The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology

283 Pages·1987·13.812 MB·English

by  Robert Merrihew Adams

The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays
in Philosophical Theology
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The Virtue of Faith
and Other Essays in
Philosophical Theology
Robert Merrihew Adams
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1987
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1987 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adams, Robert Merrihew.
The virtue of faith and other essays in philosophical
theology.
1. Religion—Philosophy. 2. Ethics. I. Title.
BL51.A42 1987 200'. 1 86-8776
ISBN 0-19-504145-3
ISBN 0-19-504146-1 (pbk.)
Since this page cannot accommodate all the copyright notices,
the page that follows constitutes an extension of the copyright pages.
2 4 68 10 9 7 5 31
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
"The Virtue of Faith." From Faith and Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1984).
Reprinted by permission of Faith and Philosophy.
"Kierkegaard's Arguments Against Objective Reasoning in Religion." The Mo-
nist, 60 (1976). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
"Must God Create the Best?" Philosophical Review, 81 (1972). Reprinted by
permission of the publisher.
"Existence, Self-interest, and the Problem of Evil." Nous, 13 (1979). Reprinted
by permission of the publisher.
"Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil." American Philosophical Quar-
terly, 14 (1977). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
"A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness." From Religion
and Morality: A Collection of Essays, edited by Gene Outka and John P. Reeder,
Jr. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
"Autonomy and Theological Ethics." Religious Studies, 15 (1979). Published by
Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
"Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again." The Journal of Religious Eth-
ics, vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring 1979), 66-79. Reprinted by permission of the pub-
lisher.
"Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief." Reprinted with permission from C. F.
Delaney, ed., Rationality and Religious Belief. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1979, pp. 116-40.
"Saints." The Journal of Philosophy, 81 (1984). Reprinted by permission of the
publisher.
"Pure Love." The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1980), 83-
99. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
"Has It Been Proved That All Real Existence Is Contingent?" American Philo-
sophical Quarterly, 8 (1971). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
"Divine Necessity." The Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1983). Reprinted by per-
mission of the publisher.
"The Logical Structure of Anselm's Arguments." The Philosophical Review, 80
(1971). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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For Marilyn
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Acknowledgments
My teachers in the philosophy of religion, John Marsh and John Hick,
and my Doktorvater, Nelson Pike, will recognize in some of the papers
ideas on which I was working under their tutelage. I am grateful to them
for their guidance and encouragement, and to Professor Hick in particular
for the suggestion that led me to assemble this collection.
It is also a pleasure to acknowledge the generous opportunities for re-
search provided to me as a faculty member by the University of Michi-
gan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Fellow-
ships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Center
of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, provided much-appre-
ciated support during periods of leave, when some of the papers were
written or reworked. Detailed acknowledgments are also contained in notes
to the individual papers.
I am grateful to Cynthia Read and Henry Krawitz of Oxford University
Press for their editorial work on this volume, and to my research assistant,
Marleen Rozemond, for much help in the final stages of its preparation.