Abstract
Axiology is the study of value, and the book asks whether the existence of God would make the world better or worse. Four scholars write essays on this general theme. Michael Almeida expounds what he calls ‘theistic modal realism’, according to which there is a supremely valuable God who necessarily creates every possible world. If this were true, he holds, it would maximally increase the value of the world. Travis Dumsday expresses a worry that the terms of the debate (either an Abrahamic God or a reductive naturalism) are unduly narrow. Nevertheless, he is agnostic about the value of two alternatives – pantheism and polytheism – and implies that a personal God is most likely to add value to the world. Perry Hendricks addresses the problem of evil, and argues that, for all we know, there may be values, unknown to us, that justify the evils of the world, and that life with God is an overwhelmingly great value. Thus, overall, theism offers value to the world that naturalism cannot supply. Graham Oppy argues that spiritual realities are impossible, and so the question of their value simply cannot arise for him, since he himself cannot put a value on something that is impossible.
Each participant comments on the essays by the others, and the discussion is both illuminating and logically rigorous. The format provides a very good example of discussion in the tradition of analytical theology, and the book is an excellent introduction to this tradition.
I have two hesitations: as a former lecturer in logic, I regard formal logic as an unsatisfactory tool for analysing poetic or religious language. This comes out most obviously in Dumsday’s otherwise excellent chapter, where he is forced to give a description of Advaita Vedanta that no practitioner would accept. It is not that he is wrong; it is just that the logical constraints he accepts do not allow this school of thought to be sympathetically described.
In a similar way, I was very surprised that the editor thinks that the book provides a ‘general overview of the literature on the axiology of theism’ (p. 3) and that ‘the axiological question is relatively new in the philosophy of religion’ (p. 13). This is obviously false. Among the many writers who make axiology basic to their philosophy and have written major books about it are John Findlay, John Leslie, Andrew Davis, John McDowell and Fiona Ellis. There is a huge amount of discussion on axiology in sources that are not even considered in the book under review. Analytical theology is, after all, only one small part of philosophy of religion.
I commend this book as a good example of the sorts of clarity and rigour it has to offer, but it also illustrates the limitations of its methodology. And the assumption that a collection of articles in a small number of journals is the whole of the philosophy of religion is frankly absurd.