In The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete, a 14th century mystic, there is a straightforward path from claims about what love for God in its purest form entails to the conclusion that a kind of self-annihilation is the ultimate goal for a Christian. There is, furthermore, an implicit argument in her work for the conclusion that achieving self-annihilation through love for God is superior to and better for us as individuals than achieving conformity with God’s will through the (mere) cultivation of virtue as it is traditionally conceived. Taking inspiration from Porete’s work, this paper defends both of these counterintuitive claims.

An increasingly popular approach to reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom is to say that, because God’s beliefs depend on what we do, we are free to do otherwise than what we actually do despite God’s infallible foreknowledge. This paper develops a new challenge for this dependence response. The challenge stems from a case of backward time travel in which an agent intuitively lacks the freedom to do otherwise because of the time-traveler’s knowledge of what the agent will do, and this is so despite the fact that the time-traveler’s knowledge depends on what the agent will do.

I argue that our expectations for particular evil events, conditional on theism, ought to be informed by our empirical knowledge of history—that is, the history of what God, if God exists, has already allowed to happen. This point is under-appreciated in the literature. And yet if I’m right, this entails that most particular evil events are not evidence against theism. This is a limited but interesting consequence in debates over the evidential impact of evil.

Hume’s argument against believing the testimony of miracles is the most influential treatment of the topic, but there is not yet a consensus on how to interpret his argument. Two arguments are attributed to him. First, Hume seems to start with the infrequency of miracles and uses this to infer that the testimony of a miracle is exceedingly unlikely, and this then creates strong but defeasible evidence against the testimony of any miracle. Second, perhaps Hume takes the constancy of our experience of the laws of nature as decisive or indefeasible evidence against the testimony of any miracle. I explain the basis for each of these interpretations of Hume’s argument, and then develop a novel criticism of the latter interpretations: namely, any inductive inference depends on the relevant similarity between the observed and the unobserved, but we may have reason for thinking that purported miracles are not relevantly similar, and thus our past experience cannot be used as reliable evidence about the testimony of (some) miracles.

The four standard theistic responses to the evidential problem of evil are theodicy, Reformed Epistemology, natural theology, and skeptical theism. It’s somewhat common for theists to combine Reformed Epistemology and skeptical theism or natural theology and theodicy. An insufficiently appreciated possibility is that of combining all four of these positions into a more holistic response to the evidential problem of evil. The chief hurdle to doing this is that it seems that skeptical theism isn’t compatible with either natural theology or theodicy. This first appearance, however, is misleading. And, interestingly, certain theists have implicitly put forth a holistic response to the problem of evil. In this paper, I sketch out how one can combine all four of the standard theistic responses to the evidential problem of evil so as to yield a holistic response to the problem of evil. The focus will be on reconciling skeptical theism with natural theology and theodicy.

There are several published versions of religious fictionalism. This paper focuses on just one of them: it evaluates Peter Lipton’s pioneering account of religious fictionalism. According to Lipton, whereas the sentences of a religious text are to be understood literally, they are not to be believed but to be accepted. To accept a religious text is to believe the moral claims it makes but not its supernatural claims. The purposes of this version of fictionalism are to reconcile religious practice with scientific theory and to access various moral and cultural values. My evaluation will be especially critical of two of Lipton’s claims. One is that, for a religious fictionalist, a religious text can be a source of moral guidance. The other is that, again for a religious fictionalist, a religious tradition provides a better understanding of oneself and others, and a better means of community identification, than any secular tradition.

The view that human law can be analyzed in terms of commands was subjected to devastating criticism by H.L.A. Hart in his 1961 The Concept of Law. Two objections that Hart levels against the command theory of law also make serious trouble for divine command theory. Divine command theorists would do well to jettison command as the central concept of their moral theory, and, following Hart’s lead, instead appeal to the concept of a rule. Such a successor view—divine legislation theory—has the attractions of divine command theory without the unacceptable limitations of command theories that Hart identifies.

One task of moral theory is to answer the question, “Why be moral?” This paper describes a particular theistic theory’s account of moral motivation, which I call the Divine Friendship Theory. I illustrate its plausibility and promise by showing how well the theory does along two dimensions along which an answer to the why-be-moral question can fare better or worse, namely, being psychologically realistic and supporting recognizably moral actions and attitudes. of the answer to the why-be-moral question. Given that the Divine Friendship Theory does well on each dimension, it deserves serious consideration.

Does evolutionary history with all its apparent contingency, wastefulness, animal suffering and innumerable extinctions make the problem of natural evil worse? In this article, I argue that it does not. I respond to two main ways in which the evolutionary problem of evil might make things worse: (1) by increasing the scale of suffering to include billions of additional creatures over hundreds of millions of years, and (2) due to the apparent cruelty of evolution by natural selection as a method of creation. I argue that both problems fail to make a difference when considered in depth. Instead, the problem of natural evil is based mostly on factors that do not depend on evolutionary biology, such as the existence of animal mortality and suffering, as well as chance and contingency in the world.

This paper regiments and responds to an objection to skeptical theism. The conclusion of the objection is that it is not reasonable for skeptical theists to prevent evil, even when it would be easy for them to do so. I call this objection a “Dominance-Reasoning Objection” because it can be regimented utilizing dominance reasoning familiar from decision theory. Nonetheless, I argue, the objection ultimately fails because it neglects a distinction between justifying goods that are necessary for the existence of a good and those that are necessary for God’s permission of the good.

In this paper, I challenge the recent consensus that global versions of theological voluntarism—on which all moral facts are explained by God’s action— fail, because only local versions—on which only a proper subset of moral facts are so explained—can successfully avoid the objection that theological voluntarism entails that God’s actions are arbitrary. I argue that global theological voluntarism can equally well avoid such arbitrariness. This does not mean that global theological voluntarism should be accepted, but that the primary advantage philosophers have taken local views to have over global views is, in fact, no advantage at all.