Are most philosophers of religion theists? You may be right, but I don't actually know. And I also don't know whether most philosophers of religion are theists before they study philosophy of religion. I also don't know how many philosophers change their minds after they study philosophy of religion.

My sense is that what you're really interested in is how much influence philosophical arguments have on people's religious beliefs—at least, if the people are people who study philosophy. It's an interesting question and all I have to offer are personal impressions, which may well be wrong.

I'd guess that there are lots of philosophers who stopped believing partly because they studied various arguments for the existence of God and found them to be inadequate. I'd guess that because it fits a fair number of people I've known, but as they say: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." I'd also guess that there are far fewer philosophers who started out as non-believers and became theists because of their study of philosophy of religion. The main reason I'd make that guess is that I haven't met many (if any) theists who became believers on account of the arguments, but once again, anecdotes don't add up to data.

A bit more "philosophically," my sense is that there aren't many, if any, good "proofs" for the existence of God. I say that having given many of them quite a bit of thought, and having co-authored a textbook on philosophy of religion. Further, the highly anthropomorphic idea of God that many believers have in mind strikes me as not even wrong, to borrow a phrase attributed to Wolfgang Pauli. My sense is that for many philosophers, that's the end of the discussion, but I don't think it should be.

One reason is that highly anthropomorphic notions of God aren't the only ones on offer. Another is that sophisticated theological claims may not be your cup of tea, but they don't strike me as a whole lot stranger than some of the ideas that get taken seriously by serious philosophers or, for that matter, serious physicists. But perhaps the main reason is that religious belief isn't, never was, and mostly doesn't pretend to be a purely intellectual matter. The outlook of many believers is much more a matter of how the world feels to them or strikes them in a hard-to-articulate way, rather than a matter of proofs. To see religious commitment as mainly about arguments and reasons is a bit like thinking one has to have good arguments for loving the ones one loves.

This is not to say that religious beliefs are beyond critique; religion can be at least as toxic as love can. Still, the fact that there's bad love doesn't prove that love is bad. Quite apart from that, however, philosophy of religion that doesn't stray beyond arguments for and against metaphysical theses is ignoring the biggest part of the picture. Not clear why a philosopher would want to do that.

I tend not to distinguish between a property and a quality. I would say that truth is a property (or quality) of propositions primarily and sentences derivatively: sentences are true when and only when they express true propositions, but propositions can be true without ever being expressed by sentences.

It seems odd to me to classify truth as a relation: it would be a relation between what and what else? Some theories of truth say that a proposition's being true depends on a relation, such as a "correspondence" relation between the proposition and, perhaps, a state of affairs in the world. But depending on a relation is different from being a relation.

I'm not sure that Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities straightforwardly applies to the property (quality) of truth. But I do think that the truth of any proposition is independent of anyone's believing it to be true -- which I suppose makes truth more like a primary than a secondary quality.

The problem here, I think, is that there's no one answer to the question "What are the fundamental laws of logic?" We can do things in different ways, and things which are fundamental on some accountings will be derived on others.

Let's assume that there is a definite answer to the question "What are the logical truths of classical logic?" (I'm using this as a proxy for "logical statements." If we want to expand it to include principles of inference, like modus ponens, that's okay too.) Note that the set of all such truths will be infinite, but that's okay. And to make "classical logic" well-defined, let's assume we mean truth-functional and first-order predicate logic, in which our first assumption is indeed correct. Then there are sets of rules and/or axiom schemes that provably allow the derivation of every logical truth thus understood. As just noted, there is no one way to so this, and the different ways won't contain the same axioms and/or rules. Even "the law of non-contradiction" will show up differently in different systems. For example: if by "the law of non-contradiction" you mean statements of the form "not-(P & not-P)," then such statements will be derived rather than basic in typical systems, but in all systems capable of capturing the logical truths, "not-(P & -P)" will come out true.

Logic isn't special in this regard, by the way. There are different ways to axiomatize pretty much any theory that can be axiomatized at all. Whatever fundamentality amounts to in these cases, it's not rigid and fixed.

An interesting question.

Let's start with the word "chance." It's part of what you take luck to require, and I take it you'd say something happens by chance only if the facts about the past and the laws of nature didn't entail it. Put another way, on your understanding, we have chance, hence luck, only if determinism isn't true.

I think we'll see that what people mean by "luck" doesn't necessarily presuppose indeterminism, but let's start with your golfing example, Joe tees off and his shot goes wild. That's not what he wanted to happen and not what he was trying to do. However, there happens to be a rock in the right place, his ball hits it and ends up in the hole. Was he lucky?

Since this seems like a paradigm case of luck, we'd need a good reason for saying no. Although it's actually doubtful that Joe intended to sink a hole in one (golfers seldom do), let's suppose he did. Given how things turned out, Joe himself would surely consider himself lucky. He intended to get a hole in one, but he didn't intend for it to happen the way it happened. He didn't intend to swing wild, he didn't mean to hit the rock, and he didn't plan to make the shot by carom. In fact, what he intended included not doing any of those things. These things didn't happen because of his intentions or even incidentally to them. They happened in spite of his intentions.

All that makes it particularly apt to say that Joe was lucky, but it's more than we need. It's safe to say that no one is a good enough golfer to make a hole in one with any reliability. According to statistics posted on this PGA page

https://www.pga.com/archive/odds-hole-in-one-albatross-condor

the odds of a professional tour golfer making a hole in one are one in three thousand. Pretty much anyone who makes a hole in one is lucky—even if they have Tiger Woods-level golf skills.

This suggests a first stab at answer. If you want something, but nothing you have control over makes it likely that your effort will succeed, then you're lucky if things work out as you hoped. Intending and getting what you intended aren't enough. The reasons here aren't deep and metaphysical. If I'm right, they're a matter of how we use words.

Still, this first stab is too strong. Most of the time, even a skilled batter won't hit a home run. The statistics suggest that the chances are about three to four percent

http://theconversation.com/whats-really-behind-baseballs-home-run-surge-...

and even Pete Alonso hit a home run in less than ten percent of his at-bats this year:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/a/alonspe01.shtml

Nonetheless, if Pete Alonso scores a home run, it seems off to say that he was lucky and it would certainly seem off to say that he was "just" lucky. When Pete Alonso hits a home run, something unlikely has happened. But it's not out-of-bounds unlikely, and skill has a whole lot to do with it. It's not surprising or unexpected when Pete Alonso hits a home run.

In light of this, we might tweak our analysis a bit. Nothing Pete Alonso has control over makes it likely that he'll hit a home run—at least not if "likely" means "more likely than not." But given Pete Alonso's skills, it's not surprising when he hits a home run. And so we might try this: we'll say you were lucky in getting something you intended or wanted if, even given your skills, what you had control over left it surprising that you succeeded.

No doubt this analysis has limitations; "lucky" is not a precise term and neither is "surprising." The hope is that the suggestion will account for a good many typical cases. But on to two other matters.

First, determinism; let's suppose it's true. Then given the full story about the laws and the initial conditions of the Universe, it was determined that our "lucky" golfer's shot would end up in the hole. In fact, relative to all of that, it was certain and therefore not in any way unlikely. But this is something that literally no human being could have known. In assessing luck, we aren't asking probability questions conditional on the unknowable total initial state. We're assessing likelihood relative to what we could reasonably be expected to know. There are perfectly good uses of the word "chance" that have a similar character. It may be that given the initial state of the universe and the laws of nature, it was determined that the coin toss would come up heads. But someone who says that the coin came up heads by chance isn't abusing words. Words mean what we mean by them, and it's both useful and intelligible to use the word "chance" in a way that takes coin tosses as examples. "Luck" is a word we use in the Lebenswelt and the way we use it is at least partly tied to a quotidian sense of the word "chance."

I'd like to bring the (already too long) discussion to a close with a different take on luck. One kind of luck has to do with what we might call salient contingency. Even if determinism is true, things didn't have to turn out as they did. That's because the initial state that the laws bear on is contingent. If the initial state had been even a little bit different, you wouldn't have existed at all. And even among the initial states that lead to your being in being, there are no doubt a great many in which you would have been much worse off than you are. There are things that each of us has no control over, and without which things we care about would not have been. In certain frames of mind, this can occupy the foreground. Most of us sometimes can be struck by the thought that we are lucky for what the religious refer to as the blessings of our lives. This is not the usual usage of the word "luck," but it's one that I don't think we should mock. And since I'm writing this two days after Thanksgiving, perhaps this is the right place to stop.

I don't know that book in particular, but I can give you a standard explanation that at least makes sense of the view you find puzzling.

In Aristotle's logic, any statement of the form "All S are P" implies that at least one S is P, so the statement comes out false (rather than vacuously true) if nothing is S. By contrast, in contemporary logic, "All S are P" is interpreted as saying "For anything at all, if it is S, then it is P": it is interpreted as a universal quantification applied to a conditional statement.

Crucially, the conditional statement "If it is S, then it is P" is standardly treated as a truth-functional conditional that is equivalent to the disjunction "It is not S, or it is P." Now suppose that nothing is S, so that "It is not S" is true of everything. Then the disjunction "It is not S, or it is P" will come out true no matter what we substitute for "it," because a true disjunction needs only one true disjunct. In that case, the truth-functional conditionals "If it is S, then it is not P," "If it is S, then it is not S," etc., also come out true for the same reason.

I think it's the decision to treat "If-then" statements as truth-functional conditionals that produces the counterintuitive results. But here we can perhaps distinguish the truth-conditions for an "If-then" statement from the conditions in which it would be informative or appropriate to assert the statement. A statement can be true without being, in the context, informative or appropriate to assert.

You ask: "morally speaking, can my action BE more serious or offensive only because other people see it so?

Suppose there was someone weird enough to think that your sleeping man would be indifferent between having his feet used to prop a window open and being raped in his sleep. And to make things clearer, suppose this person thinks that the sleeping man wouldn't mind either. It's hard to imagine the psychology of such a person, and may not even be clear if he would be a competent moral agent, but set that aside. What should we say?

Perhaps we would say that we shouldn't judge this person more harshly for doing one of these things rather than the other. No harm was meant; it's just that the person was massively, unimaginably clueless. This would be someone we should keep close watch over; if they actually carried out the rape, we would be fully justified in confining them in some way. We might abstain from moral judgments about the person himself, but there's another question we can ask: if the sleeping man was raped, is what happened to him worse than it would have been if he'd merely had his feet used as a window-stick?

It's a pretty safe bet that he would think so, and that matters. In fact it matters a lot. We don't count up harm or moral offense solely in the coin of bruises. A morally competent person knows that if someone would strongly prefer not to be treated in a certain way, that is, as far as it goes, a reason not to do it; not an all-things-considered reason, of course, but a reason that normally deserves to be taken into account. Indeed: if there's no weighty reason to ignore the person's strong preference, it will normally count as a decisive reason not to do so.

Why? I suppose a certain crude form of utilitarianism might make that look like a good question, though if it came to it it wouldn't be hard to conjure up consequentialist reasons not to rape sleeping people (let alone people who aren't asleep.) But set that aside. Part of what morality demands of us is that we respect the dignity of other people, and that we not treat them simply as means. Using someone's feet as a window stick without their consent is not a way to respect their dignity, and amounts to using them as a mere means, but raping them while asleep is so much further along both scales that to most people it will feel like a whole different kind of offense. To say that most people could be wrong about this would require a very special story to be believable. The example you've given doesn't promise one.

What makes things offensive is, no surprise, closely tied to what people find offensive. What makes something a violation is—again, no surprise, closely tied to what people would see as a violation if it happened to them. The link isn't inviolable, but it's not accidental either. It's difficult to make sense of the claim that something is not actually a violation or an offense even if most thoughtful, informed people would see it as such.

Now of course we sometimes work our way to moral insights that we once were blind to. Understanding the deep wrongness of slavery, for example, is such a case. This happens when people learn to see things that they had overlooked or ignored or turned away from. It's typically a matter of coming to see something from another's point of view. But that is exactly what's missing in the example you offer. In effect, we're asked to ignore the point of view of the person whose point of view seems prima facie most relevant.

You offer two reasons (though really it's three.)

The first is that if the government helps people (provides material support, in your phrase), it harms those people.

Is this true? It's quite possibly true sometimes,. But is it true by and large? You haven't offered any evidence, and I'm not convinced that there is any. In any case, when the government doesn't help people it's at least as plausible that at least some of the time, that results in harm. So even if both policies sometimes harm some people, that doesn't tell us which is worse.

But there's another problem internal to your argument. You're in favor of various kinds of aid, so long as it's not provided by the government. Presumably you're in favor of that at least partly because you think it can actually do good. But if private charity can do good and help people, it's not obvious that having the help come from the government can't do likewise.

Now there are questions here that philosophy alone can't answer: which kinds of aid programs, public or private, are most effective? And are they better or worse than no aid at all? Those are empirical questions. My admittedly non-expert reading of the evidence is that both sorts of aid can be beneficial and often are. But in any case, if one kind can be, it would be odd if the other couldn't.

You give another argument: public aid amounts to establishment of a state religion. However, all you offer in defense of this is an assertion: helping people in need is fundamentally a religious directive.

Why should we believe that? There are moral arguments for helping other people, but it's either arbitrary stipulation or confusion to claim that moral considerations automatically count as religious. And even if someone wants to stretch the word "religion" in this way, that doesn't settle the First Amendment question. For that purpose, the issue isn't what someone might decide to mean by the word "religion." It's what it means in the First Amendment. It's beyond doubtful that the Framers intended to count all moral considerations as religious, thereby ruling out broad moral considerations as legitimate grounds for legislation. What's pretty clear is that the Framers were concerned with religion more or less as we ordinarily think of it. And as we ordinarily think of religion, believing that murder is wrong isn't enough to make someone religious.

Your second major argument is an appeal to a kind of libertarian argument: while we're individually obliged to help people, we can't take people's money by threat of violence and use it for the benefit of others.

For that line to be persuasive, the analogy between government programs and holding someone up at gunpoint to get their money for Granny's good has to be a sound one. When you put it the way I just did, however, it seems a little less than convincing.

I'd be prepared to go further. I think that part of what the analogy rests on is a doubtful view about what's "yours" or "mine" in the first place. What you own you own against the background of a large and complicated social scheme. There's no straightforward fact of the matter about what "really" belongs to you and what doesn't. Your claim about how we should or shouldn't treat people and their money is a moral claim. There's nothing wrong with that; the questions here are in large part moral ones. But since you're appealing to a moral notion of property rights, you need a moral argument that's a lot more detailed and careful than the analogy with robbery (or Robin-Hoodery...)

There are deep, serious and important questions about the proper limits of government. There are serious arguments to be made that lean libertarian, and there are equally serious arguments that tend in quite the opposite direction. This comment—already too long—isn't the place to sort all this out. My plea really comes down to this simple thought: there really is a serious issue here, and engaging it will call for going beyond slogans and problematic analogies. There's too much at stake for that.

Great response. I would add that since the 17th century, theology as a discipline has largely been seen as distinct from philosophy. Theology, though, historically and today, has drawn from philosophy and philosophers (throughout its history) have addressed religiously significant themes. Philosophy of religion is a respected sub-field of philosophy (see the entry Philosophy of Religion in the free online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) just like philosophy of science, philosophy of art, and so on. There is also the practice of what is called philosophical theology --this is usually a matter of practicing philosophy within a tradition. In this sense a Christian philosopher might offer a philosophical analysis of the Trinity or Incarnation or Prayer.

There are two sorts of issues here. Let's start with the one that I think underlies your discomfort.

The fact that something is my goal may matter to me, but that doesn't make it intrinsically valuable. Indeed, it might be intrinsically horrid. If someone's goal is to brutally torture an innocent child to death (writing those words actually makes me shudder, but that's part of the point) then their goal is the very opposite of intrinsically valuable, and the fact that they would value achieving it makes them evil without adding an iota of value to their "achievement." In a nutshell: the fact that I value something doesn't entail that what I value is valuable. Whether an "achievement" is valuable isn't a matter of whether someone values it, but of what the achievement itself amounts to.

There might seem to be a utilitarian argument to the contrary: the pleasure the sadist gets from his cruelty adds to the sum total of happiness in the world. But all this really shows is that a certain version of utilitarianism is morally confused. Suppose that through sheer accident, an innocent person dies a horrible death. And suppose that Sam the sadist takes enormous pleasure in this fact, even though he did nothing to bring it about. Anyone who thinks the world is a little better overall than it would have been if Sam had remained ignorant of the tragedy and not taken pleasure in it is someone whose moral instincts I wouldn't trust for a moment. Pleasure is not always good; sometimes it's evil. And likewise, achievements are not always good; sometimes they're vile.

However, all of what's been said so far relies on understanding benefit morally. I've read "intrinsically valuable" as a matter of moral worth. But there is a morally neutral use of the word "benefit"; that's just a fact about how we speak. People clearly can benefit in this narrow sense from ill-gotten gains. It would be strange to say that thieves never benefit in any sense from their theft. If we prescind from the moral sense of "benefit," it would be hard to make the case that someone who commits a terrible act can't benefit in any sense at all. The very phrase "ill-gotten gains" makes the point; what's ill-gotten can still be a gain.

However, this raises a new thought. Acts of cruelty or injustice may serve my narrow ends, and in that sense, they may be to my benefit, but they make me worse. And one might think that there's some way of doing the arithmetic that allows us to ask whether on balance a terrible act can be to one's benefit—whether the selfish "benefit" will inevitably be outweighed by the moral cost. My first inclination is to say that there's no need to crack this nut, but that may be too quick. The distinction between moral and non-moral goods is almost certainly not as simple as the distinction between two independent dimensions on a graph.

There could be a picture of an X that is itself an X. For example, there could be a minimalist picture of a square that is itself a square. The picture could even be titled in such a way that it is or is meant to be a picture of itself, so that this square is a picture of this square. But in general a picture of X is, obviously, not X. A picture of a unicorn is an oil painting, say, and an oil painting is not a unicorn. The famous portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Arthur Lawrence (1815-1816) is most certainly not the Duke of Wellington himself. It has outlived him for by a longtime, for example. We can of course say, looking at the portrait, 'Oh look, there's the Duke of Wellington. I can see why they called him the Iron Duke.' There is a difficult and interesting question about depiction, and how to construe the first of these statements. It cannot mean,

'Oh look, there is a picture of the Duke of Wellington.'

This is an observation about a picture in a material sense, gold frame and all.
Nor can the statement mean,

'Oh look, there is the Duke of Wellington, in a picture.'

Of course the Duke of Wellington could be sitting in a hole in the canvas, so that he is literally in a picture, and it could even be the Lawrence portrait. Nor can the statement mean that the picture resembles the Duke of Wellington, since the Iron Duke really wasn't two-dimensional or made of paint and canvas. There are far too many respects in which the picture actively fails to resemble the Duke for there to be any sort of overall resemblance. There is the fact that the Duke had legs, and the portrait has none, and a million others of the same sort. In the same way, the visual experience I have when I see the portrait is not the same as the one I would have had had I seen the Duke himself. It would be only in very special circumstances that I might mistake the portrait for the Duke, an unlikely mistake anyway since I know that he died in 1852.