Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-cjp7w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-26T21:49:07.690Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aspirational theism and gratuitous suffering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2019

JIMMY ALFONSO LICON
JIMMY ALFONSO LICON*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD20742, USA
*
e-mail: jlicon@umd.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Philosophers have long wondered whether God exists; and yet, they have ignored the question of whether we should hope that He exists – call this stance aspirational theism. In this article, I argue that we have a weighty pro tanto reason to adopt this stance: theism offers a metaphysical guarantee against gratuitous suffering (i.e. God would not permit gratuitous suffering). On the other hand, few atheist alternatives offer such a guarantee – and even then, there are reasons to worry that they are inferior to the theistic alternative. Given this difference, we have a strong pro tanto, but not all-things-considered, reason to adopt aspirational theism.

Type
Original Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 287 - 300
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Almeida, Michael J. (2012) Freedom, God, and Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alston, William (1989) ‘The deontological conception of epistemic justification’, in Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press), 115–152.Google Scholar
Audi, Robert (2011) Rationality and Religious Commitment (Oxford: Clarendon Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baras, Dan (2017) ‘A reliability challenge to theistic Platonism’, Analysis, 77, 479–487.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booth, Anthony Robert (2014) ‘On some recent moves in defence of doxastic compatibilism’, Synthese, 191, 1867–1880.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourget, David & Chalmers, David J. (2014) ‘What do philosophers believe?’, Philosophical Studies, 170, 465–500.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frances, Bryan (2016) ‘Worrisome skepticism about philosophy’, Episteme, 13, 289–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hasker, William (1992) ‘The necessity of gratuitous evil’, Faith and Philosophy, 9, 23–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Himma, Kenneth Einar (2006) ‘Christian faith without belief that God exists: a defense of Pojman's conception of faith’, Faith and Philosophy, 23, 65–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howard-Snyder, Daniel (2014) ‘Agnosticism, the moral skepticism objection, and commonsense morality’, in Dougherty, Trent & McBrayer, Justin P. (eds) Skeptical Theism: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 293–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howard-Snyder, Daniel (forthcoming) ‘The skeptical Christian’, Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Howard-Snyder, Daniel & Howard-Snyder, Frances (1999) ‘Is theism compatible with gratuitous evil?’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 36, 115–130.Google Scholar
Kahane, Guy (2011) ‘Should we want God to exist?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82, 674–696.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahane, Guy (2018) ‘If there is a hole, it is not God-shaped’, in Kraay, Klaas J. (ed.) Does God Matter? Essays on the Axiological Consequences of Theism (Abingdon: Routledge), 95–131.Google Scholar
Kornblith, Hilary (2013) ‘Is philosophical knowledge possible?’, in Machuca, Diego E. (ed.) Disagreement and Skepticism (Abingdon: Routledge), 260–276.Google Scholar
Kraay, Klaas J. & Dragos, Chris (2013) ‘On preferring God's non-existence’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 43, 157–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leslie, John (2007) Immortality Defended (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Licon, Jimmy Alfonso (2012) ‘Sceptical thoughts on philosophical expertise’, Logos and Episteme, 3, 449–458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Adrienne M. (2013) How We Hope: A Moral Psychology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
Matheson, Jonathan (2014) ‘Disagreement: idealized and everyday’, in Matheson, Jonathan & Vitz, Rico (eds) The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 315–330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McBrayer, Justin P. (2010) ‘Skeptical theism’, Philosophy Compass, 5, 611–623.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meirav, Ariel (2009) ‘The nature of hope’, Ratio, 22, 216–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mugg, Joshua (2016) ‘The quietest challenge to the axiology of God. Faith and Philosophy, 33, 441–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagel, Thomas (1997) The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Penner, Myron A. & Arbour, Benjamin H. (2018) ‘Arguments from evil and evidence for pro-theism’, in Kraay, Klaas J. (ed.) Does God Matter? Essays on the Axiological Consequences of Theism (Abingdon: Routledge), 192–202.Google Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (1974) The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press).Google Scholar
Pojman, Louis (1986) ‘Faith without belief?’, Faith and Philosophy, 3, 157–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rachels, James (1971) ‘God and human attitudes’, Religious Studies, 7, 325–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rowe, William (2001) ‘Skeptical theism: a response to Bergmann’, Noûs, 35, 297–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Nicholas J. J. (1997) ‘Bananas enough for time travel?’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 48, 363–389.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Quentin (1991) ‘An atheological argument from evil natural laws’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 29, 159–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Street, Sharon (2014) ‘If everything happens for a reason, then we don't know what reasons are’, in Bergmann, Michael & Kain, Patrick (eds) Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 172–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Inwagen, Peter (1988) ‘The magnitude, duration, and distribution of evil’, Philosophical Topics, 16, 161–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Inwagen, Peter (1991) ‘The problem of evil, the problem of air, and the problem of silence’, Philosophical Perspectives, 5, 135–165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitcomb, Dennis (2012) ‘Grounding and omniscience’, in Kvanvig, Jonathan L. (ed.) Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, IV (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 173–201.Google Scholar