The first and greatest commandment according to Jesus, and so the one most central to Christian practice, is the command to love God. We argue that this commandment is best interpreted in aretaic rather than deontic terms. In brief, we argue that there is no obligation to love God. While bad, failure to seek and enjoy a union of love with God is not in violation of any general moral requirement. The core argument is straightforward: relations of intimacy should not be morally imposed upon autonomous beings. We contend that such reasoning applies to human beings' relationship to God. So, even if our ultimate end is to enjoy communion with God, God has no right that human beings seek a relationship with him. If this is correct, then the command to ‘love God’ is not the sort of moral principle that can be supported by threats of hellfire or other forms of coercion.

In this article, I argue that sceptical theists have too narrow a focus: they consider only God's axiological reasons, ignoring any non-axiological reasons he may have. But this is a mistake: predicting how God will act requires knowing about his reasons in general, and this requires knowing about both God's axiological and non-axiological reasons. In light of this, I construct and defend a kind of sceptical theism – Deontological Sceptical Theism – that encompasses all of God's reasons, and briefly illustrate how it renders irrelevant certain charges of excessive sceptical and how it evaporates equiprobability objections. Furthermore, I put forth a simple argument in favour of Deontological Sceptical Theism, which shows that everyone (at least currently) ought to endorse it.

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Ada Agada argues that the problem of evil is relevant not only to those who consider God to hold the Omni-properties but also to those who understand God as a limited deity. He rightly points out that the limited-God literature in the African philosophy of religion has neglected to address the problem of evil by too quickly dismissing it. Agada then argues that the reason why the problem of evil is philosophically relevant for the limited-God view is that He, as the creator, has sufficient powers to address evil and, thereby, moral responsibility regarding the evil in the world. In this reply, I uphold that although Agada is correct to affirm that the problem of evil is relevant for the limited-God view, he is mistaken to contend that the reason is that God is the creator. I contest this view and argue that Agada has not given enough reasons to believe that God has moral responsibility over evil in the world. However, I illuminate how Agada can develop this argument in the future.

This article expands my previous work on omnisubjectivity, the divine property of having a complete and perfect grasp of the subjective states of all beings who have such states. By a subjective state I mean a conscious state as that state is experienced by the one who has it. I argue that only a being with subjectivity can be omnisubjective, and therefore, God has subjective states. The article explores the subjectivity of God as it applies to the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, focusing on the important difference between a person and an instance of a nature. I propose that the uniqueness of persons is grounded in their unique subjective states, not their objective nature. Each person of the Trinity has a unique point of view and unique subjectivity even though they share an objective divine nature instantiated in a single divine being. The Son has a single set of subjective states before, during, and after the Incarnation. Each member of the Trinity is omnisubjective and fully grasps the unique subjective states of each other person of the Trinity. The perfect comprehension of each other while remaining unique persons is a model of perfect love within a community of persons.

This article describes the group of ninth-century Zoroastrian philosophers I call the ‘Dēnkard School’ and sketches the way they do philosophy. It presents their argument against substance dualism, which the Zoroastrians argue is in tension with the belief in repentance. From an analysis of this polemic, there follows a reconstruction of the Dēnkard School's own doctrine of the consubstantiality of body and soul. To understand these arguments, I describe some background eschatological and ontological beliefs upheld by the Dēnkard School and their specific conception of substance, which includes the notions of ownership and responsibility. Overall, the argument can be seen as a new position on a traditional problem, and so increasing the scope of philosophy in a more global perspective.

This article considers the role of emotion in John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent by distinguishing five different ways (or ‘models’) in which the emotions play a positive epistemic role in relation to cognition. The most important of these, the Cognitive-Emotion Model, offers a new account of Newman's crucial idea of real assent, one that stresses the primary role of the emotions in real assent rather than imagination. This model helps to explain the nature of real assent by highlighting Newman's portrayal of an emotional way of knowing an object that is personal or individual, incommunicable, vivid, and motive. In this study of the relations between emotion and cognition I hope to highlight unexplored aspects of the nature of real assent and the importance of the role of emotion in it and hope to show how Newman's epistemology offers a rich framework for exploring the positive epistemic contributions of the emotions.

This article analyses Moses Maimonides' account of the AfterDeath and, more specifically, of olam ha-ba’ (lit.: the world to come), the state of ultimate human happiness and perfection (in contrast to this world). Maimonides is unequivocal about what olam ha-ba’ is not. Contrary to a competing medieval Jewish tradition, it is utterly incorporeal and, contrary to rabbinic tradition, it is not a motivational reward nor compensation for undeserved suffering in a theodicy. Instead, Maimonides gives two positive accounts of the metaphysics of olam ha-ba’. The first is an intellectualist account on which the denizens of olam ha-ba’ are perfected intellects engaged in intellectual apprehension of the deity. The second is sceptical: it denies that humans have any understanding or knowledge (‘ilm, episteme) of olam ha-ba’ and claims that all language used to describe it is purely equivocal or homonymous, although it allows that some immutable thing, whatever it is, survives death. Instead of being a motivational reward or compensation, olam ha-ba’ is the end, that is, final cause or telos, of the best possible human life in this world at which one aims and which one attempts to approximate even if one cannot actually realize it.

In this article, I explore a Wittgensteinian approach to blasphemy. While philosophy of religion tends to have very little to say about blasphemy, we can note two key, typically unchallenged, assumptions about it. First, there is the Assertion from Anywhere Assumption: whether one can successfully blaspheme is entirely independent of one's religious views, commitments, or way of life. Second, there is the Act of Communication Assumption: blasphemy is essentially an act of assertion. I contend that a Wittgensteinian approach rejects both assumptions and, thus, reorients our conception of blasphemy. Take two characteristically Wittgensteinian claims. First, religious statements/beliefs have a different ‘grammar’ than empirical propositions. Second (and relatedly), holding religious beliefs necessarily connects with how one lives. Wittgensteinian blasphemy rejects the Assertion from Anywhere Assumption: to blaspheme, one must be in or have been in the religious framework one blasphemes. Being entirely outside of that context divests one's blasphemy from its proper content. Second, Wittgensteinian blasphemy rejects the Act of Communication Assumption: if religious belief is centrally a form of life, then blasphemy must be lived out as well. Wittgensteinian blasphemy is less about the utterances one makes and more about how one's life intersects (or fails to intersect) with religiosity.

Much of the literature on religious fictionalism has emphasized that religious fictionalists employing a theistic fiction cannot just leave evil out of the fiction, and that on the contrary, they face worries that very closely parallel the worries raised by the problem of evil. This article argues that when religious fictionalism is construed most charitably, these worries do not arise. It explores three fictionalist approaches to evil (Excision, Completeness, and Inconsistency), shows that each can serve religious fictionalist ends, and recommends a pluralist stance towards them.

A discussion of the metaphysics of spiritual experience requires that we are clear about the nature of metaphysics, and I take as my starting point the ‘transcendent metaphysics’ described and supposedly eliminated by A. J. Ayer. Most analytic philosophers agree with Ayer (and Kant) that transcendent metaphysics in the relevant sense is deeply problematic, and they associate it with platonism, theism, and religious thinking more generally. Assuming then that spiritual experience takes us into religious territory, and this territory is forbidden, a metaphysics of spiritual experience is going to involve transcendent metaphysics, and it will be similarly problematic. Ayer's conception of transcendent reality is itself deeply problematic, and I shall argue that his metaphysical framework helps to motivate atheistic spirituality by ruling out the possibility of an empirically grounded and hence defensible religious alternative. I shall challenge this framework, set out an alternative with the help of Arthur Schopenhauer, and spell out the implications for a metaphysics of spiritual experience.

This article examines Sikh conceptualizations about death and immortality, focusing on several thematic lines of inquiry drawn from the utterances of the Sikh Gurus (gurbāṇī): (i) ordinary or empirical death; (ii) deathless states; (iii) after death? (iv) this life; (v) personhood and the (non-)existence of God. These themes address philosophical issues related to concerns about fear of death, belief in an afterlife, as well as its implications for the nature of self and the concept of God in Sikhism. At the same time, however, the article complicates our understanding of these topics by resituating them within discussions of time and time-consciousness, thereby highlighting the need for a form of logic more conducive to the understanding of death and immortality in Sikh thought.

In analytic theology, corporate and/or communal accounts of moral responsibility are gaining recognition as a useful resource in numerous debates. One of the areas to which they have been applied is the atonement. It is thought that when Christ is atoning for the human community, one evades concerns about justice because it seems permissible for a member of a group to suffer punishment for the group's actions even if they are not morally responsible for these themselves. To establish the moral responsibility of the human community, one can either adopt group agency or utilize a non-agential form of group moral responsibility. I shall explore the latter option here and shall outline the understanding of communal sin undergirding the model.

This article presents a new approach to understanding ritual: embodied world construction. Informed by phenomenology and a philosophy of embodiment, this approach argues that rituals can (re)shape the structure of an individual's perceptual world. Ritual participation transforms how the world appears for an individual through the inculcation of new perceptual habits, enabling the perception of objects and properties which could not previously be apprehended. This theory is then applied to two case studies from an existing ethnographic study of North American evangelicalism, indicating how the theory of embodied world construction can shed new light on how individuals are shaped by ritual practice.

This article looks at the question of whether and how there can be a theistic expansive naturalism. In light of Fiona Ellis's work, I will identify a crucial issue for this research programme moving forward, namely, the question of ‘which God?’. Ellis seeks to develop a metaphysical framework that offers a rationale for incorporating theism into naturalism, and the acceptance of God comes through a reflection on our relation to value. Offering a sympathetic interpretation of her position, the article will suggest that Ellis's conception of God has been significantly modified in her more recent writings, moving from a rather ‘thick’ conception of God to more a modest account. I will suggest a move toward a ‘less thick’ position is preferable.

Panentheism is the position that the world is in some sense ‘in’ God, and God ‘in’ the world, without the world being identical to God. Thus, it tries, like what I call mainstream theism and against pantheism, to protect the transcendence of God, while giving greater emphasis to his immanence in creation than the former. I aim to explicate an approach that I call Orthodox Panentheism. The word ‘orthodox’ is to be read in two ways. First, the picture is derived from the writings of some of the most important figures in Eastern Christian thought, so that it is Orthodox in the ‘big “O” sense’. Second, I hope to show that it is a legitimate Christian picture of the God–world relation which is both distinctive and worthy of being called ‘panentheism’ – an orthodox panentheism in the ‘little “o” sense’.

In response to Pascal's famous wager argument for adopting Christian belief, Denis Diderot noted that ‘An Imam could just as well reason this way’. In this article, I will show how Diderot's observation about Pascal's argument can legitimately be made about Alvin Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology (RE) and its use in defending the rationality of Christian belief. Plantinga's RE can, with some minor adjustments, easily be adopted by Muslims. I shall argue that an Islamic analogue of Plantinga's Christian RE presents an undercutting rationality defeater for Christian belief for those reflective Christians who adopt Plantinga-style religious epistemology. I call this defeater the ‘Diderot Objection’ to Plantinga's RE. As part of my discussion, I will consider how Plantinga attempts to respond to this sort of objection and will show why his response runs into difficulties.

Yujin Nagasawa has recently defended two reformulated Ontological Arguments, one adapted from Anselm's ‘Classical’ version and one from Plantinga's ‘Modal’ version. This article explains in detail why both of them fail, and then goes on to present general objections to any Ontological Argument.

This article argues that the Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) literature does not support the claim, made most notably by Eleonore Stump, that suffering tends to promote psychic integration that allows for interpersonal closeness with God (or others). Two strains of argument support this conclusion. First, there are problems internal to PTG research, identified by psychologists and bioethicists in the field, that call the strength and reliability of the findings into question. Second, even if successful in what it purports to do, the PTG literature does not support the conclusions that Stump draws from it. Finally, given that we live in a culture that both prizes and moralizes positivity, often at the expense of sufferers, applying this research in prescriptive and normative ways inappropriately circumscribes the post-traumatic journeys of trauma survivors. Before turning to these arguments, I begin by briefly describing the long-term suffering that trauma can inflict in the forms of post-traumatic stress disorder and other physical and mental health effects. This section illustrates the challenge that trauma poses for the projects of theodicy and defence and provides the backdrop against which the PTG literature must be read.

This article explores the concept of non-personal immortality. Non-personal theories of immortality claim that even though there is no personal or individual survival of death, it is still possible to continue to exist in a non-personal state. The most important challenge for non-personal conceptions of immortality is solving the apparent contradiction between on the one hand accepting that individual existence ends with death and on the other hand maintaining that death nevertheless is not equal to total annihilation. I present two theories of non-personal immortality found in Schopenhauer and William James and derive a set of systematic core theses from them. Finally, I discuss whether the notion of non-personal immortality is consistent, and whether a non-personal afterlife could be desirable.

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, I will reconstruct Mullā Ṣadrā's complex arguments for the soul's immortality based on its immaterial nature. Second and finally, I will briefly probe and assess various epistemological and metaphysical objections against Ṣadrā's immaterialist conception of the soul. Ṣadrā contends that our bodily death marks an awakening to the reality of our consciousness on the plane of the imaginal realm (the imaginal world is an isthmus between the sensible world and the world of intelligible forms). For Ṣadrā, ‘death’ does not mark an end or discontinuity in human consciousness, rather it signifies an awakening to a new mode of existence in which the soul, having once been the active principle controlling the actions of the physical body, now manifests itself as the passive recipient of the form given to it by its imaginal reality – a reality shaped by the actions it had performed in its earthly, embodied state. Thus, death is seen as the passage of the soul from the sensible to the imaginal world, until the soul unites with the intelligible world (ʿālam al-ʿaql).