Sennett (1999) and Pawl and Timpe (2009; 2013) attempt to show how we can praise heavenly agents for things they inevitably do in heaven by appealing to the notion of derivative freedom. Matheson (2017) has criticized this use of derivative freedom. In this article I show why Matheson's argument is inconclusive but also how the basic point may be strengthened to undermine the use Sennett and Pawl and Timpe make of derivative freedom. I then show why Matheson is mistaken to claim that the value of free choice depends on an agent retaining the ability to change their mind; in so doing I demonstrate that some choices which result in fixed outcomes – a feature of the choices leading to impeccability – can indeed be valuable even if they cannot be undone.

By discussing three different understandings of the notion of God's propositional omniscience from a theistic point of view, I show that the strictly restricted account (SPO) – according to which God knows all true propositions that He can know – is preferable to the two other candidates as the standard interpretation of God's propositional omniscience. To establish this conclusion, I argue that Pruss's argument that strictly restricted omniscience (SPO) entails full omniscience (FPO) fails because it relies on a flawed construal of the former thesis. I propose an alternative construal for strictly restricted omniscience and defend it against some potential objections.

We utilize contemporary cognitive and social science of religion to defend a controversial thesis: the human cognitive apparatus gratuitously inclines humans to religious activity oriented around entities other than the God of classical theism. Using this thesis, we update and defend two arguments drawn from David Hume: (i) the argument from idolatry, which argues that the God of classical theism does not exist, and (ii) the argument from indifference, which argues that if the God of classical theism exists, God is indifferent to our religious activity.

The first part of the article presents three little arguments from theism to idealism. The second part employs these arguments to make sense of a puzzling doctrine of Jewish mysticism: the doctrine of divine contraction (Heb. tzimtzum).

This article investigates the metaphysical transformation that occurs when a believer becomes a new creation, something which hasn't yet been explored in the literature. I start by setting out what this ontological transformation involves, and then provide two models as to how it might go. The first is a type of substratism, based on a theory of mixing, while the second thinks about this transformation in terms of replacementism. Throughout the article I seek to resolve difficulties that both of these models bring, while also showing how other aspects of Christian thought can be explained by these models.

I advance a novel challenge for Divine Command Theory based on the existence of psychopaths. The challenge, in a nutshell, is that Divine Command Theory has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible. After explaining this argument, I respond to three objections to it and then critically examine the prospect that Divine Command Theorists might bite the bullet and accept that psychopaths can do no wrong. I conclude that the Psychopathy Objection constitutes a serious and novel challenge for Divine Command Theory.

In this article, I argue that, if ‘the overrepresentation of Christian theists in analytic philosophy of religion is unhealthy for the field, since they would be too much influenced by prior beliefs when evaluating religious arguments’ (De Cruz & De Smedt (2016), 119), then a first step towards a potential remedy is this: analytic philosophers of religion need to restructure their analytical tasks. For one way to mitigate the effects of confirmation bias, which may be influencing how analytic philosophers of religion evaluate arguments in Analytical Philosophy of Religion (APR), is to consider other points of view. Applied to APR, this means considering religious beliefs, questions, and arguments couched in non-Christian terms. In this article, I focus on Islam in particular. My aim is to show that Islam is a fertile ground of philosophical questions and arguments for analytic philosophers of religion to engage with. Engaging with questions and arguments couched in non-Christian terms would help make work in APR more diverse and inclusive of religions other than Christianity, which in turn would also be a first step towards attracting non-Christians to APR.

This article defends the correspondence theory of truth against criticisms of three theologians: Stephen Long, Kevin Hector, and Bruce Marshall. Long's criticisms arise from his metaphysical commitments, Hector's from his anti-metaphysical commitments, and Marshall's from his methodological commitments. I treat Long and Hector briefly, before giving a more extended treatment of Bruce Marshall's attack on the correspondence theory using the slingshot argument of Donald Davidson. I argue that correspondence theories withstand their criticisms. They therefore pose no obstacle to using them in theology.

According to J. L. Schellenberg, a perfectly loving God wouldn't permit the occurrence of non-resistant non-believers – that is, non-believers who are both capable of believing in and relating to God, but who fail to believe through no fault of their own. Since non-resistant non-believers exist, says Schellenberg, it follows that God doesn't. A popular response to this argument is some version or other of the greater good defence. God, it's argued, is justified in hiding himself when done for the sake of some greater good. But proponents of this defence have overlooked or neglected an important sub-argument in Schellenberg's case – what I call the ‘pre-eminent good argument’. In this article, I identify the nature of the argument and offer a solution to it.

E. J. Lowe has defended a modal ontological argument that draws upon Plantinga's version. Briefly, the argument is this: God is a necessary being; possibly, God exists; hence, God exists. In this article, I accept the validity of Lowe's modal ontological argument and focus on how he seeks to justify the argument's possibility claim in reference to his essence-based account of modal knowledge. I argue that here Lowe's defence fails. I have two complaints. I call them ‘the modified “perfect island” objection’ and ‘the conflicting possibilities objection’. Both of these refer to the concern that Lowe's modal epistemology is too permissive: it permits justification of possibility claims that question the acceptability of the underlying modal epistemology.