-pears in different forms. Access internalism, the most common form of internalism, holds that the justification-conferring factors must be reflectively accessible to the subject, such that he is able to find, with regard to the beliefs he holds, whether they are justified. Internalism captures the pre-theoretic intuition that having justification for a belief is a matter of having good reasons for that belief. It also treats the problem of scepticism seriously and explains why it has its source in internalism. Internalism has, however, faced two important objections: (1) it has been objected that internalism fails to deliver a genuinely truth-conducive conception of justification; and (2) that no available account of the access requirement could provide it with a viable basis to realize its aspirations. In an externalist account of justification, some justification-conferring factors of a belief are per-mitted to fall outside the subject’s ken and beyond the reach of the subject’s reflective access. Externalism can plausibly explain why justified beliefs are likely to be true; but by losing sight of the subject’s perspective, externalism fails to appreciate the force of the sceptical challenge. Ex-ternalists have had a hard time explaining the widely shared intuition that beliefs formed in de-mon world scenarios enjoy as much justification as they do when formed in (phenomenologically identical) normal circumstances. In the face of such challenges, both the internalist and external-ist accounts have made significant compromises, in view of which a pluralistic approach to the question of epistemic justification has become a live option.

What Laws? Which Past?: Meillassoux’s Hyper-Chaos and the Epistemological Limitations of Retro-Causation

The question of the metaphysical status of the laws of physics has received increased attention in recent years. Perhaps most well-known among this work are David Lewis’s Humean supervenience and Nancy Cartwright’s dispositionalism, both of which reject the classical conception of the laws of physics as necessary and real independent of the objects they govern, arguing instead that what we call laws are shorthand for the regularities of local states of affairs (on Lewis’s account) or the dispositions of objects (on Cartwright’s). The properties of necessity and reality are generally taken to go hand-in-hand when physical laws are concerned; however, this leaves aside the possibility that the laws of physics are independently real (i.e. not just a description of regularities of objects) yet contingent. This paper will explore this third option which is found in the work of Quentin Meillassoux. We will ask: if laws both exist independent of their objects and are contingent, what happens when laws change? Specifically, the possibility of metaphysical retro-causation becomes a live option. This raises both questions of the ontological status of the past as well as our epistemic access to the past after a change in physical laws. Meillassoux’s ontology of hyper-chaos weathers this challenge with its consistency intact; however, it is an open question of whether or not saving the reality of physical laws by sacrificing their necessity is worth the epistemic limits and metaphysical strangeness that it implies.

Identifying Spinoza’s Immediate Infinite Mode of Extension

The immediate infinite mode of extension is one of the more mysterious elements of Spinoza’s ontology. Despite its importance to Spinoza’s metaphysical system, Spinoza tells us very little about this mode. In the effort to make some progress on this question, I examine three prominent hypotheses about this mode’s identity: the Force Interpretation, the Nomic Interpretation, and the Kinetic Interpretation. I argue, first, that both the Force Interpretation and the Nomic Interpretation are subject to a number of serious objections. Second, I argue that in spite of scholars’ claims to the contrary, the Kinetic Interpretation is a live option.

On Thomas Nagel's Rejection of Theism

In his most recent book—Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False—and in numerous places in his previous work, Thomas Nagel wishes to suggest several reasons that theism is not a live option for him (to use a phrase made famous by William James). He does not seem to intend many of his criticisms to be more than suggestive, much less decisive; nonetheless, in light of the strength of his conviction that theism is somehow inherently too outrageous an option to believe, I would like to spend a bit of time identifying and assessing the criticisms he mentions.

A Theistic, Universe-Based, Theodicy of Human Suffering and Immoral Behavior

In what follows I offer an explanation for the evils in our world that should be a live option for theists who accept middle knowledge. My explanation depends on the possibility of a multiverse of radically different kinds of universes. Persons must pass through various universes, the sequence being chosen by God on an individual basis, until reaching God’s goal for them. Our universe is depicted as governed much by chance, and I give a justification, in light of my thesis, for why God would have people pass through a universe of just such a sort.

Christianity and the Errors of Our Time: Simone Weil on Atheism and Idolatry

In his 1985 book on philosophy and atheism, the Canadian thinker Kai Nielsen, a prolific writer on the subject, wonders why the philosophy of religion is ‘so boring’, and concludes that it must be ‘because the case for atheism is so strong that it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the topic.’ Indeed, Nielsen even regards most of the contemporary arguments for atheism as little more than ‘mopping up operations after the Enlightenment’ which, on the whole, add little to the socio-anthropological and socio-psychological accounts of religion provided by thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, as any ‘reasonable person informed by modernity’ will readily acknowledge. On this view, the answer to Kant's question – ‘What may we hope?’ – does not gesture towards a resurrection and personal immortality, but instead to the death of religious discourse itself: I think, and indeed hope, that God-talk, and religious discourse more generally, is, or at least should be, dying out in the West, or more generally in a world that has felt the force of a Weberian disenchantment of the world. This sense that religious convictions are no longer a live option is something which people who think of themselves as either modernists or post-modernists very often tend to have.