Jordan Howard Sobel

Jordan Howard Sobel (1929–2010) was an American-born Canadian philosopher who spent most of his career at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Trained at the University of Michigan under Richard Brandt and others, Sobel worked primarily in decision theory, deontic logic, and the philosophy of religion. He is best known in the latter field for Logic and Theism (Cambridge, 2003), a sustained formal examination of arguments for and against the existence of God, covering ontological, cosmological, teleological, moral, and Pascalian arguments, as well as the problem of evil and divine attributes. The book is notable for deploying modal and probabilistic logic with unusual technical rigor, and for engaging closely with Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Gödel (whose ontological proof Sobel famously diagnosed as entailing modal collapse), and contemporary analytic theists such as Plantinga and Swinburne. Sobel's overall conclusion is broadly atheistic: he holds that no theistic argument succeeds, while the evidential problem of evil and considerations of parsimony favor naturalism. He also contributed influential papers in decision theory, including critiques of Newcomb's problem and analyses of utilitarian reasoning. Critics have noted that the formal density of Logic and Theism limits its accessibility, and theists including Alexander Pruss and Robert Koons have contested specific reconstructions. His work remains a standard reference for the formal evaluation of natural theology.