In this paper I will argue, contrary to common assumptions, that rational atheistic prayer is possible. I will formulate and respond to two powerful arguments against the possibility of atheistic prayer: first, an argument that the act of prayer involves an intention to communicate to God, precluding disbelief in God’s existence; second, an argument claiming that reaching out to God through prayer requires believing God might exist, precluding rational disbelief in God. In showing options for response to these arguments, I will describe a model on which atheistic prayer is not only possible, but is on a par with theistic prayer in many more ways than one might expect.

Character formation is a central theme in Katherin Rogers’s Freedom and Self-Creation: Anselmian Libertarianism. According to Rogers, Anselm holds that the purpose of free choice is to afford creatures the possibility of creating their own characters through their free choices. I argue that Anselm has no doctrine of character formation. Accordingly, he does not hold the view of the purpose of free choice that Rogers attributes to him. Creatures cannot bring about justice in themselves, let alone increase it by their own efforts; any moral progress is divine gift, not creaturely achievement. I offer an alternative account of the purpose of free choice.

Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? We answer: it depends. To begin, we clear away some specious arguments surrounding this issue, to make room for the central question: What determines the reference of a name, and under what conditions do names shift reference? We’ll introduce Gareth Evans’s theory of reference, on which a name refers to the dominant source of information in that name’s “dossier,” and we then develop the theory’s notion of dominance. We conclude that whether Muslims’ use of “Allah” co-refers with Christians’ use of “God” depends on how much weight is given to what type of information in the dossiers of these two names, and we offer a two-part test by which the reader can determine whether Muslim and Christian uses of the divine names co-refer: If Christianity were true and Islam false, might “Allah” still refer to God? And: If Islam were true and Christianity false, might “God” still refer to Allah? We explain the implications of your answers to those questions, and we close with a few reflections about what, in addition to reference, might be required for worship, and whether, from a Christian perspective, salvation turns on this issue.

Theological determinism is, at first glance, difficult to square with the typical Christian commitment to the appropriateness of divine blame. How, we may wonder, can it be appropriate for God to blame someone for something that was determined to occur by God in the first place? In this paper, I try to clarify this challenge to Christian theological determinism, arguing that its most cogent version includes specific commitments about what is involved when God blames wrongdoers. I then argue that these commitments are not essential to divine blame, and that there are plausible alternative accounts of such blame that would not court similar challenges. I end with a case for the intelligibility of divine blame within theological determinism, in light of its possible similarity in relevant respects to certain instances of intelligible human blame.

I object to Merold Westphal’s characterization in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (2014) of faith as “against reason.” I argue that Kierkegaard scholars emphasize the tension between faith and reason more than Kierkegaard does, affirming and perpetuating a broader antagonism in our own cultural climate. I suggest that the view of faith as “transforming vision” developed by M. Jamie Ferreira and others makes better sense of the different facets of faith pointed out by Westphal and the strengths of his account (especially faith as a passion) while avoiding conceptual and practical problems with the account Westphal has recently offered.

Alvin Plantinga’s religious epistemology has been used to respond to many debunking arguments against theistic belief. However, critics have claimed that Plantinga’s religious epistemology conflicts with skeptical theism, a view often used in response to the problem of evil. If they are correct, then a common way of responding to debunking arguments conflicts with a common way of responding to the problem of evil. In this paper, I examine the critics’ claims and argue that they are right. I then present two revised versions of Plantinga’s argument for his religious epistemology. I call the first a religion-based argument and the second an intention-based argument. Both are compatible with skeptical theism, and both can be used to respond to debunking arguments. They apply only to theistic beliefs of actual persons who have what I call doxastically valuable relationships with God—valuable relationships the goods of which entail the belief that God exists.

It is generally thought that we cannot forgive people for things they do to others. I cannot forgive you for lying to your mother, for instance. I lack standing to do so. But many people believe that God can forgive us for things we do to others. How is this possible? This is the question I wish to explore. Call it the problem of divine standing. I begin by cataloging the various ways one can have standing to forgive a wrongdoer. I then provide two solutions to the problem of divine standing.

Contemporary treatments of humility typically treat humility as a virtue that is reserved for the accomplished. I argue that paradigmatic humility can also be possessed by the deficient, and I provide an extended example of such humility. I further argue that attending to such a case helps us to appreciate the way in which the humble have released both the desire for superiority and the aversion to inferiority. Accordingly, when necessary, the humble will exhibit an extremely low concern with their own status relative to that of others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The atheism of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud can be called the atheism of suspicion in contrast to evidential atheism. For while the latter focuses on the truth of religious beliefs, the former inquires into their function. It asks, in other words, what motives lead to belief and what practices are compatible with and authorised by religious beliefs. The primary response of Christian philosophers should not be to refute these analyses, since they are all too often true and, moreover, very much of the same sort as found in the religion critique of Jesus and the prophets. Rather, our primary response should be to show the Christian community, including ourselves, how even the truth can become an instrument of self-interest. In this way the atheism of suspicion can provide helpful conceptual tools for personal and corporate self-examination.

In Towards a World Theology, Cantwell Smith offers a new approach to the issue of conflicting belief claims in the world religions. He argues that most approaches err in considering religion in terms of belief rather than faith. He proposes a world theology of faith that requires persons to move beyond their particular traditions in order to interpret comprehensively the religious faith of human kind. I present Cantwell Smith’s central thesis, analyzing it in term of the relation between faith and belief. I argue that faith and belief are distinguishable but not separable and that to do what Cantwell Smith proposes would require an interpretive scheme or metaphysical theory that can be evaluated in accordance with its ability to make sense of the experience of humankind.

The Principle of Credulity---i.e. that if I have an experience apparently of X then in the absence of good reasons to think the experience non-veridical I have evidence that X exists---is an essential premise in many formulations of the argument from religious experience. I defend this use of the principle against objections offered by William Rowe. I argue that experiences of God are checkable. and in ways (epistemically) significantly similar to the ways sensory experiences are checkable. and that treating sensory experiences as Rowe suggests we treat experiences of God demands wholesale scepticism with regard to the senses.

I contend that William Hasker’s argument to show omniscience incompatible with human freedom trades on an ambiguity between altering and bringing about the past, and that it is the latter only which is invoked by one who thinks they are compatible. I then use his notion of precluding circumstances to suggest that what gives the appearance of our inability to freely bring about the future (and hence that omniscience is incompatible with freedom) is that, from God’s perspective of foreknowledge, it is as if the event has already occurred, but that as if conditions do not tell us about the conditions under which the act was performed (whether it was free or not).

Traditional philosophical uneasiness with imagining activity is documented. The reason adduced for the ontological homelessness of imagination is the inability of most philosophers to recognize the irreducible nature and function of imaginativity.Imagining is then distinguished from sense-perceiving. imaging. and conceptual activity. Imagining, it is proposed, is the reality of making-believe; and such human, as-if functioning can both (I) characterize human deeds as imaginative acts. and (2) be a latent or active functional moment within other kinds of human acts.Why God. creational ordinances, angels. and all earthly creatures can be imaginated is expounded, along with an analysis of such activity. its norm. and imaginative results huch as art). Remarks on relations of imagining to science and faith conclude the piece.

Alvin Plantinga’s account of proper basicality, which suggests a “broad foundationalism,” raises nagging questions. A first such question is how a disposition to accept certain beliefs as properly basic could contribute to their being so. A second is whether broadfoundationalists can really make headway in identifying the criteria of proper basicality by using, as Plantinga suggests, an inductive approach. A third is whether members of the set of statements that give criteria for proper basicality are (a) themselves properly basic and (b) necessary or only contingent truths. I argue that each of these questions has a satisfactory answer, although at Ieast one inductive approach to detennining proper basicality fails.