Some skeptical theists use Wykstra's CORNEA constraint to undercut Rowe-style inductive arguments from evil. Many critics of skeptical theism accept CORNEA, but argue that Rowe-style arguments meet its constraint. But Justin McBrayer argues that CORNEA is itself mistaken. It is, he claims, akin to "sensitivity" or "truth-tracking" constraints like those of Robert Nozick; but counterexamples show that inductive evidence is often insensitive. We here defend CORNEA against McBrayer's chief counterexample. We first clarify CORNEA, distinguishing it from a deeper underlying principle that we dub 'CORE.' We then give both principles a probabilistic construal, and show how on this construal, the counterexample fails.The new "inductive atheism" argues that certain empirical features of evil are strong inductive (or "probabilistic") evidence against theism. A feature stressed by William Rowe, for example, is the "noseeum" character of much suffering. We can, try as we may, see no God-justifying 1 (good served by much suffering. And our seeing no God-justifying good served by an instance of suffering is, it is argued, strong evidence for there being no God-justifying good served by itand hence also, by a further short step, for there being no God. Against this reasoning, so-called "skeptical theists" press this question:Granted, atheism makes the feature you cite-here, the noseem feature-entirely expectable. But isn't this feature also pretty expectable if it were the case that God exists? If God were to exist, shouldn't we expect-God being God and us being us-to often not see the goods He purposes for many evils? And if that's so, how can this feature be regarded as strong evidence that God doesn't exist? The skeptical theist here employs a "neutralizing tactic"-a tactic for defusing alleged strong evidence-that we can find used in many contexts.
What we call "the evidential argument from evil" is not one argument but a family of them, originating (perhaps) in the 1979 formulation of William Rowe. Wykstra's early versions of skeptical theism emerged in response to Rowe's evidential arguments. But what sufficed as a response to Rowe may not suffice against later more sophisticated versions of the problem of evil-in particular, those along the lines pioneered by Paul Draper. Our chief aim here is to make an earlier version of skeptical theism more responsive to the type abductive atheology pioneered by Draper. In particular, we suggest a moderate form of skeptical theism may be able to resist Draper's abductive atheology.
The claim that ordinary ethical discourse is typically true and that ethical facts are typically knowable (ethical conservativism) seems in tension with the claim that ordinary ethical discourse is about features of reality friendly to a scientific worldview (ethical naturalism). Cornell Realism attempts to dispel this tension by claiming that ordinary ethical discourse is, in fact, discourse about the same kinds of things that scientific discourse is about: natural properties. We offer two novel arguments in reply. First, we identify a key assumption that we find unlikely to be true. Second, we identify two features of typical natural properties that ethical properties lack. We conclude that Cornell Realism falls short of dispelling the tension between ethical conservativism and ethical naturalism.Many of us desire a meta-ethical position that allows us to take ordinary ethical discourse seriously. It seems to those of us, that is, that much of what we say about right and wrong or good and bad, for example, is true. Even more, it seems to those of us that we typically know many of these truths. What many of us desire, in other words, is a meta-ethical position that sees our ordinary ethical discourse as tracking important features of an accessible reality, as opposed to seeing it as some kind of mistake, mystery, or fiction (however useful). As we will put it, this is a desire for conservativism about ethical discourse, or ethical conservativism for short.Many of us, just as much, desire a meta-ethical position that respects the success of scientific inquiry. It seems to those of us, that is, that certain scientific explanations are the most impressive and secure examples of knowledge of the world around us, and that we are thereby required to conform our methods of inquiry and the ontological commitments of our theories to its methods and commitments. Put a bit differently, it seems that the correct scientific account of the world has a special kind of privilege: the methods it deploys, and the entities that it requires-which we will hereafter refer to as natural -are the ones that we have most reason to employ and believe exist. What those of us desire, then, is a meta-ethical position that does not commit us to non-scientific (non-natural) methods and entities. As we will put * We are grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments and discussion.
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Truthmaker theorists hold that there is a metaphysically explanatory relation that holds between true claims and what exists. While some critics (e.g. Merricks 2007) try to provide counterexamples to truthmaker theory, that response quickly leads to a dialectical standoff. The aim of this paper is to move beyond that standoff by attempting to undermine some standard arguments for truthmaker theory. Using realism about truth and a more pragmatic account of explanation, I show how some of those arguments can be undermined."[The question "What makes a proposition true or false?"] is a loose way of expressing the question, what are the condition in which p (is true) and what are the conditions in which not-p?" Ayer (1946: 90
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