Alvin Plantinga over the decades has developed a particular theory of warrant that would allow certain beliefs to be warranted, even if one lacked propositional arguments or evidence for them. One such belief that Plantinga focuses on is belief in God. There have been, however, numerous objections both to Plantinga's theory of warrant and to the religious application that he makes of it. In this article I address an objection from both of these categories. I first tackle an objection that attempts to show that proper function isn't a necessary condition for warrant. After tackling this, I move on to interact with the Pandora's Box Objection. This objection argues that Plantinga's epistemology is weakened by the fact that all sorts of serious religious beliefs could be warranted by using his system.

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.

Here I explain the concept of evolutionary religion and consider its relations to what in previous work I have called sceptical religion. I also interact with five articles recently published in Religious Studies that respond to my work and address related themes – articles by William A. Rottschaefer, James Elliott, Travis Dumsday, and Carl-Johan Palmqvist.

This paper considers the Bayesian form of the fine-tuning argument as advanced by Richard Swinburne. An expository section aims to identify the precise character of the argument, and three lines of objection are then advanced. The first of these holds that there is an inconsistency in Swinburne's procedure, the second that his argument has an unacceptable dependence on an objectivist theory of value, the third that his method is powerless to single out traditional theism from a vast number of competitors. In the final section of the paper the fine-tuning argument is considered, not now as self-standing, but as one of a number of theistic arguments taken together and applied in the manner of the final chapter of Swinburne's The Existence of God. It is argued that points already made also block the way for this line of thought.

In G. K. Chesterton's story The Doom of the Darnaways, Lord Darnaway put on the spines of dummy books in his library such empty designations as The Snakes of Ireland and The Religion of Frederick the Great: I too might appear to have chosen a non-subject for this paper. My coming to the contrary conclusion was the unwitting work of the man whom Balliol College employed to give us tutorials in political philosophy. I soon noticed that his interpretation of Hobbes seemed to be based on a few chapters of Leviathan; desiring to get material for probing questions, and allured by Hobbes's style, I quickly devoured the whole of Leviathan. This reading left me with an abiding respect for the moral and political philosophy of Hobbes; his religious views, at this time, I found curious rather than impressive, but already I had no doubt that they were not mere hollow professions thinly cloaking an immoralist atheism, but were considered opinions sincerely held.

Thomas Morris and Richard Swinburne have recently defended what they call the ‘two-minds’ model of the Incarnation. This model, which I refer to as the ‘inclusion model’ or ‘inclusionism’, claims that Christ had two consciousnesses, a human and a divine consciousness, with the former consciousness contained within the latter one. I begin by exploring the motivation for, and structure of, inclusionism. I then develop a variety of objections to it: some philosophical, others theological in nature. Finally, I sketch a variant of inclusionism which I call ‘restricted inclusionism’ (RI); RI can evade many, but not all, of the objections to standard inclusionism.

Most analytic philosophers hold that if God exists, He exists with broad logical necessity. Richard Swinburne denies the distinction between narrow and broad logical necessity, and argues that if God exists, His existence is narrow-logically contingent. A defender of divine broad logical necessity could grant the latter claim. I argue, however, that not only is God's existence broad-logically necessary, but on a certain understanding of God's relation to modality, it comes out narrow-logically necessary. This piece argues against Swinburne's overall account of modality and rebuts his argument for narrow-logical contingency.

Ordinal polytheism is motivated by the cosmological and design arguments. It is also motivated by Leibnizian–Lewisian modal realism. Just as there are many universes, so there are many gods. Gods are necessary concrete grounds of universes. The god-universe relation is one-to-one. Ordinal polytheism argues for a hierarchy of ranks of ever more perfect gods, one rank for every ordinal number. Since there are no maximally perfect gods, ordinal polytheism avoids many of the familiar problems of monotheism. It links theology with counterpart theory, mathematics and computer science. And it entails that the system of universes has an attractive axiological structure.

An important question raised in the Molinist debate is, ‘Given God's access to counterfactual knowledge, could God create a world in which free creatures always refrain from evil?’ An affirmative answer suggests that God cannot possess counterfactual knowledge since such knowledge would allow God to create seemingly more desirable worlds than the actual world. However, Alvin Plantinga has argued that it is at least possible that every possible person is transworld depraved – meaning that each person would perform some wrong actions if any world in which that person is morally free were actualized. I argue that, given an infinite number of possible persons, the probability that everyone is transworld depraved is exceedingly low. In addition, I investigate whether there are enough possible persons vis-à-vis the number of moral choices per person so that God could create worlds like the actual world, except lacking in moral evil.

Much work on mystical experience has taken for granted a certain view about the relation between experience and its interpretation. This ‘traditional view’ has received perhaps its most explicit statement in Stace's Mysticism and Philosophy. It is a view which is attractive to proponents of the doctrine of unanimity, the doctrine (roughly put) that at the phenomenological level all mystical experiences are basically similar. Recently, however, in a growing body of literature, the traditional view has come under heavy fire. Its critics adopt a Kantian, indeed a hyper–Kantian, picture of experience. And they see the traditional view, accordingly, as ‘naïve’ and ‘simplistic’. In addition, hyper–Kantians typically reject the doctrine of unanimity.

It has often been suggested (1) that according to Hume it is impossible in principle for testimony to prove a miracle, and (2) that an indispensable element in Hume's argument is the claim that a miracle is by definition a violation of the laws of nature. I argue that both (1) and (2) are mistaken, and that, once Hume's ‘Of Miracles’ is viewed in a proper historical context, it emerges that Hume's argument against miracles is considerably different from what is usually supposed.

God, who is an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent Creator and Providence, exists and There is evil are logically compatible claims. God exists, If God exists, then He has a morally sufficient reason for allowing any evil that He does allow, and There is evil is a consistent triad of propositions. Thus any pair from that triad is also consistent. Thus God exists and There is evil are logically compatible. But this does not settle the question as to whether the truth of There is evil in the world has such consequences for theism as making it highly improbable that God exists or making it unreasonable to believe that God exists. That propositions P and Q are logically compatible does not entail that one does not provide powerful evidence against the other. In particular, it has seemed that some actual evils are gratuitous or in some manner just could not fit into a God-made world. Thus the simple argument is offered that: (1) There are gratuitous evils; (2) If there are gratuitous evils, then there is no God; so: (3) There is no God. I will call this simple argument the ‘root argument’, for it is this argument and sophistications of it that will occupy us hereafter.

What is faith? Lara Buchak has done as much as anyone recently to answer this question in a sensible and instructive fashion. As it turns out, her writings reveal two theories of faith, an early one and a later one – or two versions of the same one if you like. In what follows, we aim to assess those theories with an eye to highlighting both their good- and bad-making features, marking choice points for theorizing about faith along the way, and defending the choices we make. The result is an alternative theory of faith, one that we hope extends our common pursuit of understanding what faith is.

The present paper tries to trace the particular contours that the problem of theodicy assumes in the Chinese Buddhist text the Awakening of Faith in the Great Vehicle (Ta-sheng ch'i-hsin lun). It analyses the beginning section of the main body of text – the section, that is, that outlines the major theoretical structure of the work – in terms of a problem that has been of particular concern in western theology. I believe that taking such a tack is especially valuable for highlighting the central Problematik around which the text is organized. The paper will thus use the problem of theodicy as a means of exploring some of the philosophical implications of the Awakening of Faith.

When it comes to religion, lack of conclusive evidence leads many reflective thinkers to embrace agnosticism. However, pure agnosticism does not necessarily have to be the final word; there are other attitudes one might reasonably adopt in a situation of epistemic uncertainty. This article concentrates on J. L. Schellenberg's proposal that non-doxastic propositional faith is available even when belief is unwarranted. Schellenberg's view is rejected since his envisaged notion of faith conflicts with important epistemic aims. Instead, it is suggested that a combination of hope and ‘occasional’ faith constitutes a substantive religious pro-attitude rationally available in situations of epistemic uncertainty.

Augustine is commonly considered the greatest early proponent of what we call the free-will defence, but this idea is deeply misleading, as Augustine grew increasingly dissatisfied with the view from an early point in his career, and his later explorations of the implications of his doctrines of sin and grace led him to reject free-will theodicies altogether. As a compatibilist, however, he continued to reject the idea that God is responsible for the advent of evil. His alternative was his often misunderstood claim that the primal sin had a ‘deficient’ cause, together with a version of what Alvin Plantinga has nominated the ‘felix culpa’ approach. Thus, Augustine was actually the free-will defence's first major Christian detractor, and by the end of his career he had become its greatest critic.

In The Coherence of Theism Richard Swinburne writes that a person cannot be omniscient and perfectly free. In The Existence of God Swinburne writes that God is a person who is omniscient and perfectly free. There is a straightforward reason why the two passages are not in tension, but recognition of this reason raises a problem for Swinburne's argument in The Existence of God (the conclusion of which is that God likely exists). In this paper I present the problem for Swinburne's argument. I then consider two potential responses and suggest that neither succeeds.

‘The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for particular purposes.’

Among the many purposes for which Wittgenstein assembled reminders, the deeper understanding of the religious life would have to qualify as one. Though on first reading this would hardly seem obvious, I hope to make this abundantly clear through an examination of his later literature. There are two ways in which he sheds light on religious issues: first, by the personal passion of his own life and the forthright display of intellectual integrity expected of any professional thinker toward any discipline (this I take to be of particular importance for the theologian or religious thinker), and, second, by making his philosophical investigations descriptive. Any analysis of religious issues or the understanding of the religious life should involve the high degree of personal integrity and the rigorously descriptive method which Wittgenstein makes apparent throughout his writing.

This paper is concerned with the nature of mystical knowledge in the higher stages of mystical realization, with particular reference to the teachings of St John of the Cross. Correspondences and parallels with the writings of other mystics may be noticed, but it is not the purpose of this discussion to elucidate these in detail.