Barry Lam: Lam: Meghan Sullivan, University of Notre Dame. Meghan Sullivan: Sullivan: Exactly one God. And this is where Christians get into trouble, because then you got to explain how it’s one God, but it’s God, the father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And then you’ve got a lot of fighting, and the big source of constant theological discussion between Islam and Christianity is like the Christians really believe in three gods and when they should believe in one, It was the one god thing extraordinarily important part of those religious traditions. And you can understand why. God is all powerful. He’s morally perfect. He should have no competition, certainly not like a duplicate of himself, anywhere that’s competing for being the absolute bowl best being in the universe. And if you start trying to back off from that and allowing him to have competitors, then it’s unclear that he explains the causal order of the universe. It’s unclear why you should worship him. It’s unclear that he exists. I mean, Anselm’s argument is like, you should believe in God because you should believe that something is that which none greater can be conceived, and that’s got to be God. So as soon as you start like diminishing God in any way or giving him any competition, you start undermining all of your reasons for wanting him in the first place. Second thing, and here’s where you know Christians are probably have a harder time with modal realism than even other Abrahamic traditions. We believe that in one of his forms as Jesus, he took up spacetime, like he was born, he had a mom and dad, he had adventures in the desert, he got into some trouble with the Romans. That all happened with the body and in space and time. But Jesus is God, that part we’ve been working out for the last 20 years. Then you tried to add modal realism into that, you know, temperamental, theological, metaphysical soup, modal realism says there’s like a bunch of different Jerusalem’s. There’s Jesus born in all of them, and he does like slightly different things. Like in one, he cures this leper, but in another one, he doesn’t cure this leper and one of them, he dies on Good Friday, but another one he dies on like Saturday or dies on Thursday or whatever. As soon as you start to multiply Christ, you’ve already got like a humongous challenge for Christianity. Like, you know, no, no, I don’t want to deal with that. That seems like deeply unorthodox. I mean, there are philosophers who’ve kind of dipped their toes in the water of like, maybe each of David Lewis as possible worlds could have their own counterpart of Christ who would do like, say, people who believe in him. But I don’t know, like, did he teach different things in those different worlds? That’s problematic. Do you think like he’s teaching necessary truths about us in the Universe and God and its relationship to him? And those should be true in all possible worlds. And that his life is a model for a good human life, not just accidentally, but really robustly. For Christians, Jesus is a huge problem with trying to endorse modal realism. I mean, maybe you could have like, you know, possible world hopping Jesus like quantum leap leaping Jesus, but its the same one visiting all of them. But then you start seeing, like, I don’t know, this is already looking like a little bit problematic, and you definitely wouldn’t want worlds where, like, he wasn’t in any of them. Barry Lam: Lam: And it’s not enough for Christians to know or think that God or Jesus rolls over the whole universe. Just this universe, not all universes. Meghan Sullivan: Sullivan: Again, we’re trying not to take the wind out of the sails of God like he’s the necessary perfect being. So I think that’s one reason that just like once you try to add modal realism to the already complicated counting problem, based in Christianity, it just looks like, I don’t know. I can’t, no too hard. I think also there is a question of freedom then that matters a lot