This line of reasoning leads to the moral attributes of “God as a holy lawgiver, a benevolent sustainer of the world, and a just judge.” A major problem of the philosophy of religion we have yet to consider is the problem of evil. If they are using moral language intelligibly, how could it be that the very meaning of such moral language should be analyzed in terms of Divine volitions? According to this theory, moral judgments can be analyzed in terms of how an ideal observer would judge matters. Theistic voluntarists face several difficulties: moral language seems intelligible without having to be explained in terms of the Divine will. In reply, some voluntarists have sought to understand the stability of the moral laws in light of God’s immutably fixed, necessary nature. Thus belief in Allah and His Prophet means commitment to obey them and to fashion individual and collective life in the light of the law and the guidance that Allah revealed to His Prophet. Zagzebski’s theory is perhaps the most ambitious virtue theory in print, offering an account of human virtues in light of theism. At best, it may not justify a full picture of the God of religion (a First Cause would be powerful, but not necessarily omnipotent), but it would nonetheless challenge naturalistic alternatives and provide some reason theism.

For example, an argument from the apparent order and purposive nature of the cosmos will be criticized on the grounds that, at best, the argument would establish there is a purposive, designing intelligence at work in the cosmos. Another reason is that, due to the nature of religious belief itself, if any kind of belief is inappropriate for public deliberation, then religious beliefs will be the prime candidate, either because they are irrational, or immune to critique, or unverifiable, etc. In other words, religion provides a useful test case in evaluating theories of public deliberation. The focus of the argument is the thesis that, if there is a God, then God’s existence is necessary. The crucial moves in arguments that the cosmos and its contents belong to their Creator have been to guard against the idea that human parents would then “own” their children (they do not, because parents are not radical creators like God), and the idea that Divine ownership would permit anything, thus construing human duties owed to God as the duties of a slave to a master (a view to which not all theists have objected). Religious participation has typically been tightly connected to the timeline of important life events, such as getting married and having children.

A new development in theorizing about God’s goodness has been advanced in Zagzebski 2004. Zagzebski contends that being an exemplary virtuous person consists in having good motives. A special note: The purpose for this teaching is that we may begin to understand the goodness of God as opposed to the evilness of the devil. If so, must not the very notion of goodness have some meaning independent of God’s will? It appears that in calling God or in particular God’s will “good” the religious believer is saying more than “God wills what God wills”. The Grim Reaper is a more recent version of the angel of death, born in the Middle Ages as a personification of the Black Death. A common version of theistic voluntarism is the claim that for something to be good or right simply means that God approves of permits it and for something to be bad or wrong means that God disapproves or forbids it. The ontological argument goes back to St. Anselm (1033/34-1109), but this section shall explore a current version relying heavily on the principle that if something is possibly necessarily the case, then it is necessarily the case (or, to put it redundantly, it is necessarily necessary).

If God is simultaneous with the event of Rome burning in 410 CE, and also simultaneous with your reading this entry, then it seems that Rome must be burning at the same time you are reading this entry. Some argue that the cosmos had an initial cause outside it, a First Cause in time. Both versions of the argument ask us to consider the cosmos in its present state. Theories spelling out why and how the cosmos belongs to God have been prominent in all three monotheistic traditions. Finally, while the great monotheistic traditions provide a portrait of the Divine as supremely different from the creation, there is also an insistence on God’s proximity or immanence. According to one such moderate stance, while God cannot make cruelty good, God can make some actions morally required or morally forbidden which otherwise would be morally neutral. On each of the 10 small beads, say a Hail Mary while continuing to meditate on the mystery. To say an act is right entails a commitment to holding that if there were an ideal observer, it would approve of the act; to claim an act is wrong entails the thesis that if there were an ideal observer, it would disapprove of it.