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Questioning the Story

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Is God the Best Explanation of Things?

Abstract

This chapter raises questions and concerns Rasmussen’s Great Story theodicy against the cumulative case argument I sketched in Chapter 14. My worries include its uneasy fit with other parts of theism, its appeal to the free will of finite persons, its soul-making elements, its complexity, and the plausibility of the expectation of a story-like history of finite creatures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Though not necessarily agents with libertarian moral freedom. More on this in my previous chapter and below.

  2. 2.

    For concerns about the compatibility of theism with healthy human autonomy, see Kahane (2011). See also the papers in Kraay (2017) for more on this and related concerns.

  3. 3.

    In a way akin to how my own mitigated modal skepticism leads me to agnosticism about intrinsic limits/boundaries to an ultimate foundation that can’t be known a priori.

  4. 4.

    For an extended discussion of this and related problems, see, e.g., Morriston (2000, 2002) and Leon (2019).

  5. 5.

    For a rigorous development and defense of this line of reasoning, see Rowe (2004).

  6. 6.

    For an important development and defense of this point, see Schellenberg (2007).

  7. 7.

    It’s important to note that many of these experts are theists.

  8. 8.

    Again, see McKenzie (2017) for a scientifically informed defense of this claim.

  9. 9.

    Cf. Manson (2018).

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Correspondence to Felipe Leon .

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Leon, F. (2019). Questioning the Story. In: Is God the Best Explanation of Things?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23752-3_16

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