How should belief in creation affect our theoretical understanding of knowledge? In this essay I argue that traditional views of knowledge, illustrated by Plato and Descartes, cannot do justice to the integral meaning of reality as God’s creation. Making use of two metaphors, the visual metaphor for theoretical knowledge and the biblical one of hearing the divine promise-command to be, I sketch the outlines of a theoretical framework that takes belief in creation as its starting point. My approach is based upon insights of Reformational philosophy and leads to a view in which beliefs and propositions concerning isolated states of affairs are replaced by an emphasis on the concrete situations in which knowing occurs. Important notions like rationality and objectivity lose their central place to responsibility and acknowledgement. I claim that in this way the biblical understanding of reality as God’s creation can be better appreciated than in approaches that take their starting point in Greek and modern philosophical conceptions.

Traditional views of grace assert that God owes us nothing. Grace is undeserved, supererogatory and free. In this paper I argue that while this is an accurate characterization of creating grace, it is not true of saving grace. We have no right to be created as spiritual beings whose true good is found in relationship with God. But once we exist as spiritual beings, God does owe us a genuine offer of the salvation that constitutes our highest fulfillment. Creating grace is undeserved. Saving grace is deserved (being based on our inherent worth and vital interests as spiritual beings) but unearned (it is not based on anything we have done).

In Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, J. L. Schellenberg argues that the phenomenon of “reasonable nonbelief” constitutes sufficient reason to doubtthe existence of God. In this essay I assert the reasonableness of entertaining doubts about the kind of reasonable nonbelief that Schellenberg needs for a cogent argument. Treating his latest set of arguments in this journal, I dispute his claims about the scope and status of “unreflective nonbelief,” his assertion that God would prevent reasonable nonbelief “of any kind and duration,” and his confidence that we can know that some doubters are not self-deceived.

This paper clarifies and evaluates a premise of William Alston’s argument in Perceiving God. The premise in question: if it is practically rational to engage ina doxastic practice, then it is epistemically rational to suppose that said practice is reliable. I first provide the background needed to understand how thispremise fits into Alston’s main argument. I then present Alston’s main argument, and proceed to clarify, criticize, modify, and ultimately reject Alston’s argument for the premise in question. Without this premise, Alston’s main argument fails.

In response to Lynne Rudder Baker’s intriguing paper, “Why Christians Should Not Be Libertarians,” I suggest that, even if a Christian simply lets the chips fall where they may with respect to the dispute between libertarians and compatibilists, a Christian should not be a determinist. I also offer for consideration a rather controversial non-Augustinian explanation for the near universality and seeming inevitability of human sin.

Patrick Toner has argued that eternalism, the doctrine that all times are ontologically on par, conflicts with the Catholic view of judgment as based on the state of the soul at death. For, he holds, it is arbitrary that judgment should be based on what happened at some particular time, unless, as presentism holds, that time is the only that really exists. I shall argue that his argument fails because the eternalist can say that judgment is simultaneous with the state of soul that is being judged, and there is nothing arbitrary about judging something at t on the basis of its state at the same time t.

Ted Sider’s paper “Hell and Vagueness” challenges a certain conception of Hell by arguing that it is inconsistent with God’s justice. Sider’s inconsistencyargument works only when supplemented by additional premises. Key to Sider’s case is a premise that the properties upon which eternal destinies superveneare “a smear,” i.e., they are distributed continuously among individuals in the world. We question this premise and provide reasons to doubt it. The doubts come from two sources. The first is based on evidential considerations borrowed from skeptical theism. A related but separate consideration is that supposing it would be an insurmountable problem for God to make just (and therefore non-arbitrary) distinctions in morally smeared world, God thereby has sufficient motivation not to actualize such worlds. Yet God also clearly has motivation only to actualize some member of the subset of non-smeared worlds which don’t appear non-smeared. For if it was obvious who was morally fit for Heaven and who wasn’t, a new arena of great injustice is opened up. The result is that if there is a God, then he has the motivation and the ability to actualize from just that set of worlds which are not smeared but which are indiscernible from smeared worlds.