Mystical experiences are often regarded as potential sources of epistemic justification for religious beliefs. However, the ‘disanalogy objection’ maintains that, in contrast to sense perceptions, mystical experiences lack social verifiability and are thus merely subjective states that cannot substantiate objective truths. This article explores a novel externalist response that involves the concept of angels. As spiritual beings, angels can directly perceive God and verify these perceptions in their celestial community. Thus, the ‘direct perception of God’ is not inherently incapable of social verification. While invoking angels might appear contentious, it coheres with the externalist approach of conceptualising cognitive states under hypothetical settings. Despite the differences between humans and angels and their lack of interaction for verification purposes, our approach remains valid because mystics not only exemplify the same general type of ‘direct perception of God’ as angels but can also be preliminary members of a wider celestial community.

The philosophical ‘problem of evil’ goes back at least as far as Epicurus and has remained a powerful argument against the existence of God in contemporary philosophy. The argument is rooted in apparent contradictions between God’s divine attributes and various conditions of human existence. But these contradictions arise only given certain assumptions of what we should expect both God and the world to be like given God’s existence. In this article, I argue that we can utilise the work of the twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil to craft a coherent metaphysical picture of God, creation, and suffering that rejects these common assumptions. Further, I contend that this picture very plausibly follows from commonly accepted tenets of traditional monotheism. Given this, I argue that this Weil-inspired framework provides serious reasons for reframing the problem of evil and its corresponding theodicies by presenting a radically different view of how God must relate to creation. Yet, this picture does not necessarily vindicate the theist. I argue that this picture may leave us with a new question about creation in the face of evil. Namely, is it possible to understand God’s initial creative act as Weil describes it – as an act of love?

This article explores the implications of non-ideal theorising for the problem of evil. The critique of ideal theory – which has gained increased attention in several philosophical sub-disciplines during recent years – states that analytic philosophers tend to rely on overly idealised conditions, to the point of being completely unrealistic, in their theorising. To investigate if this charge holds merit in the philosophy of religion, I apply a non-ideal methodology to one traditional area of philosophy of religion – the problem of evil. Here, Richard Swinburne’s theodicy constitutes a sample of how the problem of evil is typically approached in mainstream philosophy of religion. Additionally, Swinburne’s Principle of Credulity will, in relation to his theodicy, be interrogated as well. Applying non-ideal theorising, I find that Swinburne’s theorisation relies on idealised cases and presupposes ideal conditions, while overlooking non-ideal realities. Turning to epistemic injustice and epistemology of ignorance, I find that Swinburne assumes ideal epistemological conditions in both inter-agent communication (testimony), and in collective cognition. After examining the implications of such idealisations, I find that Swinburne’s idealisations abstract away non-ideal factors which are relevant for his theories, concluding that Swinburne displays tendencies typical of ideal theorising.

Many traditional theists maintain that God is the ultimate explanation of the universe, for why anything exists at all. For the traditional theist, only a being who is fundamental and transcendent can provide an ultimate ground and explanation of the universe. This requirement that God transcend the universe in order to ultimately explain it poses a challenge for pantheism, the view that God is numerically identical with the universe. If God is identical with the universe, and God is supposed to be the ultimate explanation of the universe, the result is an instance of circular explanation. And circular explanations are allegedly illegitimate. In this article, I develop two explanatory models in an attempt to show that pantheism is consistent with non-circular explanations of the universe. All else being equal, I argue that pantheism is not explanatorily deficient in comparison to traditional theism.

Published in 1892, St. George Jackson Mivart’s remarkably original article ‘Happiness in Hell’ was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum almost immediately. In his article, Mivart proposed a solution to the problem of hell whose core contention is that hell is horrible only from a heavenly point of view. From a this-worldly point of view, by contrast, hell is a place of breathtaking felicity. In my opinion, this proposal has some striking merits, at least if it is updated and developed in certain respects. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct it, to reassess it, and to put it back on the table of eschatological ideas.

James Dominic argues in response to a previous article by me that the view according to which God is the formal cause of creatures is unorthodox and ultimately incoherent. This is because it involves either making God a part of creatures, or dividing God into finite parts, both of which, he claims, lead to contradictions with traditional Christian claims. However, Rooney both misunderstands central parts of my presentation, and fails to make his case.

The article takes as point of departure the influential book An Interpretation of Religion by John Hick both to understand an Afro-Brazilian religion called Candomblé and to suggest a way to define this human activity as a whole. After a description of Hick’s proposal, his ideas will be applied to Candomblé to see what kind of religion it is. From the problems raised in this classification, the article puts forward two formal refinements in Hick’s proposal, which can increase its internal coherence as well. In addition, in view of a salient feature of Candomblé, it is argued that the concept of religion should include the experience of evil as an essential element. The resulting definition is justified by its explanatory power, amplitude and fruitfulness.

This article is part of Religious Studies’ new initiative to publish a series of interviews with distinguished philosophers of religion. Each interview explores the personal and academic background of the interviewee and discusses their core philosophical views. The aim is to inspire students and scholars and to provide an overview of some of the most important works developed by contemporary philosophers of religion. In the first interview, Max Baker-Hytch interviews Richard Swinburne, covering such topics as his upbringing, his days as a student in Oxford in the 1950s, and his views on natural theology, the problem of evil, and the mind-body problem.

Christians talk a lot about humility. They also talk a lot about the kinds of radical faith that seem to fly in the face of intellectual humility. I explore how best to resolve this tension, from a Christian perspective. I argue that rather than prohibiting radical, ‘all-in’ faith or giving up on an intellectual humility requirement, Christians should conceive of intellectual humility as rooted in (non-)concern for one’s intellectual ego. This kind of intellectual humility is compatible with radical faith, but it also suggests a critique of some actual, ego-driven faith commitments.

It is a reasonable worry that God would not truly love us and want our salvation if He fixed a definite point after which He will no longer offer us the graces to repent of our sins. I propose that Thomas Aquinas succeeds in showing us that God would not be cruel or arbitrary in setting up a world where embodied agents end up after death in a state where they will inevitably fail to repent of their sins. Aquinas proposes that being disembodied is to be in a state where a person cannot be mistaken about what they want, given that they know themselves perfectly. If the disembodied state were like this, it would not be surprising that being in that state makes repentance impossible, since a soul would become fully integrated around whatever one desired, without any conflicting desires that could prompt repentance. Thus, humans would persist in whatever desires they had at the moment of death and disembodiment. I conclude by arguing that, while this scenario stands in need of fuller theodicy, Aquinas’s scenario is helpful in defending a view that God is not cruel or arbitrary for creating a world in which post-mortem repentance is impossible.

There are mainly two types of questions asked about religious language: those about identity (e.g., what is a religious language?) and those about meaning (e.g., what do its sentences say?). Most philosophers focus on the latter because while they disagree about meaning, they agree that some sentences are religious and that our understanding of them does not depend on us knowing what makes them religious. In this article, I provide two reasons why questions about identity should receive more attention. First, theories of identity and theories of meaning share a two-way relationship where the characteristics of one influence those of the other, and so overlooking identity overlooks important characteristics of meaning. Second, the study of religious language has been shaped by this relationship for some time and being aware of it improves our understanding of conventional trends and contemporary debates. If successful, this article will motivate philosophers to reconsider the role of identity in research and to dedicate more effort to its study.

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness – those that take there to be absolute goodness – are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this article we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea.

I aim in this article to contribute two points to the ongoing discussion regarding strong DDS and modal collapse. First, I will examine a recent version of the modal collapse objection formulated by R. T. Mullins, demonstrating that one can modify the argument to survive its most forceful rejoinder. Having established the cogency of Mullins's modal collapse argument, I next aim to heighten the severity of the conclusion. In particular, I demonstrate that the success of the modal collapse argument entails a moral collapse wherein well-established principles of ethical reasoning fail. Finally, I examine a recent attempt by Katherine Rogers to undercut some of the unwelcomed results of a modal collapse via an appeal to the theistic multiverse. I conclude that this manoeuvre proves ineffective against the moral collapse objection.

Theological voluntarism is a family of metaethical views that share the claim that deontological statuses of actions are dependent on or identical with some divine feature. Adams's version of this theistic metaethical view is a divine command theory (DCT). According to Adams's DCT, the property being-morally-obligated is identical to the property being-commanded-by-God. Thus, a natural consequence of Adams's DCT is that an agent is morally obligated to do something just in case God commands that agent to do such a thing. From Adams's DCT, it follows that God is morally obligated to act just in case God commands himself to act. Quinn argued that commanding oneself is incoherent and, therefore, that God cannot be morally obligated to act. The claim that commanding oneself is incoherent has seldom been discussed in the divine command theory literature. This article is an attempt to change that. Here, I argue (contra Quinn) that that no constitutive rule (or condition of satisfaction) of self-commands is incoherent, from which it follows that self-commanding is not an incoherent speech act. I conclude that divine command theorists can, without the charge of incoherence, affirm that God can be morally obligated because God can command himself.