My reply to my critics in this issue deal with the following issues: God and time, James’ will-to-believe, the free will defense, and the cognitivity of mystical experiences.

Richard Gale has mounted the most effective attack on religious experience’s cognitive credentials in recent decades. This article explains why I am nonetheless not persuaded by it. I argue that: (1) Contrary to Gale, mystical experiences do take an objective accusative, and are therefore presumptively cognitive. (2) The tests for the veridicality of religious experience are more like those for sense experiences than Gale allows. (3) Gale’s “big” or “deep” disanalogy (viz., that “there are no analogous dimensions [to space-time] in which the apparent object of a religious experience could be housed” and, as a result, no way to distinguish between religious experiences that are of numerically one and the same religious object and religious experiences “that are of merely qualitatively similar ones”) is not as devastating as he thinks. (4) Gale’s critique of my and Alston’s attempt to defuse attacks on the cognitively of religious experience by appealing to categoreal differences between the apparent objects of religious experience and sense experience is unsuccessful.

I argue that Gale’s brilliant critique of theistic arguments is a major contribution to the philosophy of religion that can instruct atheologians and theologians for decades to come. However, his unargued appeal to faith, his reliance on the vague properties of being eminently worthy of worship and being supremely great, his failure to come to grips with the atheological implications of maintaining that God cannot know what He will decide, and the incompleteness of his critique of atheological arguments seriously weaken his tacit case against rational atheism and his acceptance of fideism. I see his use of informal polls regarding modal intuitionsas a first important step to a more rigorous approach.

In Decision Theory as Philosophy, Mark Kaplan reissues a number of perennial questions within decision theory and epistemology, particularly regarding the relevance of decision theory to epistemology and the scope of an epistemology informed by a “modest” Bayesian decision theory. Much of Kaplan’s book represents a challenge to what he calls the “Orthodox” Bayesian theory of decision and evidence. His arguments turn positive in the fourth chapter, in which he argues for the “Assertion View” of belief---an attempted reconciliation of the categorical notion of belief (as distinct from disbelief) with that of confidence, which comes in degrees. Theapproach to epistemology manifest in Decision Theory, while commendable in some respects, suffers fundamentally from its methodological commitment to the primacy of preference principles over and above distinctively epistemic principles. But to express this last misgiving is just to doubt whether decision theory has much of its own to contribute to epistemology.

In “The Tensed or Tensless Existence of Nature” Alexsander Jokic attempts to defend a new version A. N. Prior’s “Thank Goodness It’sOver” argument against my response to it. Jokic argues that we can give a non-circular account of ceasing to exist that will vindicate the new reading, but I argue that his account to rescue Prior’s argument against my criticism fails.

The method in question is conceptual analysis. The madness comes of its privileging received usage over theories that would revise our concepts so as to conform to the phenomena, not the other way around. The alternatives to capture-the-concept include revisionary theory-construction as practiced not only in the sciences but in some philosophies. I present a revisionary theory of an important kind of normativity---the normativity involved in a biological adaptation’s being for this or that---which theory, I argue, undermines the received objections to there being any such normativity objectively in the world. So too for other kinds of normativity, including the moral, insofar as the objections to their objectivity have the same form and presuppositions.

A traditional and widespread belief among theists is that God administers punishment for sins and/or immoral actions. In this paper, Iargue that there is good reason to believe that the infliction of any suffering on humans by God (i.e., a perfectly just being) is morally unjustified. This is important not only because it conflicts with a deeply entrenched religious belief, but also because, as I show, a number of recent argumentative strategies employed by theistic philosophers require that divine punishment be morally justifiable. I conclude, then, that the arguments put forth by these theistic philosophers do not succeed.

There are no unicorns, but there are representations of them, hence motivating an explanation of discourse about the property “unicorn” in terms of discourse about representations of unicorns. I show how to extend this strategy to apply to any kind or property terms. References to property instances may be explained as references to comprehensive representations of them, which represent all of the (supposed) properties of such an instance-unlike ’ordinary’ representations, which are distinctive in that they represent only some limited subset of such properties, through use only of some proper subset of their own (supposed) properties. This representationalist approach results in a very economical naturalist ontology, which has no need for properties.

This paper examines the evidential argument from evil put forward by William Rowe during his early and middle periods (1978-1995). Having delineated some of the important features of Rowe’s argument, it is then assessed in the light of “the skeptical theist critique.” According to skeptical theists, Rowe’s crucial (“noseeum”) inference from inscrutable evil to pointless evil can be exposed as unwarranted, particularly by appealing to the disparity between our cognitive abilities and the infinite wisdom of God. However, by relating the problem of evil to that of divine hiddenness, the adverse consequences and hence the highly dubious nature of this skeptical theist position are brought to light.

The Modal Perfection Argument (MPA) for the existence of a Supreme Being is a new ontological argument that is rooted in the insights of Anselm, Leibniz and Gödel. Something is supreme if and only if nothing is possibly greater, and a perfection is a property that it is better to have than not. The premises of MPA are that supremity is a perfection, perfections entail only perfections, and the negation of a perfection is not a perfection. I do three things in this paper. First, I prove that MPA is valid by constructing a formal deduction of it in second order modal logic. Second, I argue that its premises are true. Third, I defend the argument and the logic used against some likely objections.

In the debate between those who hold the tensed theory and those who hold the tenseless theory of time, Arthur Prior’s famous “Thank Goodness Argument” has had a special place. Initially designed to help tensers, it has seen its fortune change many times. In this paper the focus is on a methodological aspect of the argument. The purpose is to defend the “new reading” of the argument, which is intended to resolve an ontological issue by focusing on an epistemic fact, against a recent charge by Nathan Oaklander that such an argument can be valid only if it is trivial, i.e., if “ceases to exist” contained in one of the premises had been already understood in the tensed sense. However, whether the argument is trivial or not depends also on whether the tensed reading is directly invoked or obtained only through the substitution of an extensional equivalent whose truth is not based on the presupposed truth of the tensed account. A possible extensional equivalent needed for the intended substitution is offered. It is based on the concept of in-the-world-inherent-modalities.

According to Quine, the ontological question can be posed in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: “What is there?” But if we call this the ontological question, what shall we call the logically prior question: “What is it for an item to be there?” Peter van Inwagen has recently suggested that this be called the meta-ontological question, and more importantly, has endorsed Quine’s answer to it. Ingredient in this Quinean answer to the meta-ontological question are several theses, among them, “Being is the same as existence”; “Being is univocal”; and “The single sense of being or existence is adequately captured by the existential quantifier of formal logic.” This articleexamines the last of these theses, which van Inwagen claims “ought to be uncontroversial.” But far from having this deontic property, the thesis in question ought to be not only controverted, but rejected.

Matthew Tedesco has argued that Alvin Plantinga’s argument that belief in naturalistic evolution is self-defeating entails, according to a parallel argument, that theistic belief is self-defeating for the same reasons. I defend Plantinga against this charge by arguing that the parallel argument is unsound.

In a recent paper, Steven Savitt attempts to demonstrate that there is an area of common ground between one classic proponent of temporal passage, C.D. Broad, and one classic opponent of passage, D.C. Williams. According to Savitt, Broad's notion of “absolute becoming” as the ordered occurrence of (simultaneity sets of) events, and Williams’ notion of “literal passage,” as the happening of events strung along the four-dimensional space-time manifold, are indistinguishable. Savitt recognizes that some might think it preposterous to maintain that Broad and Williams agree regarding the nature of passage, but by a consideration of Broad’s “OstensibleTemporality,” and Williams’ “The Myth of Passage,” Savitt attempts to demonstrate that they do in fact hold the same, and indeed the correct, view of passage. I shall argue, however, that Broad’s account of the transitory aspect of time is ontologically distinguishable from Williams’ and that only by confusing Broad’s A-theory with Williams’ B-theory or Williams’ B-theory with Broad’s A-theory could Savitt have thought that there is an area of overlap between them. A demonstration of these points will have the benefit of enabling us to clarify the ontological character ofthe dispute, of which Broad was well-aware, between the A- and B-theories of time.

In the second chapter of his Modality, Probability and Rationality, James Sennett argues that Plantinga’s famed S5 Modal Argument (hereafter “MA”) for the existence of an unsurpassably great being is objectionably circular since it’s impossible for one to understand the premises of Plantinga’s MA without understanding these premises to logically entail its conclusion. That is to say, Sennett’s charge is that Plantinga’s MA is circular since there is no understanding of the premises of Plantinga’s MA that is independent of its conclusion. In this paper I argue that Sennett has shown no such thing and that, contrary to strong prima facie appearances, there is an understanding of the premises of Plantinga’s MA that is independent of its conclusion. Consequently, Plantinga’s MA is not circular inthe way that Sennett alleges.

Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss raise a number of excellent questions in their separate responses to my comments on Gale’s book, On the Nature and Existence of God. They focus on aspects of my discussion that need at least to be clarified, if not retracted, in ways I explain in this reply.

It is often assumed by friends and foes alike of intelligent design that a likelihood approach to design inferences will require evidenceregarding the specific motives and abilities of any hypothetical designer. Elliott Sober, like Venn before him, indicates that this information is unavailable when the designer is not human (or at least finite) and concludes that there is no good argument for design in biology. I argue that a knowledge of motives and abilities is not always necessary for obtaining a likelihood on design. In many cases, including the case of irreducibly complex objects, frequencies from known agents can supply the likelihood. I argue against the claim that data gathered from humans is inapplicable to non-human agents. Finally, I point out that a broadly Bayesian approach to design inferences, such as that advocated by Sober, is actually advantageous to design advocates in that it frees them from the Popperian requirement that they construct an overarching science which makes high-likelihood predictions.