The paper considers three possible definitions of what it is for an action to be ‘morally’ good: (1) that it is overall important to do; (2) that it is overall important to do in virtue of a universalisable principle; and (3) that it is overall important to do in virtue of a universalisable principle, belonging to a system of such principles, which includes almost all of certain moral fixed points. I defend (3) and show how we can reach such a system, starting from the basic beliefs with which we find ourselves, through the process of reflective equilibrium. Moral realism is then the doctrine that there is such a system of true moral beliefs. My optimistic view is that all human communities could eventually reach the same such system. But, if they cannot, then there will be two (or more) different such systems, and so two (or more) different senses of ‘moral realism’.

Behavioural activation (BA) is an efficacious treatment approach. Activity monitoring is a key component of brief BA treatments; however, no studies have examined the most efficacious format for monitoring. The present pilot study tested brief versus intensive activity monitoring approaches during a BA intervention administered in a college orientation course. Outcomes characterised (1) engagement with the treatment protocol via activity monitoring and (2) participant qualitative experiences with monitoring and the intervention as reported during focus group interviews. Four course sections were randomly assigned to receive monitoring forms that were brief (assessed activities three times daily) or intensive (assessed activities hourly). Forms were provided electronically to students via a web-based platform which tracked completion. There were no significant differences in monitoring frequency (38.0 vs. 23.0 days; p = .154) or the duration of monitoring engagement (62.0 vs. 36.0 days; p = .054) between the brief and intensive conditions. Qualitative findings suggested that participants in both conditions found utility in activity monitoring, particularly during the first month as they transitioned to college. Overall, findings indicated that participants may find utility in monitoring during the first month of a BA intervention using either brief or intensive monitoring forms.

Clinical Trials Registration Number: NCT04038190

A ‘complex’ theory of personal identity analyses a person P2 being the same as an earlier person P1 in terms of some particular degree of physical or mental continuity between them. All such theories are open to an objection that the postulated degree of continuity is an arbitrary one, and many of them are open to the objection that more than one subsequent person could satisfy them. Necessarily, any subsequent person is either totally the same person as P1 or not at all the same as P1. P2 is identical with P1 if and only if P2 has the same (non-physical and indivisible) soul as P1.

What does it mean to say that the Universe had a beginning? There are different ways of spelling this out. I shall develop them, consider the logical relations between them, and support one as best capturing our intuitive understanding of this notion. I shall then draw a conclusion about whether Time could (it is logically possible) have a beginning. Finally I shall consider, on my preferred understanding of what it is for the Universe to have a beginning, what physical cosmology can show about whether it did in fact have a beginning.

I understand by a Universe, a system of substances temporally connected to each other. I understand by a substance a thing with causal powers or liabilities, that is able to act or be acted upon. Substances will thus include both material objects and any other physical objects there may be such as chunks of energy or the fluctuating ‘vacuum’ of quantum field theory, and immaterial objects, if there are any, such as souls and ghosts. I understand by two substances being temporally connected that they exist for periods of time which are either earlier than, overlap with, or are later than each other.

To many atheists the existence of evil seems to provide a conclusive argument against the existence of God. God is by definition omnipotent and perfectly good; a perfectly good being will remove evil in so far as he can, an omnipotent being can remove any evil he chooses, so if there is a God there will be no evil, but there is evil, hence there is no God. Theists normally challenge this argument by challenging the premiss that a perfectly good being will remove evil in so far as he can. The theistic defence is usually put as the defence that many evils are logically necessary conditions of greater goods, and hence a perfectly good being may allow them to occur in order to bring about the greater good; so a perfectly good being may well allow some evils to occur.

Subsequent to the fifth century until modern times all theologians agreed that God the Trinity is constituted by three persons (in Boethius's sense of ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’) who have a common divine essence, and are individuated only by their relations to each other. Having that essence entailed each being omnipotent and so perfectly good. In virtue of his perfect goodness the Father necessarily produces the Son (in order to have one equal whom to love and be loved by) and the Spirit (in order that the Son have one equal other than the Father to love and be loved by). There cannot be more than three divine persons because three persons are sufficient for the existence of unselfish love, and so any fourth divine person would be produced by an act which none of the three needed to produce, and so would not exist necessarily and so could not be divine. Necessarily if there is one divine person, there are three and only three divine persons.

This article contains my responses to the discussions of my views on the nature of God by Howard Robinson and Herman Philipse, my views on the strength of arguments for the existence of God by Herman Philipse, Brian Leftow, Timothy Mawson, and Christoph Jäger, and my views on the nature and justification of Christian faith by Mark Wynn and Cyrille Michon, contained in this issue of Religious Studies.

Moral realism entails that there are metaphysically necessary moral principles of the form ‘all actions of nonmoral kind Z are morally good’; being discoverable a priori, these must be (in a wide sense) logically necessary. This article seeks to justify this apparently puzzling consequence. A sentence expresses a logically necessary proposition iff its negation entails a contradiction. The method of reflective equilibrium assumes that the simplest account of the apparently correct use of sentences of some type in paradigm examples is probably logically necessary. An account is simple insofar as it uses few predicates designating properties easily recognizable in many different kinds of paradigm examples. I illustrate how reflective equilibrium uses these criteria to discover logically necessary nonmoral propositions such as ‘if S remembers doing X, S believes that he did X’ and ‘if it is scarlet, it is red’. I then illustrate how exactly the same procedures can lead us from paradigm examples of apparently true sentences asserting that actions of some kind are good to discovering moral principles. I advance the contingent hypothesis that most contemporary humans, although they initially disagree about moral issues, have derived from different paradigm examples the same concept of moral goodness, which will ensure that the use of reflective equilibrium will lead to eventual agreement about moral issues. That strongly suggests that the moral principles eventually reached by reflective equilibrium are logically necessary ones.

Humans are pure mental substances, that is essentially souls, who have a rich mental life of sensations, thoughts, intentions, and other pure mental events, largely caused by and sometimes causing events in their brains and so in their bodies. God has reason to create humans because humans have a kind of goodness, the ability to choose between good and evil, which God himself does not have. The existence of these causal connections between mental events and brain events requires an enormous number of separate psychophysical laws. It is most improbable that there would be such laws if God had not made them. Each soul has a thisness; it is the particular soul it is quite independently of its mental properties and bodily connections. So no scientific law, concerned only with relations between substances in virtue of their universal properties, could explain why God created this soul rather than that possible soul, and connected it to this body. Yet a rational person often has to choose between equally good alternatives on non-rational grounds; and so there is nothing puzzling about God choosing to create this soul rather than that possible soul. Hence the existence of souls provides a good argument for the existence of God.

I have argued over many years that theism provides a probably true explanation of the existence and most general features of the universe. A major reason for this, I have claimed, is that it is simpler than other explanations. The present paper seeks to amplify and defend this latter claim in the light of some recent challenges.

This paper defends (especially in response to Brian Leftow's recent attack) logical nominalism, the thesis that logically necessary truth belongs primarily to sentences and depends solely on the conventions of human language. A sentence is logically necessary (that is, a priori metaphysically necessary) iff its negation entails a contradiction. A sentence is a posteriori metaphysically necessary iff it reduces to a logical necessity when we substitute for rigid designators of objects or properties canonical descriptions of the essential properties of those objects or properties. The truth-conditions of necessary sentences are not to be found in any transcendent reality, such as God's thoughts. ‘There is a God’ is neither a priori nor a posteriori metaphysically necessary; God is necessary in the sense that His existence is not causally contingent on anything else.

Jeremy Gwiazda has criticized my claim that God, understood as an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly free person is a person ‘of the simplest possible kind’ on the grounds that omnipotence etc. as spelled out by me are omnipotence etc. of restricted kinds, and so less simple forms of these properties than maximal forms would be. However the account which I gave of these properties in The Christian God (although not in The Coherence of Theism) shows that, when they are defined in certain ways, they all follow from one property of ‘pure, limitless, intentional power’. I argue here that a person who has these properties so defined is a person ‘of the simplest possible kind’.

Richard Swinburne responds to Simon Blackburn.

The first six articles in this issue of THINK have the theme “Good without God”. Here, Richard Swinburne argues that the existence of God is not a precondition of there being moral truths, but his existence does impact on what moral truths there are.

In response to Michael Bradley, I summarize my account of the criteria by which the various data of natural theology increase the probability of theism and together make it probable. I explain the sense in which a simpler theory leaves less to be explained, justify my claim that God's perfect goodness is entailed by his other divine properties, and show that not merely is theism simpler than Bradley's ‘Epicurean hypothesis’, but that the ‘mixed’ data of natural theology are more to be expected given theism than given the ‘Epicurean hypothesis’.