Introduction

J. Howard Sobel devotes seventy pages of his wide-ranging analysis of theistic arguments to a critique of the cosmological argument. The focus of that critique falls on the argument a contingentia mundi; but he also offers in passing some criticisms of the argument ab initio mundi, or the kalam cosmological argument.

Sobel provides the following Statement of the argument:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence [that did not begin to exist].

Sobel will accept the causal premiss (1) only if ‘begins to exist’ means ‘has a first instant of its existence,’ and he disputes the arguments and evidence for (2).

Traditional proponents of the kalam argument sought to justify (2) by means of philosophical arguments against the infinity of the past, while contemporary interest in the argument arises from the empirical evidence of physical cosmology for the truth of (2).

Some critics of the doctrine of penal substitution have alleged that the doctrine is incoherent because punishment entails an attitude of condemnation or censure towards the person punished, which is impossible in the case of Christ. It is shown that this objection is multiply flawed and that a number of viable ways of avoiding the alleged incoherence are available to the penal substitution theorist.

Some platonists truly agonize over the ontological commitments which their platonism demands of them. Peter van Inwagen, for example, confesses candidly,

David Myers's critique of my proposed Molinist solution to the so-called soteriological problem of evil miscontrues that solution in several key respects. Once those misinterpretations are rectified, it emerges that his proffered critique of my Molinist solution is really quite unrelated to that solution, but constitutes instead an independent argument against the tenability of a religious epistemology of evidentialism in the context of Christian orthodoxy.

John Taylor complains that the Kalam cosmological argument gives the appearance of being a swift and simple demonstration of the existence of a Creator of the universe, whereas in fact a convincing argument involving the premiss that the universe began to exist is very difficult to achieve. But Taylor's proffered defeaters of the premisses of the philosophical arguments for the beginning of the universe are themselves typically undercut due to Taylor's inadvertence to alternatives open to the defender of the Kalam arguments. With respect to empirical confirmation of the universe's beginning Taylor is forced into an anti-realist position on the Big Bang theory, but without sufficient warrant for singling out the theory as non-realistic. Therefore, despite the virtue of simplicity of form, the Kalam cosmological argument has not been defeated by Taylor's all too swift refutation.

God is conceived in the Western theistic tradition to be both the Creator and Conservor of the universe. These two roles were typically classed as different aspects of creation, originating creation and continuing creation. On pain of incoherence, however, conservation needs to be distinguished from creation. Contrary to current analyses (such as Philip Quinn's), creation should be explicated in terms of God's bringing something into being, while conservation should be understood in terms of God's preservation of something over an interval of time. The crucial difference is that while conservation presupposes an object of the divine action, creation does not. Such a construal has significant implications for a tensed theory of time.

New B-Theorists of language, while conceding the untranslatability of tensed sentences by tenseless sentences, deny that the ineliminability of tense implies the reality of tensed facts. Thus, New BTheorist Nathan Oaklander explains,

For a variety of reasons, ... recent defenders of the tenseless view have come to embrace the thesis that tensed sentences cannot be translated by tenseless ones without loss of meaning. Nevertheless, recent detensers have denied that the ineliminability of tensed language and thought entails the reality of temporal properties. ... Tensed discourse is indeed necessary for timely action, but tensed facts are not, since the truth conditions of tensed sentences can be expressed in a tenseless meta-language that describes unchanging temporal relations between and among events.

In my ‘No Other Name’, I asserted that detractors of Christian exclusivism are, in effect, posing a soteriological problem of evil, to wit, that the proposition

In a pair of recently published articles, Thomas Talbott has presented a carefully constructed case for universalism. He contends that from the principle

(P3) Necessarily, God loves a person S (with a perfect form of love) at a time t only if God's intention at t and every moment subsequent to t is to do everything within his power to promote supremely worthwhile happiness in S, provided that the actions taken are consistent with his promoting the same kind of happiness in all others whom he also loves

and the propositions

1. God exists

2. God is both omniscient and omnipotent

3. God loves every created person

4. God will irrevocably reject some persons and subject those persons to ever-lasting punishment

a contradiction may be deduced. For given (P3), (3) entails

5. For any created person S and time t subsequent to the creation of S, God's intention at t is to do all that he properly can to promote supremely worthwhile happiness in S.

During the last several years, philosophers of religion have witnessed a long-drawn debate between Nelson Pike and John Fischer on the problems of theological fatalism, Fischer claiming in his most recent contribution to have proved that even if God's past beliefs are ‘nice soft facts’, still theological fatalism cannot be averted. Unfortunately, this debate has not – at least it seems to this observer – served substantially either to clarify the issues involved or to move toward a resolution of the question, but has instead confused matters by its use of misleading terminology and diverted the discussion into unpromising side roads.

Like David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, J. L. Mackie's most potent blast against the rationality of belief in God, his The Miracle of Theism, appeared after his death. The book is a broadside against not only the traditional arguments for God's existence, such as the onto-, cosmo-, and teleological arguments, but also against proofs from consciousness, miracles, the idea of God, and so forth, and against the validity of religious experience and faith without reason, and it presents as well negative arguments against divine existence. The book will no doubt supply much grist for the mill of future discussions, but in this piece I should like to focus on Mackie's analysis of one particular argument, the kalām cosmological argument. For his discussion at this point seems to me to be superficial, and I think it can be shown that he has failed to provide any compelling or even intuitively appealing objection against the argument.

God is the ‘high and lofty One who inhabits eternity’, declared the prophet Isaiah, but exactly how we are to understand the notion of eternity is not clear. Traditionally, the Christian church has taken it to mean ‘timeless’. But in his classic work on this subject, Oscar Cullmann has contended that the New Testament ‘does not make a philosophical, qualitative distinction between time and eternity. It knows linear time only…’ He maintains, ‘Primitive Christianity knows nothing of a timeless God. The “eternal” God is he who was in the beginning, is now, and will be in all the future, “who is, who was, and who will be” (Rev. 1:4).’ As a result, God's eternity, says Cullmann, must be expressed in terms of endless time.