Sometime in the late 1960s the claim that speech about God is devoid of cognitive import
died a quiet death. There was no quick, decisive refutation of this claim, but many of the
arguments supporting it had been answered, and the claim simply ceased to be
convincing. The philosophical establishment did not, however, greet the newly
rediscovered cognitive claims of theology with marked enthusiasm. Many critics moved
easily, and with no apparent discomfort, from their earlier complaint that assertions about
God were meaningless to the logically incompatible claim that these assertions are false.
(The ease with which this transition was made might cause some to wonder whether the
earlier claims of incomprehension were entirely genuine.) The objections raised against
theism set up a budget of problems that were addressed in subsequent decades. It was
necessary for theists to define the main theistic attributes as rigorously as possible and to
defend the definitions as logically coherent. The problem of evil emerged as by far the
most important objection to theistic belief and has required intensive scrutiny. The
arguments for the existence of God, which at the beginning of the period tended to be
written off as a lost cause, have inspired continued interest and not a few defenders. And
lurking over all of this were epistemological questions about the kind of justification
required, and the kind that might be available, for religious belief—traditionally, the
problem of faith and reason.
end p.427
The attributes of God most commonly held to be essential for theism are omnipotence,
omniscience, and perfect goodness. Both omnipotence and omniscience have been
intensively discussed, and though nothing like complete consensus has been reached, it
does not seem that insuperable problems remain concerning either attribute. Omnipotence
seems to imply God's ability to “intervene” supernaturally in the world in performing
miracles, and analytic theists have defended this possibility against the objections of
Hume and his modern successors. With regard to omniscience, it would be generally
acknowledged that this attribute entails God's knowing everything it is possible for a
perfect being to know. There remain, however, intense disagreements as to whether it is
logically possible for God to foreknow the actions of creatures who are free in the
libertarian (incompatibilist) sense. An extension of this controversy concerns divine
“middle knowledge”: whether it is possible for God to know the (libertarian) free choices
that would be made by actual and possible free creatures in situations that never in fact
arise. The divine goodness, on the other hand, has been comparatively neglected—an
unfortunate omission because (among other reasons) the conception of divine goodness
plays a crucial role in considering the problem of evil. The prevailing view, however,
seems to have been that divine goodness is sufficiently understood without a detailed or
painstaking investigation.
Other traditional divine attributes remain deeply contentious. The trend has been against
the traditional conception of divine timeless eternity derived from Augustine and
Boethius. Analytic philosophers are inclined to think that “mysteries are not to be
multiplied beyond necessity,” and divine timelessness has seemed to many of them one
mystery too many. Still, the doctrine has found a few energetic defenders, first in
Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (1981, 1992), and more recently in Brian