Someone owes gratitude to God for something only if God benefits her and God is morally responsible for doing so. These requirements concerning benefit and moral responsibility generate reasons to doubt that human beings owe gratitude to God for their own moral goodness. First, moral character must be generated by its possessor’s own free choices, and so God cannot benefit moral character in human beings. Second, owed gratitude requires being morally responsible for providing a benefit, which rules out owed gratitude to God because God must do what is best. Both reasons are unpersuasive. I argue that God can benefit morally good character in human beings with and without their free choices. Subsequently, I argue against views of moral responsibility that preclude divine moral responsibility and argue that influential accounts of moral responsibility preserve it. Thus, these two requirements generate no problem for owed gratitude to God.

I provide a Nietzschean reading of the way that moral concerns shape and structure discussion of the problem of evil, through consideration of Nietzsche’s account of nihilism and compassion. Although, on this account, all theodicy is nihilistic in one sense, in another sense theodicy actually inhibits the fully-fledged nihilism of despair, which “judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist.” I go on to apply Nietzsche’s account of “devaluation” to moral critique of theodicy. Such critique is rooted in compassion, but in such a way that it is self-undermining: once the “protest” that motivates compassion rules out any appeal to a world that transcends earthly suffering, protest against suffering is revealed as a purely negative posture; this is what one would expect, if compassion were a nihilistic value from the beginning.

On the standard understanding of petitionary prayer, the purpose of prayer is to make a difference to what God will do. In this article, I argue that such an activity does not make sense.

This paper defends a definition of sin. I begin by defending the project of trying to do so. I then suggest that the Bible does not clearly define it. I then consider some candidate definitions, pointing out ways they fall short. I finally introduce my method for coming up with a better definition. I use the method to evaluate a recent proposal. Finally I offer my own. I suggest that the method favors mine over the other proposal I discuss.

There is a tension for those who want to simultaneously hold that Abraham’s disposition to sacrifice Isaac is epistemically justified and yet hold that a contemporary father would not be justified in believing that God is commanding him to sacrifice his son. This paper attempts to resolve that tension. While some commentators have correctly pointed out that one must take Abraham’s long relationship with God into account when considering Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son, they do not entertain the possibility that his hearing this commandment is evidence against the hypothesis that Abraham is speaking to God. I grant this possibility. But I argue that when God commands Abraham to do the unthinkable, Abraham’s previously acquired evidence could still be sufficient to justify his belief that he is speaking with God. And in making this argument, I attempt to show what differentiates Abraham from the contemporary father who thinks that God is commanding him to sacrifice his son.

Rationalist models of divine agency typically ascribe perfect freedom to God, where this is understood as a freedom from external causal influences and non-rational influences, including desires or preferences not derived from reason alone. Paul Draper has recently developed a rationalist model of God’s agency on which God faces “hard choices” between options differing in moral and non-moral value. He argues that this model is preferable to rival rationalist models because it is compatible with God’s having significant freedom and being maximally worthy of praise and gratitude. I argue that on an alternative model of divine agency, which rejects perfect freedom and holds that God makes hard choices on the basis of brute preferences, God would be more worthy of praise and gratitude. However, a probabilistic problem for theism which Draper identifies for his model also applies to the brute preference model.