No best world: moral luck

William Rowe and others argue that if ours is a possible world than which there is a better, it follows that God does not exist. If this is correct, then if there is no best possible world, it is not so much as possible that God exist. I reject the key premise of Rowe's argument. The key to seeing that it is false, I suggest, is seeing that God is subject to something fairly called moral luck. In this first part of the article, I set up Rowe's argument, indicate my strategy, introduce the notion of moral luck and show how it bears on Rowe's claims

The nature of necessity

I give an account of the nature of absolute or metaphysical necessity. Absolute-necessarily P, I suggest, just if it is always the case that P and there never is or was a power with a chance to bring it about, bring about a power to bring it about, etc. that not P. I display both advantages and a cost of this sort of definition

Presentism, atemporality and time's way

After defining presentism, I consider four arguments that presentism and divine atemporality are incompatible. I identify an assumption common to the four, ask what reason there is to consider it true, and argue against it

A naturalist cosmological argument

I rebut a “naturalist” counter to Swinburne’s Bayesian cosmological argument, based on the supposedly superior simplicity of naturalism

The nature of necessity

I give an account of the nature of absolute or metaphysical necessity. Absolute-necessarily P, I suggest, just if it is always the case that P and there never is or was a power with a chance to bring it about, bring about a power to bring it about, etc. that not P. I display both advantages and a cost of this sort of definition

Presentism, atemporality and time's way

After defining presentism, I consider four arguments that presentism and divine atemporality are incompatible. I identify an assumption common to the four, ask what reason there is to consider it true, and argue against it

The Trinity is unconstitutional

Some marble, appropriately worked, comes to constitute a status: constitution is the relation between the resulting statue and the marble it is made of. Some recent authors use the concept of constitution to explicate or at least provide an analogy for the doctrine of the Trinity. I argue that this won’t do, because there is no viable candidate for the role the marble plays in the statue’s case