Natural Nonbelief as a Necessary Means to a Life of Choiceworthy Meaning

• Authors: Kevin Vandergriff
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Many have thought that certain types and distributions of apparent nonresistant nonbelief in the world are among the best reasons to think naturalism is more probable than theism. Jason Marsh has argued that one specific type of nonresistant nonbelief, called natural nonbelief in early humans, supports naturalism over theism. However, I will argue that it is epistemically possible that God has a morallysufficient reason for permitting natural nonbelief in early humans. First, according to Axiarchism, God’s goal for physical reality is to intentionally structure it so that a choiceworthy degree of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic value will be realized. Second, since theism entails Axiarchism, and it is far from clear on our total available evidence that eliminating the possibility of natural nonbelief would have led to a choiceworthy degree of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic value being realized for early humans, the degree to which natural nonbelief supports naturalism over theism is softened.

Keywords

EN

Natural Nonbelief; Divine Hiddenness; Axiarchism; Fundamentality Theory of Meaning; Connection Building; Choiceworthy; Theism; Naturalism; Defense

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Theology
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2015-09-08

accepted

2015-10-26

online

2016-01-19

Contributors

author

Kevin Vandergriff

• Biola University; E-mail: [e-mail]

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opth-2016-0004