Kierkegaard’s belief that Socrates embodied a prefigurement of Christian neighbor love militates against the claim that Kierkegaard believed there was absolutely no intimation of the obligation to love the neighbor in paganism. Kierkegaard also accepted that any awareness of the obligation to love the neighbor must be divinely originated. These beliefs and Kierkegaard’s other claims regarding the daimonion and Socrates’s “becoming a Christian” support the view that Kierkegaard believed Socrates to have been a recipient of special divine revelation. The plausibility of this conclusion and its consistency with Kierkegaard’s apostle/genius distinction is explored. Finally, speculative reasons are given as to why God might have chosen to give Socrates the daimonion.

Recently a new question has emerged in the philosophy of religion: not whether God exists, but whether God’s existence is or would be preferable. The existing literature on the subject is sparse (see, for example, footnotes 2, 3, 4, and 5). The present essay, in dialogue form, is an attempt to marshal and evaluate arguments on both sides.

It is reasonable to take Kierkegaard and Plantinga as presenting very different approaches to the rationality of adopting religious beliefs. Kierkegaard says Christian doctrines are absurd, and Plantinga argues that the existence of God is part of the deliverances of reason. I argue that in spite of these apparent differences, Kierkegaard and Plantinga agree on some foundational epistemological issues. I begin by exploring the topic of radical conversion, as discussed by van Fraassen. I use the notion of radical conversion as a tool, to focus our investigation and illuminate the agreements between Kierkegaard and Plantinga. Because of the role of passions and affections in epistemology, we will see that Kierkegaard and Plantinga share a basic epistemological outlook.

Richard Swinburne’s formulation of the argument from evil is representative of a pervasive way of understanding the challenge evil poses for theistic belief. But there is an error in Swinburne’s formulation (“Swinburne’s Lapse”): he fails to consider possible deontological constraints on God’s legitimate responses to evil. To demonstrate the error’s significance, I show that some important objections to Swinburne’s theodicy admit of a novel answer once we correct for Swinburne’s Lapse. While more is needed to show that the resultant “deontological theodicy” succeeds, its promise highlights the significance of Swinburne’s Lapse and the prospects for theodicy it has obscured.

We use Bayesian tools to assess Law’s skeptical argument against the historicity of Jesus. We clarify and endorse his sub-argument for the conclusion that there is good reason to be skeptical about the miracle claims of the New Testament. However, we dispute Law’s contamination principle that he claims entails that we should be skeptical about the existence of Jesus. There are problems with Law’s defense of his principle, and we show, more importantly, that it is not supported by Bayesian considerations. Finally, we show that Law’s principle is false in the specific case of Jesus and thereby show, contrary to the main conclusion of Law’s argument, that biblical historians are entitled to remain confident that Jesus existed.

In this essay, I closely examine the role of the screening criterion in the Howard-Snyders’ thought experiment. Jove’s use of a screening criterion plays a crucial role in preserving his moral status. It allows him to take significantly less moral risk in selecting a world for creation. It also helps him resolve the problem of moral luck in his favor. However, it is plausible that a highest screening criterion may not exist, and that for a given screening criterion, a higher one may exist. If this is the case, then Jove faces an infinite regress in selecting a screening criterion, making it impossible for him to use the randomizer.

Western theism holds that God cannot do evil. Christians also hold that Christ is God the Son and that Christ was tempted to do evil. These claims appear to be jointly inconsistent. I argue that they are not.

Many maintain that petitionary prayer is pointless. I argue that the theist can defend petitionary prayer by giving a general account of how divine and creaturely causation can be compatible and complementary, based on the claim that the goodness of something depends on its cause. I use Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysical framework to give an account that explains why a world with creaturely causation better reflects God’s goodness than a world in which God brought all things about immediately. In such a world, prayer could allow us to cause good things in a distinctive way: by asking God for them.

We present a Reformed view on the relation between Christianity and non-Christian religions. We then explore what this view entails for the question whether Christians and non-Christian religious believers refer to, believe in, and worship the same God. We first analyze the concepts of worship, belief-in, and reference, as well as their interrelations. We then argue that adherents of the Abrahamic religions plausibly refer to the same God, whereas adherents of non-Abrahamic religions do not refer to this God. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to say that adherents of all Abrahamic religions believe in and worship the same God.

The problem of moral luck is that a general fact about luck and an intuitive moral principle jointly imply the following skeptical conclusion: human beings are morally responsible for at most a tiny fraction of each action. This skeptical conclusion threatens to undermine the claim that human beings deserve their respective eternal reward and punishment. But even if this restriction on moral responsibility is compatible with the doctrine of the final judgment, the quality of one’s afterlife within heaven or hell still appears to be lucky. Utilizing recent responses to the problem of moral luck, I explore several Molinist accounts of the final judgment that resolve both theological problems of moral luck. Some of these accounts entirely eliminate moral luck while others ensure that the moral luck involved in the judgment is overall good luck.

J. P. Moreland has recently raised a number of metaphysical objections to the theory of Emergent Individuals that is defended by Timothy O’Connor, Jonathan Jacobs, and others. Moreland argues that only theism can provide a sufficient explanation for human consciousness, and he considers the theory of Emergent Individuals to offer a competing naturalistic explanation that must be refuted in order for his argument to be successful. Moreland focuses his objections on the account of emergence advocated by the defenders of the theory, as well as what he considers to be the theory’s problematic commitment to panpsychism and the causal powers metaphysic. I respond to Moreland’s objections and argue that they are unsuccessful largely due to his misunderstanding of the theory of Emergent Individuals.