Many worldviews assume that God exists and is the greatest possible being. Religious traditions, philosophical arguments, and billions of believers hold that God is perfectly good, all-knowing, and all-powerful. This book argues that this worldview is false. It provides four arguments for this conclusion that build on the philosophy of religion and moral responsibility literatures in original and insightful ways:
Impossibility: God is not responsible because responsibility itself is impossible. No one-including God-can satisfy the conditions necessary for moral responsibility.
Compulsion: God is not responsible because his perfect nature compels his choices. A being whose psychology necessarily determines his actions cannot be responsible for them.
Arbitrariness: God is not responsible because his choices would be arbitrary. No one is responsible for making arbitrary choices, even if those choices are between good options.
Maximal Greatness: If God lacks responsibility, then his greatness depends on being uniquely and maximally benevolent, but no one can satisfy this requirement.
There is no other book that argues against God's existence by systematically examining whether God can be morally responsible and showing how these arguments undermine the greatest possible being thesis. The book's arguments connecting divine psychology, foreknowledge, and responsibility are new to the literature. Ultimately, the book's conclusions challenge our understanding of God, morality, and the metaphysical structure of the universe.
God Collapses: Theism and Moral Responsibility is essential reading for scholars and graduate students in philosophy, religious studies, and theology who are interested in debates about divine attributes, moral responsibility, and arguments for atheism.
Autorentext
Stephen Kershnar is a distinguished teaching professor in the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Fredonia. He is also an attorney. Kershnar focuses on applied ethics and political philosophy. He has written more than one hundred articles and book chapters on such diverse topics as abortion, desert, moral responsibility, punishment, and religion. He is the author of twelve books, including Morality Collapses: Against the Right and the Good (New York: Routledge, 2025), Responsibility Collapses: Why Moral Responsibility is Impossible (New York: Routledge, 2023), and Desert Collapses: Why No One Deserves Anything (New York: Routledge, 2022).
Nathan Bray is a doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews. He works mainly in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics. Within these fields, his favorite topics, in no particular order, are the cosmological argument, divine freedom, and animal ethics. His works have appeared in Public Affairs Quarterly and Between the Species.