Umeå universitets logga

In this article, I present a Leibnizian cosmological argument to the conclusion that either the totality of physical beings has a non-physical cause, or a necessary being exists. The crucial premise of the argument is a restricted version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, namely the claim that every contingent physical phenomenon has a sufficient cause (PSR-P). I defend this principle by comparing it with a causal principle that is fundamental for physicalism, namely the Causal Closure of Physics, which says that every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause (CC). I find that the evidence for Causal Closure is weaker than the evidence for PSR-P, which means that physicalists who take CC to be justified must concede that PSR-P is also justified, and to a higher degree. Since my Leibnizian cosmological argument succeeds if PSR-P is granted, I conclude that physicalists must either give up CC and thereby physicalism, or accept that a necessary being exists.

Cardinal Walter Kasper has presented a proposal according to which divorced and remarried Catholics may receive Eucharistic Communion, provided that they satisfy certain conditions. He argues that his proposal is merely pastoral, and that it has no implications for the Catholic doctrine of marriage. This article demonstrates that Kasper's proposal in fact entails a significant revision of the  doctrine of marriage by changing the meaning of the marriage commitment. 

Cardinal Walter Kasper has presented a proposal according to which divorced and remarried Catholics may, under certain conditions, receive Holy Communion. “Traditionalists” in moral theology have firmly rejected the proposal on moral grounds, while “revisionists” have been more receptive to it. This article presents a method by which the question of the moral tolerability of second, civil marriages for divorced Catholics can be settled. The method is neutral between “traditionalists” and “revisionists” in the sense that it does not take for granted the truth of any traditionalist dogma, such as the existence of intrinsically evil acts. The method should, in fact, be more acceptable to “revisionists” than to “traditionalists”. Still, when the method is applied to the question of the moral tolerability of second, civil marriages, it gives a negative verdict. This leads to the conclusion that “revisionists” as well as “traditionalists” in moral theology have strong reason to reject Cardinal Kasper’s proposal.       

I kapitel 7 diskuterar Mats Wahlberg det evolutionära lidandets problem. Han delar in detta i två delar. Det första rör hur teismen kan hantera det lidande som jordens evolutionära historia har medfört för icke-mänskliga varelser, det andra hur teismen kan hantera det faktum att evolutionsprocessen i hög grad tycks drivas av en sorts kapprustning där utplåningen av mindre lämpade individer och arter utgör en förutsättning för framväxten av högre biologisk komplexitet.

Wahlberg menar att båda problemen kan hanteras om man accepterar tanken att en skapelse som har en viss grad av autonomi och som dessutom är delvis ”självskapande” är mer värdefull än en skapelse som saknar dessa egenskaper. För historiska tänkare som Augustinus och Thomas av Aquino bygger inte skapelsens autonomi på att Gud ”drar sig tillbaka” och avstår från att blanda sig i det som sker (som många samtida teodicister har hävdat). Skapelsen får istället sin tillbörliga autonomi genom att Guds allomfattande kausalitet respekterar de skapade tingens naturer, så att Gud handlar med tingen på ett sätt som överensstämmer med de inneboende lagar och principer han själv lagt ned.

Mot bakgrund av detta synsätt argumenterar Wahlberg för att en evolutionärt ”självskapande” värld har en djupare delaktighet i Gud som causa prima – källan till all kausalitet – än en värld där Gud skapar utan hjälp av sekundära orsaker. Det betyder att en evolutionär skapelse återspeglar Guds härlighet i högre grad, och att det evolutionära lidandets problem kan besvaras av teismen med hänvisning till detta större goda.

A commonly heard claim is that the Catholic Church’s non-admission of women to the priesthood is unjust. But what about the behavior of Christ, who selected only men when he constituted the group of the Twelve? Did Christ thereby violate justice? Most proponents of female ordination deny that he did. Typically, they argue that it would have been practically impossible – that is, extremely imprudent – for Christ to appoint women as religious leaders in a first century Jewish context. I argue that this defense of Christ’s behavior fails. If women objectively have a right to be considered for all religious leadership positions (as advocates of female ordination typically claim), then no prudential reasons can make it morally acceptable to deny them this right. It is equally problematic to defend Christ’s non-selection of women by appealing to his presumed ignorance of women’s rights, or by arguing that the moral norms were objectively different in his day. After having considered and rejected a number of suggested or conceivable ways to exonerate Christ without at the same time exonerating the Church, I conclude that there is no fundamental moral difference between Christ’s non-admission of women to the Twelve and the Church’s non-admission of women to the priesthood. Hence, if the Church violates gender justice, then so did Christ. Since the idea that Christ violated justice is very difficult to square with the Christian faith, I conclude that Christians cannot reasonably believe that the Church’s non-admission of women to the priesthood is unjust.

In this article, I first interpret and evaluate the main argument of E.V.R. Kojonen’s book, The Compatibility of Evolution and Design. I then address a challenge against this argument (as well as against design arguments in general), namely the problem of seemingly malevolent and bad designs in nature. Evolutionary theodicists commonly deal with this problem by assuming that the evolutionary process is not fully under God’s control. This solution, however, is deeply problematic from the perspective of classical theism. I therefore suggest another approach to the problem, inspired by the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

“Revelation” (lat. revelatio) is a translation of the Greek word apokalypsis, which means the removal of a veil so that something can be seen. Many religions appeal to purported divine revelations in order to explain and justify their characteristic beliefs about God, and revelation has usually been understood as an epistemic notion. Paradigmatically, it refers to alleged instances of divine speaking or special divine acts in history, although in a more general sense “revelation” can denote any means of divine self-disclosure, for example through nature. The topic of divine revelation has been a long-standing and central focus in theology, and philosophical discussions have often taken their cues from Christian theological debates. This entry will treat theological perspectives only in so far as they are relevant for philosophical questions about the purported nature and means of divine revelation and the justification of revelatory claims.

How can the immense amount of suffering and waste inherent in the evolutionary process be reconciled with the existence of a perfectly good and omnipotent God? A widely embraced proposal in the area of “evolutionary theodicy” is the so-called “Only Way”-argument. This argument contends that certain valuable goods – in particular, creaturely independence and human freedom – can only come about through a genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled process of evolution. In a previous article, I have argued that the “Only Way”-argument can be defeated by a “Twin Earth”-thought experiment: If God is omnipotent, he could have created – directly, without evolution – creatures that are molecule-for-molecule identical to those that he actually created through evolution. If the creatures that he actually created have freedom and independence, there is no valid reason to deny that the non-evolved “twin creatures” would also be free and independent. Recently, Eikrem and Søvik (ES) have suggested a way of blocking my Twin Earth-argument by appealing to the distinction between type-values and token-values (or type-goods and token-goods). While ES admit that the Twin Earth-argument shows the non-necessity of evolution for the existence of certain type-goods, they argue that an evolutionary creation can be justified by appeal to valuable token-goods (unique particulars) that could not have existed without evolution. In this article, I respond to ES’s token-goods argument by showing that it is incompatible with a basic presupposition of “Only Way” evolutionary theodicies, namely the claim that the evolutionary process is genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled.

In this article, I do two things. First, I will argue – drawing extensively on Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis of Fides et Ratio – that the doctrine of Thomistic realism is entailed by the encyclical’s portrait of the human being as a seeker of truth. Fides et Ratio can therefore be read as a philosophical argument in favor of realism, starting from the premise that humans are essentially “philosophizing animals”. With the purpose of highlighting the contemporary importance of the pope’s message, I will then reflect on the consequences – philosophical and cultural – of rejecting the encyclical’s portrait of human nature and the Thomistic realism it implies.

Second, I will ask whether the encyclical’s optimism about reason’s ability to attain universal truth is tenable in light of the alleged demise of “foundationalism” and the contemporary suspicion – persuasively voiced by MacIntyre – against “universal standards of rationality”. Is the pope’s belief in the viability of perennial philosophy and the universality of reason blue-eyed?

[KULTURDEBATT] När Björn Ulvaeus skriver att han inte kan förstå varför människor ber till Gud i coronatider eftersom Gud ”förorsakat eländet”, sätter han fingret på en öm punkt. Det skriver teologiforskaren Mats Wahlberg, men menar samtidigt att viruset inte är något bevis för att Gud inte är god eller allsmäktig.

In this article, I clarify and deepen my criticism of methodological naturalism in biblical studies and other historical disciplines. Responding to Tobias Hägerland’s and Cecilia Wassén’s defense of this methodological paradigm, I make three main points. First, I argue that while methodological naturalism might be a reasonable posture in the natural sciences, the same is not the case in historical studies. The natural sciences study nature – natural mechanisms and laws – which means that supernatural and irreducibly personal causes (such as God) fall outside their purview. When it comes to the study of history, on the other hand, nothing that has impacted human culture in the past is by definition outside of the discipline’s sphere of interest. This goes for supernatural as well as natural causes. History is the study of the past, not the study of the natural. Second, I scrutinize Hägerland’s and Wassén’s claim that methodological naturalism cannot be abandoned because this would complicate the process of testing historical hypotheses, thereby expanding the role of subjective judgment. This line of argument is fundamentally misconceived. If supernatural explanations are possibly true, it would be patently irrational to exclude them from scholarly consideration on the ground that they would complicate the process of testing and adjudicating between hypotheses. Third, I defend N.T. Wright’s argument in favor of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus against two interrelated lines of criticism.  

The concept of merit, according to a Catholic understanding, is dictated by the nature of the divine grace that moves Christians to good works without violating their freedom. The Lutheran tradition, however, rejects the meritorious character of good works, at least in the context of salvation. In this article, it is argued that the new, Finnish Luther interpretation undermines the basis for Lutheranism’s traditional resistance to the notion of merit. A tentative conclusion is that a Lutheranism that appropriates the Finnish interpretation has reason to embrace the applicability of merit-language in soteriological contexts.

it is often claimed that our knowledge of the evolutionary process adds an extra dimension to the classical problem of natural evil and makes this problem worse. Especially the principle of natural selection is often portrayed as morally inappropriate or “unfitting” for a perfectly good God to use as a means for creating biological complexity. In this article, I argue that this common view is misconceived, and that natural selection is a wholly innocuous principle. The real source of evolutionary evils is the fact that resources in nature are scarce – a fact that was known long before Darwin. The problem of natural and evolutionary evil, therefore, is best construed as a question about why God permits scarcity in nature. I argue that recent research about the interrelation between competition and cooperation in the evolutionary process provides resources for answering this perennial question in a more satisfactory way than could be done before the advent of evolutionary theory.

In this article, I first reflect on the background of the debate between myself and Eikrem and Søvik and make some clarificatory remarks about the term “Only Way argument”, which figured in the article that started the exchange. I then map areas of agreement and disagreement between us, with an eye to discerning promising and less promising paths forward in the field of evolutionary theodicy. Finally, I respond to Eikrem’s and Søvik’s criticism of my previous arguments about token-goods.

Is nature creation or merely the product of non-intentional, natural processes? Mats Wahlberg argues that our perceptual experiences of nature can settle this question in favor of creation. He suggests that biological nature has expressive properties of a kind similar to human behavior and art. We may therefore be able to perceive – directly – nature as creation, i.e. as expressive of the mind of a creator. This idea resonates with the traditional Christian claim that God’s invisible nature can be ‘clearly perceived in the things that have been made’ (Rom 1:20). Wahlberg’s interpretation of this claim contradicts the common view that the existence of a creator must be established by inferential argument.   

The book’s thesis is compatible with the fact that biological organisms have evolved by natural selection. Its viability depends, however, on the rejection of certain common assumptions about the nature of mind and perception – assumptions that may properly be called ‘Cartesian’. The author presents and defends an anti-Cartesian stance on mind and perception, inspired mainly by the work of the philosopher John McDowell. The philosophical resources provided by this stance are then drawn on to defend the book’s version of natural theology.       

The dissertation examines, on the basis of insights from contemporary analytic philosophy of testimony, the intellectual viability of the traditional Christian conception of revelation as divine testimony. This conception entails that God reveals by speaking, and that people can acquire knowledge of God and divine things by believing what God says. In academic theology of recent decades, this view is often dismissed under the label of “propositional revelation,” and viewed as authoritarian and intellectually problematic. Recent developments within the analytic philosophy of testimony, however, provide grounds for a reevaluation of the view.  

The dissertation has two purposes. One is to clarify the concept of propositional revelation and to examine what the consequences are, for Christian theology, of rejecting this idea. The second purpose is to investigate whether there is a way of explicating the divine testimony-model of revelation (traditionally the most prominent version of propositional revelation) so as to render it intellectually credible today.

Chapter 1 describes the research problem and the method. Chapters 2-3 address the first purpose by distinguishing, following Nicholas Wolterstorff, between manifestational and propositional conceptions of revelation, and by arguing that unless theologians posit some form of propositional revelation (e.g. revelation as divine testimony), theology will be threatened by incoherence. On the basis of a survey of several manifestational theories of revelation, selected on the basis of Avery Dulles’s categorization, the author argues that they all suffer from certain systematic limitations connected to their manifestational character. Since manifestational models of revelation provide an insufficient basis for theology, theologians have reason to take a second look at the intellectual viability of the propositional model of revelation as divine testimony.      

   To evaluate the viability of this model is the second and main purpose of the dissertation, and it is addressed by the method of hypothesis construction and testing. In the present context, this means to construct a version of the divine testimony-model with the help of the best philosophical and theological tools available, and to examine whether internal coherence and coherence with established knowledge can be achieved, and if the model can withstand various types of criticism. In chapters 4 and 5, the author describes the philosophical tools that will be used, viz. Nicholas Wolterstorff’s analysis of the idea of divine speech, and John McDowell’s analysis of testimony as a source of epistemic justification and knowledge. In chapters 6-8, the model is elaborated using these tools and tested for internal coherence, coherence with external knowledge such as contemporary Biblical scholarship, and coherence with Biblical and traditional views of the nature of Christian faith. The model’s ability to withstand philosophical objections of various kinds is also examined. The tentative conclusion of the dissertation is that the model is intellectually viable in light of current knowledge, but that further testing in the context of a wider scholarly debate is needed.

According to the pre-modern Christian tradition, knowledge of God is mainly testimonial: we know certain important truths about God and divine things because God himself has told them to us. In academic theology of late this view is often summarily dismissed. But to do so is a mistake, claims Mats Wahlberg, who argues in this book that the testimonial understanding of revelation is indispensable to Christian theology.

Criticizing the currently common idea that revelation should be construed exclusively in terms of God's self-manifestation in history or through inner experience, Wahlberg discusses the concept of divine testimony in the context of the debate about how any knowledge of God is possible. He draws on resources from contemporary analytic philosophy— especially John McDowell and Nicholas Wolterstorff — to argue for the intellectual viability of revelation as divine testimony. 

This dissertation constructively explores the implications for natural theology of (especially) John McDowell’s anti-Cartesian philosophy of mind and perception. Traditionally, an important element within natural theology is the idea that nature testifies to its creator, thereby making knowledge of a creator available to humans. In traditional accounts, the relevant knowledge is usually conceived as inferential. From observations of “the things that have been made” (Rom 1: 20), we may reason our way to the existence of a creator.

The dissertation presents an alternative construal of creation’s testimony. It argues that biological nature may have expressive properties of a similar kind as human behaviour and art seem to have. We may be able to perceive nature as creation, i.e., as expressive of the mind of a creator. The knowledge of a creator acquired from nature is, according to this construal, perceptual rather than inferential.

The viability of the dissertation’s suggestion depends, however, on the rejection of certain common and fundamental assumptions about the nature of mind and perception – assumptions that may rightly be called “Cartesian.” In chapters 1-3, a radically anti-Cartesian outlook on mind and perception, drawn mainly from McDowell’s work, is presented. The outlook (labelled “open-mindedness”) conceives the mind as a system of essentially world-involving capacities. One such capacity is perception, which is portrayed as (when all goes well) a direct, cognitive openness to the world.

Chapter 4 argues that open-mindedness makes an attractive construal of our knowledge of “other minds” available. Human behaviour may, as McDowell suggests, be construed as having expressive properties, i.e., perceivable properties the instantiation of which logically entails the instantiation of certain mental properties. The main problem confronting this idea is the so-called “argument from pretence” – a version of the more general “argument from illusion.” The fact that behaviour that is the result of pretence can be indistinguishable, for an observer, from behaviour that is genuinely expressive of the mental property pain, can seem to entail that it is impossible to perceive that somebody else is in pain. It is argued that accepting the outlook of open-mindedness and the view of perception it includes dissolves this problem and makes it possible to construe (some of) our knowledge of the mental states of other people as perceptual rather than inferential knowledge.

Chapter 5 argues that the same philosophical moves that dissolve the “problem of other minds” also can be used to overcome the problems confronting the (from a Christian perspective) attractive idea that nature may be perceptibly expressive of the mind of a creator. It is argued that the idea that other phenomena than human behaviour can be genuinely expressive of mind is not at all counter-intuitive. Artworks have, for instance, (according to a common view) expressive properties that make something of the mental life of the artist available to others. Furthermore, many people seem to have experiences in which natural structures appear to them as intentionally created. Even atheists report that biological organisms strike them as “designed.” Experiences in which natural phenomena appear to the subject as intentionally created or “designed” are candidates for being veridical perceptions of expressive properties in nature. It is argued that the suggested construal of biological nature as expressive of the mind of a creator is completely compatible with the fact that biological species have evolved by natural selection. Chapter 6 briefly reflects on the consequences of the dissertation’s argument for Christian theology.

David Bentley Hart has recently argued that universal salvation is a metaphysically necessary outcome of God’s act of creating rational beings. A crucial premise of Hart’s argument is a compatibilist view of free will, according to which God can determine human choices without taking away their freedom. This view constitutes common ground between Hart and the tradition of classical Thomism, which emphasizes the non-competitive relation between human freedom and God’s universal causality. Unfortunately, Thomistic compatibilism undermines the so-called Free Will Defense, which is often considered to be the only viable way of responding to contemporary criticism of the doctrine of hell. Can the existence of hell be reconciled with God’s goodness given a Thomistic conception of rational freedom? This question is of interest not only to followers of Aquinas but to anyone who rejects a ‘zero-sum competition’ between freedom and grace, and who also believes that divine revelation confirms the possibility of perdition. The present article proposes an alternative to the Free Will Defense - called The Thomistic Autonomy Defense - which aims to block Hart’s arguments for the necessity of universal salvation.

Some New Testament scholars argue that as historians, they must reject all miracle reports a priori. When asked to justify this view, the scholars usually appeal to some of the following philosophical claims:

1) Miracles are incompatible with our natural scientific knowledge.

2) Even though miracles are theoretically possible, we can never be rationally justified in believing that a reported miracle actually happened (Hume’s argument).

3) Miracles entail the existence of a supernatural realm, and the supernatural (God) cannot be the object of scientific or scholarly knowledge or study.

I argue that there are no good reasons to believe any of these claims, which should be regarded as “myths”. The first claim confuses science with a controversial philosophical theory – naturalism. The second claim is undermined by the devastating philosophical criticism that has been directed at Hume’s anti-miracle argument. The third claim entails that philosophers of religion who debate theistic arguments are wasting their time, since no theistic argument can ever succeed. It is very unclear, however, how anybody could possibly know that no theistic argument can ever succeed.

All three myths are exemplified in a recent book by Cecilia Wassén and Tobias Hägerland: Den okände Jesus: Berättelsen om en profet som misslyckades (The Unknown Jesus: The Story of a Prophet Who Failed). Taking this work as my point of departure, I discuss the myths with reference to a wider horizon of Swedish and international Jesus research. I also suggest a more reasonable framework for dealing with miracle reports in the context of historical scholarship.

Evolutionary theodicies are attempts to explain how the enormous amount of suffering, premature death and extinction inherent in the evolutionary process can be reconciled with belief in a loving and almighty God. A common strategy in this area is to argue that certain very valuable creaturely attributes could only be exemplified by creatures that are produced by a partly random and uncontrolled process of evolution. Evolution, in other words, was the only possible way for God to create these kinds of creatures. This article presents and examines two versions of the “only way”-argument. The anthropocentric version tries to justify God’s use of evolution by reference to the value of human freedom, and argues that freedom presupposes that God lets go of full control over the process of creation (Arthur Peacocke, Nancey Murphy). The non-anthropocentric version presents a similar argument with respect to more inclusive creaturely properties, such as that of being “truly other” than God, or of being a “creaturely self” with a certain degree of autonomy in relation to God (John Polkinghorne, John Haught, Christopher Southgate). With the help of a number of thought-experiments of the “Twin-Earth”-type, the author argues that both the anthropocentric and the non-anthropocentric only way-arguments fail.

With his magisterial tome The Church as Polis: From Political Theology to Theological Politics as Exemplified by Jürgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas, Arne Rasmusson emerged as the world’s foremost expositor and defender of Stanley Hauerwas’s ecclesiology. Given the close relationship between Hauerwas’s and Rasmusson’s thought, it is appropriate to speak of an ecclesiological “Hauerwas-Rasmusson paradigm”, centered on the idea of the church as polis. This paradigm will be the object of critical attention in the present essay, where I will argue that the ecclesiological ideas of Hauerwas and Rasmusson are incompatible with the broadly ecumenical conception of “church” that the two authors promote. The inner logic of the Hauerwas-Rasmusson paradigm requires a well-defined notion of church, such as can be found in the Second Vatican Councils constitution Lumen Gentium. 

Protestant critique of the Catholic idea of inherent righteousness has, since the time of the Reformation, given rise to counter-questions about the status of faith in Protestant theology. Is faith a human condition for justification (that is, a human act or inherent property which is necessary for justification), and why should not faith in that case be counted as a kind of work? Many Protestant theologians, however, view it as very important to dissociate faith from works. This article examines a number of Protestant attempts to explain why faith is not a work. The examined explanations rely on a number of ideas, for example, that faith is not a work because faith is a gift of God, or because faith is non-voluntary, or because faith is not a condition of justification, or because faith does not merit justification, or because faith is union with Christ. The problem with many of these Protestant answers to the question of why faith is not a work is that they can equally well be used to explain why the supernatural virtue of love is not a work. The Reformers, however, strongly associated love with ‘works of the law’, and wanted to keep love out of the doctrine of justification. For Protestants who share this view of love, the present article poses a challenge. Is it possible to dissociate faith from works without at the same time dissociating love from works, thereby legitimising the Tridentine understanding of justification? The author concludes that this is indeed possible, but only if an important identity marker for much Protestant theology is given up, namely the purely forensic understanding of the doctrine of justification.