Philosophers' Carnival #1

The first Philosophers' Carnival, collecting some of the best of the philosophoblogosphere of late, is now up at Philosophy, et cetera... I submitted my first problem of evil post. If the participants of this blog get active again, we will be able to submit one post per person, so we won't have to vote on which post we all think is the best or anything like that. Anyone who wants to submit one can do so.

Open Theism and Evil, Part II

In the first post, I gave some indications of why I think denying God's foreknowledge of free human acts doesn't really explain that much evil. What I'd like to do now is lay out a number of elements of the traditional response to the problem of evil, the one that open theists find unsatisfying. This will all be at a fairly basic level, but I'd like to get all the general things on the table before going into depth on how denying foreknowledge is supposed to help.

One of the primary strategies for responding to the problem of evil is to treat some good as a higher-order good in the sense that it can't exist without allowing some evil to exist yet the good is worth the evil it allows in some sense. Many traditional presentations of the problem of evil have assumed utilitarianism, and thus they will talk about the consequences for happiness and unhappiness, saying that more unhappiness is created than the happiness that requires it, so it's not ultimately worth it. Some theists have responded that utilitarianism is false, and thus the theist has more resources to explain evil. Some kinds of evil may simply be wrong to prevent, with no relevant questions about how much evil is allowed by not doing that wrong thing. If it's wrong to do it, then God shouldn't be expected to do it. So I don't want to assume utilitarianism here, even though it's easier to frame the problem of evil if you do have such assumptions. The way to think of higher-order goods in a non-utilitarian framework would be to see some goods as being so important that it would be wrong not to pursue them. Alternatively, one might simply see preventing certain evils as morally wrong, because any method of preventing that kind of evil would involve doing something wrong. Most theodicies or defenses (I'm not going to deal with the distinction some philosophers make between the two) fall under some kind of higher-order good, I would say.

Open Theism and Evil, Part I

I've gotten the sense that the problem of evil is the primary motivation for many who subscribe to what's commonly called open theism, i.e. the view that God does not know the future, takes risks, and changes his mind due to learning new information.

Some open theists take God to have voluntarily given up the right to have knowledge of the future for the sake of human freedom. The assumption is that divine foreknowledge and human freedom are incompatible. Other open theists take God's ignorance of the future to be a necessary fact about the nature of time, since there's no future to be known. This view assumes what I call a growing block theory of time. Some think it follows from presentism, i.e. the view that the present exists but the future and past don't, but if presentism is going to justify the view that there are no truths about the future, then it must also justify the view that there are no truths about the past. So it assumes a growing block view, according to which past and present exist but no future, since those truths aren't somehow sense "fixed".

I share neither of these assumptions, so I have little sympathy for open theism, but my concern here isn't to deal with those elements. I'm interested in a different motivation for open theism, the motivation that God's ignorance of the future can explain the kinds and amount of evil in the universe in a much more satisfying way than any other view. I just don't think that's true.

Philosophers' Carnival

We now have a carnival for philosophy blogs. For those who don't know the term, it will be a collection of the best posts from philosophy blogs, done every two weeks. The first one will be next Monday. See the page I've linked for more info.

New Blog Philosophy of Art

Philosophy of Art is a group weblog on the philosophy of art and its various relationships to mind, ethics, and culture. The initial and expanding list of contributors consists of professors and graduate students from Columbia University, Temple University, Tel Aviv University, Minnesota State University, Auburn University, California State University, and Central Michigan University:

Brandon Cooke (Auburn University)
Michal Gal (Tel Aviv University)
York H. Gunther (California State University)
Ted Gracyk (Minnesota State University)
Hagi Kenaan (Tel Aviv University)
Jonathan Neufeld (Columbia University)
Tiger Roholt (Columbia University)
Richard Shusterman (Temple University)
Robert Stecker (Central Michigan University)

Personality Transformation and the Afterlife

Perhaps it's worth resurrecting this blog with a post related to resurrection and the afterlife. I got the following example from Ben Bradley about a completely different topic, but since it raises interesting issues about the afterlife I figured I'd steal it and ask some questions about it.

Suppose you had a terminal illness. You're given six months to live. There's a treatment that can save you, but it will lead to a total transformation of your personality and interests. For example, you might stop enjoying philosophy and the intellectual life and start enjoying bottle cap collecting. You would find complete fulfillment in bottle cap collecting and not miss the intellectual life, but the desires you currently have would no longer be fulfilled. Ben poses the case as a means to wondering whether it would be better to die in six months or to undergo the treatment and be transformed so drastically that your current desires and preferences would very likely go unfulfilled.

My question is this: what significance does this case have for the possibility of an afterlife? More particularly, what should someone who is not a univeralist say about this sort of case? If I need to spell out the details of what I'm thinking to guide the discussion in the direction I've been thinking, I will, but I'd rather see what people want to say about it first.