Philosophers have paid almost no attention to the baptismal rite. This is puzzling not only because the rite is central to the Christian life but also because the rite itself is very puzzling, making audacious claims about what its performance accomplishes. According to one of these audacious claims, by the performance of the rite the one baptized is transformed, enjoying states such as purification, sanctification, regeneration, and illumination – what I call the regenerate states. But how could this be so? And isn't there good empirical evidence that the imposition of the regenerate states on the one baptized is not accomplished in the vast majority of cases? In this article, I consider an ancient and audacious version of the baptismal rite, namely, that used by Eastern Orthodox Christians. I propose a model for understanding this rite – what I call the process-interpretation – which I believe comes close to being satisfactory, since it implies that the imposition of the regenerate states is not nearly as perplexing as it might seem at first glance.

According to Alvin Plantinga there is no good reason to think that there is anything unacceptable about religious belief even if the believer cannot present evidence or arguments in support of her beliefs. One important challenge to this claim is the ‘Great Pumpkin’ objection. This objection is that Plantinga's arguments could be used to defend very strange beliefs such as belief in the Great Pumpkin. I describe this objection in more detail and then offer a solution to the problem by considering how the historical and social environment might provide favouring evidence for Christian beliefs.

John Bishop and Andrei Buckareff have discussed in this journal Bishop's conception of faith, which he has later included in his Believing by Faith (2007). One key question concerned the possibility of believing on inconclusive evidence. Bishop suggested that beliefs may have non-evidential, passional causes that can sustain belief even if what is believed lacks adequate evidential support. Buckareff took a critical stance towards Bishop's claim. In this article I shall expand and defend Buckareff's central claims against Bishop's answer to the criticism as well as his revised view in Believing by Faith. My aim is to show that while beliefs may at times be caused by passional factors, it is doubtful that such beliefs could be sustained in full awareness. In general, I will argue that conscious non-evidential believing is not possible.

In the debate over the theology of the soul's origin, there have traditionally been three broad views on origins. These include creationism, traducianism, and Origen's pre-existence view. In the recent philosophy of religion and mind literature, William Hasker posits an alternative view of origins called emergent substance dualism. As a contribution to this discussion, I put forward one novel option as a via media between simple creationism and Hasker's emergent substance dualism, wherein it has relevant overlapping features found in the two contrary positions. I suggest that this view is a variation of creationism like emergentism where the material part (i.e. the brain) has some positive causal role in the soul's coming to be as a discrete effect of one divine cause. I argue that emergent creationism (as I call it) is a viable option deserving the attention of philosophers and theologians.

Traditional views about God and about deliberation seem to imply that we need a deliberation restriction on the concept of divine omniscience. I will argue, however, that this deliberation restriction is both irrelevant and unnecessary. It is irrelevant because there is no time at which God needs to deliberate; and it is unnecessary because even if God does deliberate, it's possible for him to do so while knowing what the results of that deliberation will be. And because this possibility of deliberating despite knowing the results holds for deliberation in general, my argument provides useful (and perhaps surprising) results not only for discussions of the divine attributes, but also for broader discussions of deliberation itself.

In this article I discuss two interrelated problems found in Richard Swinburne's cumulative case argument for the existence of God. First, I argue that the probabilistic proof apparatus introduced by Swinburne in The Existence of God (1979; 2004) would require him to provide a normalized preference order of God's intentions based on a measure of the ‘relative moral goodness’ of possible-world states. However, the approach offered in the second edition of The Existence of God (2004) fails to do so for various reasons. Second, a slightly different version of the argument briefly indicated by Swinburne might avoid the problems of normalizability but falls apart when meeting the criteria of relevant confirmation.

Chris Dragos has recently presented two objections to criticisms I've published against Peter van Inwagen's No-Minimum argument. He also suggests that the best way to criticize the No-Minimum argument is via the concept of divine satisficing. In this article I argue that both of Dragos's objections fail, and I question whether satisficing is relevant to the viability of the No-Minimum argument.