After defining presentism, I consider four arguments that presentism and divine atemporality are incompatible. I identify an assumption common to the four, ask what reason there is to consider it true, and argue against it.

Faith plays a valuable role in sustaining relationships through various kinds of challenges, including through evidentially unfavorable circumstances and periods of significant doubt. But if, as is widely assumed, both faith in God and faith that God exists require belief that God exists, and if one’s beliefs are properly responsive to one’s evidence, the capacity for faith to persevere amidst significant and well-grounded doubt will be fairly limited. Taking Mother Teresa as an exemplar of Christian faith and exploring the close connection between faith and faithfulness in the context of committed covenantal relationships, I set out a view of Relational Faith that does not assume that faith requires belief and allows wide room for honestly wrestling with doubt from within the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Philosophical responses to religious diversity range from outright rejection of divine reality to claims of religious pluralism. In this paper, I challenge those responses that take the problem of religious diversity to be merely an instance of the general problem of disagreement. To do so, I will take, as my starting point, William Alston’s treatment of the problems that religious diversity seems to pose for the rationality of theistic beliefs. My main aim is to highlight the cognitive penetrability of religious experience as a major source of such problems. I conclude by examining the consequences of cognitive penetration for the reliability of the monotheistic doxastic practice.

According to Eleonore Stump, Thomas Aquinas rejects a “popular” (roughly, penal substitutionary) account of the atonement. For Stump’s Aquinas, God does not require satisfaction or punishment for human sin, and the function of satisfaction is remedial, not juridical or penal. Naturally, then, Aquinas does not, on this reading, see Christ’s passion as having saving effect in virtue of Christ substitutionally bearing the punishment for human sin that divine justice requires. I argue that Stump is incorrect. For Aquinas, divine justice does require satisfaction; satisfaction involves punishment ( poena) and has a penal function; and one way Christ’s death has saving effect is in virtue of his satisfying that requirement on people’s behalf. Christ saves by “paying our debt,” bearing in the place of humans the penalty or punishment required by divine justice. My argument implies that Aquinas’s account of satisfaction in the atonement significantly resembles key aspects of Stump’s “popular account”—and of the Penal Substitution Theory it represents.

I present and defend an “indexical” version of the Fine-Tuning Argument. I begin by outlining the dialectic between the Fine-Tuning Argument, the Multiverse Objection, and the This-Universe Reply. Next, I sketch an indexical fine-tuning argument and defend it from two new objections. Then, I show that such an argument is immune to the Multiverse Objection. I explain how a further augmentation to the argument allows it to avoid an objection I call the “Indifference Objection.” I conclude that my indexical version of the Fine-Tuning Argument is no less cogent than the standard version, and yet it is immune to the Multiverse Objection.

In this paper, I introduce a problem to the philosophy of religion—the problem of divine moral standing—and explain how this problem is distinct from (albeit related to) the more familiar problem of evil (with which it is often conflated). In short, the problem is this: given how God would be (or, on some conceptions, is) “involved in” our actions, how is it that God has the moral standing to blame us for performing those very actions? In light of the recent literature on “moral standing,” I consider God’s moral standing to blame on two models of “divine providence”: open theism and theological determinism. I contend that God may have standing on open theism, and—perhaps surprisingly—may also have standing even on theological determinism, given the truth of compatibilism. The topic of this paper thus sheds considerable light on the traditional philosophical debate about the conditions of moral responsibility.

Resolving religious disagreements is difficult, for beliefs about religion tend to come with strong biases against other views and the people who hold them. Evidence can help, but there is no agreed-upon policy for weighting it, and moreover bias affects the content of our evidence itself. Another complicating factor is that some biases are reliable and others unreliable. What we need is an evidence-weighting policy geared toward negotiating the effects of bias. I consider three evidence-weighting policies in the philosophy of religion and advocate one of them as the best for promoting the resolution of religious disagreements.

There is a concern about the effectiveness of petitionary prayer. If I pray for something good, wouldn’t God give it to me anyway? And if I pray for something bad, won’t God refrain from giving it to me even though I’ve asked? This problem has received significant attention. The typical solutions suggest that the prayer itself can alter whether something is good or bad. I will argue that this is insufficient to fully address the problem, but also that the problem requires another assumption which can be doubted, thereby opening up a new way to solve the problem.

Some claim that cognitive science of religion (CSR) either completely “explains religion away,” or at the very least calls the epistemic status of religious belief into question. Others claim that religious beliefs are the cognitive outputs of systems that seem highly reliable in other contexts, and thus CSR provides positive epistemic support for religious belief. I argue that (i) CSR does not provide evidence for atheism, but (ii) if one is an atheist, CSR lends “intellectual aid and comfort,” (iii) CSR does not provide evidence for theism, but (iv) if one is a theist, CSR provides qualified support for Reformed Epistemology.

Scott Davison has raised an epistemic challenge to the doctrine of petitionary prayer. Roughly, the challenge is that we cannot know or have reason to believe that a prayer has been answered. Davison argues that the epistemic challenge undermines all the extant defenses of petitionary prayer. I argue that it does not.