Search Results for: Graham Oppy

As part of a continuing discussion on “Christ-Shaped Philosophy,” this paper is a reply to the latest rejoinders from Graham Oppy and William Hasker.

The paper contends that the position of my essay “Christ-shaped Philosophy” escapes their objections and hence is more resilient than they suppose.

The FREE full-text of the paper is available for downloading by accessing it here.

This paper offers two main reflections.

First, I intend to highlight that (and why) the philosopher, when focuses on reality, may treat his object from a merely intellectual point of view, hoping to find pro et contra reasons; but when he focuses on God as well as on every other thing in relation to God, he needs to develop his arguments within a loving relationship with the Lord.

Secondly, it is my intention to treat one more question raised by Graham Oppy’s objections to Moser: the idea that philosophy must start only from what everybody knows. I intend to show that, in the light of such an idea, Christian philosophy seems to be paradoxically less inconsistent than philosophy alone.

The full-text of this contribution is available for FREE by clicking here.

This paper offers offers two developments of the two issues I had presented in a previous paper and that Oppy has kindly taken into account.

First, Oppy rightly says that he never affirmed that his starting point was “what everybody knows”. However, both he and I need such a starting point, because it is the only one that permits us to discuss our topic and try to convince each other.

Second, Oppy affirms that it is “just obvious […] that a large part of any satisfactory comprehensive worldview will be utterly independent of distinctively Christian assumptions”. But Christian faith doesn’t promise to render believers more capable than non-believers. It promises to render them better than they would be otherwise.

However, I understand that Oppy is not convinced by my explanation, because, from the rational point of view, what I have just said is only epistemically possible. In other words, I understand that he remains confident in mere reason alone. But reason alone, though it be the only possible way of thinking and discussing, is not free from contradiction.

To access the FREE full-text of this paper, please click here.

In this paper, Paul Moser replies to specific claims about ambiguity raised by Graham Oppy.

He also suggests that Christ-Shaped Philosophy does not settle for broad goals that are identical with the goals of the natural sciences, even if it is broadly continuous with reliable science. If it did settle thus, it would offer nothing distinctive. Instead, it offers a philosophical approach that goes beyond mere truth-seeking and understanding to redemption by God in Christ. Anything short of this will fail to be Christ-Shaped Philosophy. It thereby will fail to incorporate the distinctive kind of wisdom or philosophy recommended by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:6-7. “Christ-Shaped Philosophy” aims precisely to restore attention to that kind of philosophy.

The full-text of this contribution is available for FREE by clicking here.

Learn more about the Four Views on Christianity and Philosophy (Zondervan, 2016) by going to the EPS book page.

I am a metaphysical naturalist: I hold a metaphysical naturalist worldview. I think that my metaphysical naturalist worldview is superior to competing Christian worldviews. In particular, I think that my metaphysical naturalist worldview commits me to less, but nowhere issues in weaker explanations, than competing Christian worldviews.

I am a philosophical neutralist: I think that one important part of philosophy is devoted to the neutral assessment of competing worldviews. In my opinion, the neutral assessment of competing worldviews goes by way of comparing the trade-offs made by those competing worldviews between minimising theoretical commitment and maximising explanatory breadth and depth. While there is no general algorithm for carrying out this assessment, there are some cases where we get a clear verdict. In particular, if the commitments of one worldview are a proper subset of the commitments of a second worldview, and yet there is nowhere that the second worldview has an explanatory advantage over the first, then the first worldview is superior to the second. According to me, neutral philosophical evaluation tells us that my metaphysical naturalist worldview is more theoretically virtuous than—and hence to be preferred to—competing Christian worldviews.

I don’t claim to be able to provide here—or anywhere else—a comprehensive assessment of the comparative theoretical virtues of my metaphysical naturalist worldview and competing Christian worldviews. What I give is a sketch that leaves almost all of the details undiscussed. Moreover, the conclusion that I reach is evidently contentious. Some will wish to reject my philosophical neutralism. (I think that those people go badly wrong; I cannot accept the implicit suggestion that philosophy ought everywhere be the mouthpiece of dogmatism.) Others will contest the details of my assessment. That seems fair to me: there are many controversial matters for judgment that feed into final verdicts about which worldviews are more theoretically virtuous than other competing worldviews.

It is worth noting that I do not say that there is conflict between Christianity and philosophy. It is perfectly possible to do Christian philosophy, i.e. to work on the philosophical development and improvement of Christian worldviews. My claims is just that, as I see it, the part of philosophy devoted to the neutral assessment of worldviews says that my metaphysical naturalist worldview is superior to competing Christian worldviews.
Among the other contributors to this discussion, it seems to me that only Tim McGrew (“Convergence”) has any sympathy for philosophical neutralism. In his view, the neutral assessment of competing worldviews is best handled in a Bayesian framework. Moreover, in his view, Bayesian deliberation delivers the conclusion that Christianity is to be preferred to metaphysical naturalism. While it is not entirely clear, I think that his use of derivations in the prosecution of his case shows that he thinks that metaphysical naturalism is logically inconsistent. In any case, I maintain that neutral philosophical assessment cannot be Bayesian because there are crippling theoretical problems for Bayesian analysis generated by—for example—the role played by prior probabilities in that framework.

Paul Moser (“Conformation”) rejects philosophical neutralism in favour of a reconceptualization of philosophy in which Christ is the central focus. While I’m happy to allow that philosophers can work on the development and improvement of Christian worldviews, I doubt that Moser’s proposed reconceptualization would benefit either philosophy or Christianity. On the one hand, there is an enormous amount in philosophy to which Christ is simply irrelevant. (For example, whether Christianity is true or false makes no difference whatsoever to the proper philosophical treatment of the two envelope paradox, or the liar paradox, or Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, or a thousand other philosophical topics.) On the other hand, Christianity benefits if there is a part of philosophy that provides a neutral standpoint from which it can be assessed: in particular, it is much more likely that improvements to Christian worldviews will emerge from criticism that is not committed to Christian worldview.

Scott Oliphant (“Covenant”) claims that philosophical neutralism is simply incoherent: in his opinion, all coherent worldviews presuppose the truth of Christianity. I think that it is obvious that my metaphysical neutralism does not presuppose Christianity; rather, in my view, it (a) entails that Christianity is necessarily false; and (b) trumps Christianity in a properly conducted assessment of theoretical virtue. I do not think that there is any coherent understanding of “presupposition” on which it is the case that worldviews have presuppositions. In particular, it seems to me that we should think of worldviews as maximal consistent theories. But, in any maximal consistent theory, for any proposition that p, exactly one of p and not-p belongs to that theory. While this way of thinking about worldviews is clearly an idealisation, it nonetheless forecloses the possibility that worldviews have presuppositions.

Obviously enough, there is lots of work to be done to build on and improve the position that I have begun to sketch.

First, there is much to be done to flesh out the account of worldviews and the details of the process to be followed in giving a neutral assessment of worldviews. In particular, it is worth noting that the account of worlds and their assessment involves a large amount of idealisation: there are many questions to ask about the relationship between worldview beliefs and the ideal structures that I have discussed.

Second, there is a huge amount of work required to make my metaphysical naturalist worldview and competing Christian worldviews more explicit (and there is also the potentially endless task of constructing better versions of these worldviews). I think that the task of setting out—and comparing—the commitments of worldviews is the most important but also the most difficult philosophical project.

Third, there is the enormous task of filling out all of the detail that feeds into the determination of the comparative theoretical virtue of my metaphysical naturalist worldview and competing Christian worldviews. (I have made a start on this work elsewhere; see, for example, my 2013 book The Best Argument against God (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan), and my 2015 paper “What Derivations Cannot Do” (Religious Studies 51, 3, 323-34). But most of the work remains to be done).

This paper joins Paul Moser, William Hasker, and Graham Oppy in that part of their discussion which concerns philosophy’s perennial problems. In their challenge to Moser’s project, for the most part, Hasker and Oppy draw from the extensive range of such questions, while avoiding the obvious, namely, philosophy’s “big questions.” The paper argues that it is the latter which, in an important sense, contextualize and serve as prolegomena for the Good News of God in Christ. However, this only occurs for a properly Christian philosophy, when through biblical answers many of these questions come to closure.

On the other hand, when philosophy insists on non-closure and writes the rules of knowing such that what Scripture says about these questions does not count as knowledge, it keeps at bay what Moser calls “God’s inquiry in Christ.”

The full-text of this contribution is available for FREE by clicking here.

Graham Oppy argues that Moser’s call for “Christ-Shaped Philosophy” suffers from some serious ambiguities.

On the one hand, he fails to distinguish clearly enough between the contents of philosophical positions and the attitudes that are constitutive of philosophical engagement. On the other hand, he fails to distinguish clearly enough between the claim that Christian philosophy should be consistent with Christian doctrine, the claim that Christian philosophy should entail Christian doctrine, and whatever claims there might be that are intermediate between these two.

Oppy suggests that the most that “Christ-Shaped Philosophy” should require is that the attitudes that Christians take in their engagement with philosophy should be consistent with their Christian beliefs.

Finally, Oppy suggests that the claim that Christian philosophy should always entail Christian doctrine is plausibly at odds with attitudes that are constitutive of philosophical engagement (in particular, with commitment to the goal of achieving genuine understanding of diverse worldviews).

The full-text of his contribution is available for FREE by clicking here.

This paper examines the negative consequences of relying too heavily upon theoretical content (“content”) as the basis of one’s confidence in the preeminence of Christ in all things.

The argument show the importance of the role of content by briefly considering the initial exchange between Paul Moser and Graham Oppy in this forum. Having motivated the reader by drawing his or her attention to said importance, the paper proceeds to show why an improper understanding of the relationship between Christ and content weakens one’s ability to defend the preeminence of Christ.

Two common but mistaken approaches to the relationship between Christ and content suffice in demonstrating this to be the case.

The full-text of this contribution is available for FREE by clicking here.