Ian M Church

The problem of evil is an ideal topic for experimental philosophy. Suffering - which is at the heart of most prominent formulations of the problem of evil - is a universal human experience and has been the topic of careful reflection for millennia. However, interpretations of suffering and how it bears on the existence of God are tremendously diverse and nuanced. Why does suffering push some people toward atheism while pushing others toward deeper faith? What cultural, psychological, or sociological differences account for this diversity of responses? And, importantly, what light might this diversity of responses shed on the problem of evil and how it has been formulated by philosophers in recent years? The aim of this article is to highlight how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to the problem of evil. In the first section, we review some recent work in this area and describe the current state of this emergent body of literature. In the second section, we review the broader and more recent theoretical developments on the problem of evil. In the final section, we outline some potential areas of future empirical research that we see as especially promising given those developments.

Abstract Experimental philosophy of religion is the project of taking the tools and resources of the human sciences—especially psychology and cognitive science—and bringing them to bear on issues within philosophy of religion toward explicit philosophical ends. This paper introduces readers to experimental philosophy of religion. §2 explores the contours of experimental philosophy of religion by contrasting it with a few related fields: the psychology of religion and cognitive science of religion, on the one hand, and natural theology, on the other. §3 offers a brief history of experimental philosophy of religion. The goal in this section is to highlight the ancient pedigree of this emerging area of research; as the contemporary experimental philosophy of religion literature expands and proliferates, it's important to remember that this field has deep historical roots. Then, §4 focuses on the following questions: Why should we care about experimental philosophy of religion? And why is it needed?

The Gettier dilemma facing reductive analyses of knowledge has not been properly appreciated by virtue epistemologists or even virtue epistemology's most vocal critics. This paper starts by considering how recent critics of virtue epistemology understand the Gettier problem facing virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge. The paper highlights how the dilemma facing virtue-theoretic analyses of knowledge is more general than these critics seem to suggest. It then elucidates the worry that the threat facing virtue epistemology is really a dilemma between Gettier counterexamples and radical skepticism. Finally, the paper considers how some recent virtue epistemologists have tried to viably defuse the Gettier problem. It shows (i) just how the critiques it elucidates have (mis)shaped the dialectic between virtue epistemology and what is required in solving Gettier counterexamples and (ii) how this has led to virtue epistemologists underestimating the widespread insidiousness of Gettier counterexamples.

While the evidential problem of evil has been enormously influential within the contemporary philosophical literature—William Rowe’s 1979 formulation in “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” being the most seminal—no academic research has explored what cognitive mechanisms might underwrite the appearance of pointlessness in target examples of suffering. In this exploratory paper, we show that the perception of pointlessness in the target examples of suffering that underwrite Rowe’s seminal formulation of the problem of evil is contingent on the absence of broader context. In other words, we show that when such suffering is presented alongside broader contextual information, the appearance of pointlessness, on average, significantly diminishes.  In §1 we briefly elucidate Rowe’s formulation of the problem of evil and the thought experiment that motivates a key premise. In §2 and §3 respectively, we briefly explain our hypothesis regarding Rowe’s case and our methods for testing these hypotheses. In §4, we elucidate our results, and in §5 we explore some of the philosophical implications of our findings and gesture towards some areas for future research. Finally, in §6, we briefly connect our research to some of the established philosophical literature on suffering and narrative before concluding.

The primary aim of this article is to highlight, at least in short, how the resources of experimental philosophy could be fruitfully applied to the evidential problem of evil. To do this, we will consider two of the most influential and archetypal formulations of the problem: William L. Rowe's article, "The problem of evil and some varieties of atheism" (1979), and Paul Draper's article, "Pain and pleasure: an evidential problem for theists" (1989). We will consider the relevance of experimental philosophy to Rowe's 1979 argument in 1 and to Draper's 1989 argument in 2. But in addition to exploring how the resources of experimental philosophy might apply to the problem of evil, it is also worth exploring what broader empirical factors might contribute to people having the intuitions that they have-from someone's affective state to someone's need for closure. In 3, we want to very briefly elucidate a few areas where the psychology of philosophy might be productively explored in future empirical research.

[...]while I wrote my doctoral thesis on virtue epistemology, I'd never written a single blasted word on intellectual humility per se (it turns out that I was far from alone on this, and that was part of the problem!) Add to this the cognitive dissonance I felt while looking at an advertisement for a philosophy postdoc in a graduate school of psychology at a seminary, and you can understand why I nearly moved on to the next job application. First of all, the principle investigator of the project, Justin Barrett, had a long history of playing nice with philosophers such that he could often serve as a "translator" in team discussions. [...]the project team had sufficient time to get to know one another and collaborate before any major project outputs needed to be produced.

Intellectual humility is a hot topic. One of the key questions the literature is exploring is definitional: What is intellectual humility? In their recent paper, "Intellectual Humility: Owning our Limitations," Dennis Whitcomb, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr, and Daniel Howard-Snyder have proposed an answer: Intellectual humility is "proper attentiveness to, and owning of, one's intellectual limitations" (2015). I highlight some limitations of the limitations-owning account of intellectual humility. And in conclusion, I suggest (i) that ultimately these are not limitations that any viable account of intellectual humility should own and (ii) that Whitcomb et al. should revise their view accordingly.