Editorial preface
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Editorial preface R. L. Hall1 Published online: 19 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In our first essay, James Dominic Rooney defends the claim that a doctrine of physical premotions is necessary if traditional theists are adequately to account for a notion of divine causality that makes room for human freedom. The doctrine of physical premotions is about the process of choosing and not about some fact of the matter regarding what is chosen. Accordingly, this doctrine denies that God directly intervenes in human choices. To the contrary, it affirms that God is the cause of the human process of freedom, not the cause of the outcome of a free decision. That is, the doctrine of physical premotions holds that God does not choose or us or cause us to choose what we choose. Rather, in creating us as he did, God vested human beings with the capacity to engage in the process of free deliberation. Because God gracefully created human beings with the capacity to exercise human freedom, every choice is dependent on God’s grace as its efficient cause. Daniel Statman begins the second article in this issue with the observation that modern orthodox rabbis are often considered more moderate than their ultra-orthodox counterparts when it comes to an openness to considering moral arguments regarding the relative independence of Jewish law from divine commands. Statman considers some central figures such as Walter Wurzburger, Eliezer Berkovits and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, to show that the modern orthodox approach to morality is somewhat more ambivalent regarding this matter of independence. As it turns out, modern orthodox thinkers may have more in common with ultra-orthodox rabbis than is usually supposed. On this point, both sides agree that in conflicts between divine commandments and morality, the former must take precedence. If morality is independent of God, then God, or religion, seems to become redundant in the moral domain. If it is not, morality seems to be arbitrary, unstable, and lacking in value. As Patrick Monaghan has noted, it is unusual to find philosophers so widely and so readily agreeing that some proposed argument has been so thoroughly and so completely defeated that it has been taken off the table as no longer worthy of further comment or defense. This is what Monaghan thinks has happened to John Mackie’s argument that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of God. Most agree that Mackie’s argument is invalid or unsound and that it has * R. L. Hall [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Stetson University, Deland, FL 32723, USA
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International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2020) 88:137–138
definitively been shown to be so. Without further ado, philosophers of religion have turned to a harder problem, what is called the evidential problem of evil. Monaghan rejects the assumption made by apparently all parties to the debate, which is that there is only one logical problem of evil and it has been defeated once and for all. His purp
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