380 NOTES53 Claims about BIW starting at the level of persons (and stopping there as well since
there can be non-human as well as human persons) will be called “speciesist” and get
one booed in various contemporary circles. Nonetheless, name-calling aside, the
perspective that so limits BIW seems eminently defensible.
54 Alan Donagan’s The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977)
and his Choice: The Essential Element in Action (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1987) are very good here.
55 Obviously there are other versions of (b)-strategies, each requiring attention on its
own. Even a book-length treatment of some of them would leave out others.
56 Reasonable, of course, in this sense: if it is reasonable to accept P, then it is not also
reasonable to accept not-P or to suspend judgment regarding P.
57 With the usual allowance for variant versions concerning probability, reasonability
of concluding that, and so on.
10 Arguments for monotheism
1 Proposition P entails proposition Q if and only if P, but not Q is a contradiction.
(e.g., There are two whales in the bay entails There is at least one whale in the bay,
since to assert the former and deny the latter is to contradict yourself). Another way
of putting this is: P entails Q if and only if P, therefore Q is a necessary truth.
2 George Mavrodes, Belief in God: A Study in the Epistemology of Religion (New
York: Random House, 1970), chapter 2.
3 These examples are due to ibid.
4 For those not aware of the history of the basketball franchise the Boston Celtics, Bill
Russell was the center for the Celtics teams that won eleven of thirteen championships,
and the greatest defensive center (arguably, the greatest player) ever to play the
game.
5 Defending this understanding goes beyond the scope of this book. For a beginning,
see Arthur Pap, Semantics and Necessary Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1959), chapter 7, “The linguistic theory of the apriori,” and Alvin Plantinga, The
Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
6 For an accessible review of different relevant views, see Michael Loux, Metaphysics
(London: Routledge, 1998).
7 If you want another counterexample and are willing to have it more complicated
than our other examples, here are two: For any formal system S, if S is adequate for
number theory (e.g., if its axioms are strong enough to entail Peano’s postulates)
there will be some formula F that is both expressible in S and undecidable in S and
its corollary For any formal system S, if S is adequate for number theory, there can
be no proof within S of the claim S is consistent. These are hardly uninformative or
mathematically trivial.
8 Due to Alvin Plantinga; see The Nature of Necessity, op. cit., and God, Freedom, and
Evil (New York: Random House, 1974). The former contains the full-dress, and the
latter a streamlined, version of the argument.
9 Note that, on the principle For all x, if x is actual then x is possible that the actual
world is (also) a possible world.
10 Note that to be true in all possible worlds and to be included in every maximal
proposition are the same.
11 In am using “empirical” here very broadly.
12 This strategy may also seem attractive if one wishes to hedge one’s bet regarding the
interpretation of Scripture on how God and the universe are related.