Senor on Moser’s Evidence for God

Tom Senor, who contributes to a discussion in the latest issue of Philosophia Christi (Winter 2010), has a helpful review in the NDPR on Paul Moser’s Evidence for God.

(readers may also be interested in my interview with Paul Moser on his “kerygmatic thesis”)

One of the conclusions that Tom draws is this:

Despite a long and interesting discussion of the theological and biblical account of the nature of, and challenges to, volitional change, we never do get an epistemologically illuminating discussion of acquaintance and of the personifying, experiential evidence that one gets as one positively responds to the divine offer.

The Evidence for God’s concluding chapter tackles the primary potential defeaters for the justification of premise two: the problems of evil and of religious diversity. Although there is no room here to discuss the details of this chapter, I will say that Moser’s discussion of diversity (which takes up most of the chapter) is bold, innovative, and nuanced. While defending a version of exclusivism, Moser argues that a God of perfect love could not make belief a requirement of salvation, and that one might yield to God’s transforming call de re and fail to form any beliefs about having yielded to God or even about the existence of God.

Readers might also be interested in the Philosophia Christi discussion on “religious diversity” (Winter 2009), for which Moser was a contributor.

Senor summarizes an interesting consideration in the above first paragraph, which he develops earlier in the review. He wants a more “epistemologically illuminating discussion of acquaintance.” But is Senor expecting “acquaintance” to deliver “spectator evidence” for God’s existence?