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The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology
Robert Merrihew Adams has been a leader in renewing philosophical respect for the idea that moral obligation may be founded on the commands of God. This collection of Adams' essays, two of which are previously unpublished, draws from his extensive writings on philosophical theology that discuss metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues surrounding the concept of God--whether God exists or not, what God is or would be like, and how we ought to relate ourselves to such a being. Adams studies the relation between religion and ethics, delving into an analysis of moral arguments for theistic belief. In several essays, he applies contemporary studies in the metaphysics of individuality, possibility and necessity, and counterfactual conditionals to issues surrounding the existence of God and problems of evil.
- GenresTheologyPhilosophy
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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May 31, 2024
A COLLECTION OF PAPERS OF THE ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Robert Merrihew Adams taught philosophy at UC Los Angeles, and Yale University (from which he retired in 2004); he has since taught part-time at the University of Oxford in England, and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1987 book, “This volume includes most of the work in the philosophy of religion that I have published in the last fifteen years, with two additional papers… that are published here for the first time… I hope that the present collection may be of interest to a wider audience interested in questions about religion, as well as to the analytic philosophers to whom the largest part of it was originally addressed… Philosophical theology is the part of philosophy of religion that is primarily about God… I do not mean a discipline that can be practiced only by those who believe, as I do, that God exists. Atheists as well as theists can and do contribute to it. Indeed, it is a subject in which atheism is one of the competing positions…
“I am affirming the REALISM that characterizes my approach to philosophical theology. By ‘realism’ here I mean the belief that there is a truth about the subject matter that is independent of our opinions, and even of our best evidence. Whether we believe it or not… god exists or does not, is omnipotent or is not, will raise us from the dead or not, and so forth. This conviction is presupposed in all the essays in this volume. This realism is combined… with a moderate skepticism. On the matters discussed here… I do not believe that conclusive proof is possible… My approach to philosophical theology, then, is a skeptical realism… I will argue … that… realism goes naturally with at least a moderate skepticism.” (Pg. 3-5)
He states, “By nature or grace the right guess, the right cognitive impulse, must simply be given to us. This applies also to ethical convictions and religious faith… I imagine we can agree that rationality alone will not assure us of reaching all that we ought to reach of them. Something more than rationality must be given to us here. As Christians we will say it is the testimony of the Holy Spirit, but presumably he may speak to us through a great variety of social influences and apparently natural inclinations, as well as through more dramatic experiences.” (Pg. 15-16)
He argues, “I would desire that the desire to create and love all of a certain group of possible creatures … might be an adequate ground for a perfectly good God to create them, even if his creating ALL of them must have the result that some of them are less happy than they might otherwise have been. And they need not be the best of all possible creatures, or included in the best of all possible worlds, in order for this qualification of his kindness to be consistent with his perfect goodness. The desire to create THOSE creatures is as legitimate a ground for him to qualify his kindness toward some, as the desire to create the best of all possible worlds.” (Pg. 55)
He suggests, “I do not think it would have been possible, in the metaphysical or broadly logical sense that is relevant here, for me to exist in a world that differed much from the actual world in the evils occurring in the parts of history that contain my roots. We are sure that once begun, my life could have continued in many different ways that it actually did not, and would still have been mine. But I think that case is at least close to being the only one in which it is intuitively clear that I could have existed in circumstances very different from those that actually obtain.” (Pg. 67)
He cautions, “That there are such goods for which God’s causing or permitting the evils that happen was necessary, I think the theist must believe. But if he is wise, he will not claim to know in detail what they are, or to see enough of the history of the world, and of each individual life, to see the point of everything God does or allows. It is part of the task of theodicy, nonetheless, to say something about the sort of goods for which God’s causing or permitting evils might be necessary. Among the familiar examples … are moral responsibility before God; the exercise of fortitude, compassion, and forgiveness; and occasions for self-sacrifice and triumph over temptation. I am suggesting, in effect, that the existence of creatures such as we are, with the characteristic, subtle, and sometimes bittersweet values and beauties of human life, may also be a good of the relevant sort that is loved by God.” (Pg. 72)
He asserts, “I deny that God could have made free creatures who WOULD always have freely done right. The supposition that he could have done so is burdened with all the difficulties about truth of conditionals that afflict the theory of middle knowledge… Without middle knowledge God must take real risks if he makes free creatures … No matter how shrewdly God acted in running so many risks, his winning on EVERY risk would not be antecedently probable… These judgments suggest that the necessity of permitting some evil in order to have free will in creatures may play a part in a theodicy but cannot bear the whole weight of it, even if the possibility of middle knowledge is rejected.” (Pg. 90-91)
He explains, “My new divine command theory of the nature of ethical wrongness… is that ethical wrongness IS… the property of being contrary to the commands of a loving God. I regard this as a metaphysically necessary, but not an analytic or a priori truth. Because is it not a conceptual analysis, this claim is not relative to a religious sub-community of the larger linguistic community. It purports to be the correct theory of the nature of the ethical wrongness that EVERYBODY… is talking about.” (Pg. 139)
He outlines, “The subject of this paper is the doctrine of divine necessity: the belief that God’s existence is necessary in the strongest possible sense---that it is not merely causally or physically or hypothetically, but logically or metaphysically or absolutely necessary… I will not attempt to prove here that God’s existence is necessary, nor even that God exists, though some theoretical advantages of theistic belief will be noted in the course of discussion. Nor will I try to explain exactly HOW God’s existence can be necessary. I believe that the most plausible form of the doctrine of divine necessity is the Thomistic view that God’s existence follows necessarily from his essence but that we do not understand God’s essence well enough to see how his existence follows from it.” (Pg. 209)
He points out, “Physical and mental states are correlated as they are because the physical states are constructed out of the mental ones. But this only accentuates another problem. Why do our perceptual states occur in the order in which they do? This cannot be explained in terms of the action of bodies, for bodies are constructed out of the very perpetual facts to be explained, accordingly to the idealist. And it certainly is not plausible to regard it as sheer happenstance that our perceptions are such that we can regard them as representing an orderly world.” (Pg. 251)
This book will be of keen interest to those (particularly with an “analytical” philosophical orientation) seriously studying the philosophy of religion.
Robert Merrihew Adams taught philosophy at UC Los Angeles, and Yale University (from which he retired in 2004); he has since taught part-time at the University of Oxford in England, and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1987 book, “This volume includes most of the work in the philosophy of religion that I have published in the last fifteen years, with two additional papers… that are published here for the first time… I hope that the present collection may be of interest to a wider audience interested in questions about religion, as well as to the analytic philosophers to whom the largest part of it was originally addressed… Philosophical theology is the part of philosophy of religion that is primarily about God… I do not mean a discipline that can be practiced only by those who believe, as I do, that God exists. Atheists as well as theists can and do contribute to it. Indeed, it is a subject in which atheism is one of the competing positions…
“I am affirming the REALISM that characterizes my approach to philosophical theology. By ‘realism’ here I mean the belief that there is a truth about the subject matter that is independent of our opinions, and even of our best evidence. Whether we believe it or not… god exists or does not, is omnipotent or is not, will raise us from the dead or not, and so forth. This conviction is presupposed in all the essays in this volume. This realism is combined… with a moderate skepticism. On the matters discussed here… I do not believe that conclusive proof is possible… My approach to philosophical theology, then, is a skeptical realism… I will argue … that… realism goes naturally with at least a moderate skepticism.” (Pg. 3-5)
He states, “By nature or grace the right guess, the right cognitive impulse, must simply be given to us. This applies also to ethical convictions and religious faith… I imagine we can agree that rationality alone will not assure us of reaching all that we ought to reach of them. Something more than rationality must be given to us here. As Christians we will say it is the testimony of the Holy Spirit, but presumably he may speak to us through a great variety of social influences and apparently natural inclinations, as well as through more dramatic experiences.” (Pg. 15-16)
He argues, “I would desire that the desire to create and love all of a certain group of possible creatures … might be an adequate ground for a perfectly good God to create them, even if his creating ALL of them must have the result that some of them are less happy than they might otherwise have been. And they need not be the best of all possible creatures, or included in the best of all possible worlds, in order for this qualification of his kindness to be consistent with his perfect goodness. The desire to create THOSE creatures is as legitimate a ground for him to qualify his kindness toward some, as the desire to create the best of all possible worlds.” (Pg. 55)
He suggests, “I do not think it would have been possible, in the metaphysical or broadly logical sense that is relevant here, for me to exist in a world that differed much from the actual world in the evils occurring in the parts of history that contain my roots. We are sure that once begun, my life could have continued in many different ways that it actually did not, and would still have been mine. But I think that case is at least close to being the only one in which it is intuitively clear that I could have existed in circumstances very different from those that actually obtain.” (Pg. 67)
He cautions, “That there are such goods for which God’s causing or permitting the evils that happen was necessary, I think the theist must believe. But if he is wise, he will not claim to know in detail what they are, or to see enough of the history of the world, and of each individual life, to see the point of everything God does or allows. It is part of the task of theodicy, nonetheless, to say something about the sort of goods for which God’s causing or permitting evils might be necessary. Among the familiar examples … are moral responsibility before God; the exercise of fortitude, compassion, and forgiveness; and occasions for self-sacrifice and triumph over temptation. I am suggesting, in effect, that the existence of creatures such as we are, with the characteristic, subtle, and sometimes bittersweet values and beauties of human life, may also be a good of the relevant sort that is loved by God.” (Pg. 72)
He asserts, “I deny that God could have made free creatures who WOULD always have freely done right. The supposition that he could have done so is burdened with all the difficulties about truth of conditionals that afflict the theory of middle knowledge… Without middle knowledge God must take real risks if he makes free creatures … No matter how shrewdly God acted in running so many risks, his winning on EVERY risk would not be antecedently probable… These judgments suggest that the necessity of permitting some evil in order to have free will in creatures may play a part in a theodicy but cannot bear the whole weight of it, even if the possibility of middle knowledge is rejected.” (Pg. 90-91)
He explains, “My new divine command theory of the nature of ethical wrongness… is that ethical wrongness IS… the property of being contrary to the commands of a loving God. I regard this as a metaphysically necessary, but not an analytic or a priori truth. Because is it not a conceptual analysis, this claim is not relative to a religious sub-community of the larger linguistic community. It purports to be the correct theory of the nature of the ethical wrongness that EVERYBODY… is talking about.” (Pg. 139)
He outlines, “The subject of this paper is the doctrine of divine necessity: the belief that God’s existence is necessary in the strongest possible sense---that it is not merely causally or physically or hypothetically, but logically or metaphysically or absolutely necessary… I will not attempt to prove here that God’s existence is necessary, nor even that God exists, though some theoretical advantages of theistic belief will be noted in the course of discussion. Nor will I try to explain exactly HOW God’s existence can be necessary. I believe that the most plausible form of the doctrine of divine necessity is the Thomistic view that God’s existence follows necessarily from his essence but that we do not understand God’s essence well enough to see how his existence follows from it.” (Pg. 209)
He points out, “Physical and mental states are correlated as they are because the physical states are constructed out of the mental ones. But this only accentuates another problem. Why do our perceptual states occur in the order in which they do? This cannot be explained in terms of the action of bodies, for bodies are constructed out of the very perpetual facts to be explained, accordingly to the idealist. And it certainly is not plausible to regard it as sheer happenstance that our perceptions are such that we can regard them as representing an orderly world.” (Pg. 251)
This book will be of keen interest to those (particularly with an “analytical” philosophical orientation) seriously studying the philosophy of religion.
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