Isn't there something like an amount and density of horrific suffering whose discovery would make it irrational to think God exists? Use your imagination to think of worlds that are much, much, much worse than you think Earth is when it comes to horrific suffering. Isn't there some conceivable scenario which, if you were in it, would make you say ‘Okay, okay. God doesn't exist, at least in the way we thought God was. We were wrong about that’? Pursuing this question leads to what I call the Problem of Absurd Evil.

Theists commonly hold that God endows humans with rights. Standard explanations draw on natural law theory or divine command theory. However, the natural law account does not give God a central role in explaining our rights, and the divine command account does not assign human nature a significant explanatory role. A successful theistic explanation of human rights must meet three conditions: (1) God must directly explain human rights; (2) human nature must also directly explain human rights; (3) this dual contribution must explain why morality forbids rights violations by grounding the deontic reasons associated with rights. I propose a holiness account of rights. On this view, God endows human nature with rights by making human nature holy, and God does so by fashioning humans with one of God's essential properties: the capacity to love. This theory satisfies all three conditions and explains the deontological character of rights.

All the cards seem to be stacked against belief in immortality. Nonetheless, the resources of particular religious traditions may avail where generic philosophical solutions fall short. With attention to the boredom and narcissism critiques, intimations of deathlessness in Śāntideva's radical altruism, and recent Christian debates on the soul and the intermediate state, I propose two criteria for a coherent religion-specific belief in immortality: (1) the belief is supported by a fully realized religious tradition, (2) the belief satisfies the demand for self-transcendence as well as for self-preservation. Where self-transcendence and self-preservation are kept in balance, and where the whole idea rests upon the lattice-work of a fully realized religious tradition, immortality is a fitting object of belief. Moreover, such belief is compatible with considerable speculative freedom concerning matter and spirit, body and soul, and personal identity over time.

The symbolic argument against women's ordination supposes that the theological significance of Christ's sex is his saving relationship to the Church, which takes the form of that of a bridegroom and his bride. It infers that a male priest alone is fit to represent Christ in his capacity as the Saviour of the Church, and thus that only men should be ordained. Since the emergence of the symbolic argument, however, scholars have rediscovered a long tradition of understanding Christ's saving relationship to the Church in maternal terms. While remaining neutral on whether women ultimately ought to be ordained or not, I argue that the kind of reasoning in the symbolic argument, if updated with the Jesus as Mother tradition, would suggest that it is fitting for a female priest to represent Jesus as Mother, just as it is fitting for a male priest to represent Christ the Bridegroom. Other critics of the symbolic argument tend to contest what is seen as its ‘literalist’ or ‘essentialist’ or overly gendered-valanced assumptions about priestly representation. I show that even if we grant to the symbolic argument more gendered and ‘essentialist’ views on each of the major points of disagreement in these debates, women might still be fit to represent Christ because of the maternal ways that Christ has traditionally been thought to relate to the Church. As a result, the symbolic argument may be repurposed to support women's ordination rather than undermine it.

This article probes some philosophical issues that pertain to interfaith environmental collaboration. I distinguish some forms of interfaith environmentalism, starting with a form that is relatively easy for religious communities to pursue and that appears straightforward and easy to understand. Then I propose that even this easily pursued type of collaboration has interesting components that may not be obvious at first glance, including various sorts of mutual recognition. In addition, this sort of collaboration beckons those who engage in it to take various additional steps, some of which have to do with mutual understanding and mutual enrichment. Next I turn to forms of interfaith collaboration that some religious communities and religious traditions will find challenging. In the final sections I consider the possibility that environmentally constructive religious perspectives might emerge from interfaith collaboration and I consider forms of interfaith collaboration that involve religious exploration. At the end I consider the implications of the fact that to date the religions have generally failed to undertake the robust large-scale interfaith collaboration that the environmental crisis requires.

Two doctrines (or axioms) of christian theology sharply distinguish christian monotheism from its traditional monotheistic siblings (viz. jewish and islamic monotheism): the incarnation of God and the triunity of God. Both doctrines, as many have long observed, face a conspicuous so-called logical problem – namely, apparent contradiction. How should the strong appearance of such fundamental contradiction be explained? Beall's answer: the incarnation and trinity appear to be contradictory because God is a contradictory being – a being of whom some contradictions are true. The full truth of God is expressed only via contradiction, which is why the fundamental axioms of christian theology have long appeared to be contradictory. Divine Contradiction presents the target contradictory account of the trinity; its predecessor The Contradictory Christ presents the contradictory account of the incarnation.

Assuming the existence of God and divine commands, it makes sense to ask to what end God issues commands. This question has been raised in recent philosophical literature in the context of whether there can be a divine command to believe in, or to worship, God. In this article, I argue that the answers proposed to this question fail to appreciate the wide range of possible purposes of divine commanding. In particular, I argue that commands that cannot be conformed or complied with may still have purpose.

Pascal famously argued that practical reasoning should lead people to try to form within themselves a commitment to religious practice and obedience, based upon a belief in God. I propose to take a less ambitious argument, which I call the Sensible Argument, and use it to present The Puzzle. I argue that there is a huge puzzle here, about the radical dissonance between the beliefs and practices of many of the purportedly religious. There are, I will argue, good reasons to doubt, concerning many (clearly not all or indeed most) purported religious believers, whether they are indeed believers, or at least whether their beliefs are strong; and religion seems to greatly increase the risks of deception, duplicity, and hypocrisy, as well as self-deception and inauthenticity. By turning towards a religious form of life, one will therefore be adding great morality-related risks. Arguably, if there is a God who deeply cares about individual moral behaviour, he would punish religious moral transgressors more than the secular ones. One is unlikely to be saved from hell (or other severe divine punishment) by becoming religious. If one is going to wager, it seems much more sensible to wager on the secular side.

The theist needs a conception of the distinction between doing and allowing because much of the literature focused on the problem of evil attempts to justify (via theodicy) or defend (via defence) God's allowing evil to occur. I present a counterfactual account of the doing/allowing distinction in the divine context and argue that, even if there are compelling objections to counterfactual accounts of the distinction in the human context, they do not work against such an account in the divine context. The counterfactual analysis to follow will allow the theist to plausibly claim that God does not ever bring about evil, which is crucial to some defences against the problem of evil. I conclude by defending my account against possible objections.

The doctrine of creation is a teaching shared across many faith traditions that requires urgent interdisciplinary attention today. Joanna Leidenhag's book Minding Creation considers how the philosophy of panpsychism might be beneficial to the Christian articulation of creation. This article is an overview of the book, in order to contextualize the four responses and author's reply that follows.

Jc Beall's Divine Contradiction proposes a bold response to the so-called ‘logical’ problems of the Trinity: we should admit without embarrassment that divine reality is flat-out contradictory. Beall defends his proposal against a wide range of objections and contends that it enjoys various philosophical and theological virtues, including the virtues of metaphysical and epistemological neutrality. While I agree that ceteris paribus these are desirable, I question whether the possession of these virtues really gives Beall's approach any advantage over its competitors when the chips are finally counted.

Saul Smilansky presents us with a puzzle which, in combination with a small number of premises, is supposed to generate a reversal of Pascal's wager: the wagerer should bet on a secular lifestyle, and reject religion, as the surest way of pleasing God (if God exists). In this article, we argue that the puzzle, once unpacked, isn't particularly puzzling, that the premises aren't true, and that Smilansky's wager is open to both reductio and a reversal of its own.

Thomas Ward explicates and defends a version of divine exemplarism called Containment Exemplarism to make good on the claim that God is a ‘totally original artist’. According to Containment Exemplarism, (i) God ex nihilo creates according to divine ideas, (ii) divine ideas are about an aspect or part of God, and (iii) God has the ideas he has by knowing himself. Containment Exemplarism, we are told, secures the rationality and creativity of the divine creative act. I argue, first, that Ward's God is not a totally original artist since, on Containment Exemplarism, God does not act creatively in creating. Theistic Activism, the view that God makes up the ideas he has, can secure the creativity of the divine creative act. I argue, second, that Ward's argument against the rationality of God making stuff up fails. Thus, there is one version of divine exemplarism that satisfies key desiderata for divine creation.

This article, offered from the point of view of a non-analytic, systematic theologian, admires the freshness, clarity, and simplicity of the proposal at the heart of Beall's Divine Contradiction, while raising three objections. The first is to the style in which the book is written: I suggest that it remains far too technical to reach large parts of its intended audience. The second is to the tendency to speak of God as ‘portion’ or ‘fragment’ of reality. The third, more substantive objection is to the proposal that the denial of the divinity of each of the Persons of the Trinity can be part of the Christian faith: I argue that Beall's position that only the failure to affirm a truth, and not its denial, counts as a real heresy, is under-argued and unpersuasive.

This article appreciatively reviews Joanna Leidenhag's work Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation while also responding critically to some aspects of Leidenhag's approach and content. The authors acknowledge several strengths of Leidenhag's work, then turn to how a panpsychic framework comports with Christa L. McKirland's recent work in theological anthropology. Finally, Eugene Fuimaono proposes areas of expansion for Leidenhag to consider – specifically as this relates to the value of engaging indigenous perspectives.

Michael Almeida has recently tried to show that if S5 correctly represents metaphysical necessity, there can be no non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God. Evidence would thus be irrelevant to the reasonability of traditional theistic belief. Almeida's argument has implications beyond its announced target: it amounts to a new argument for sweeping scepticism. Almeida's argument for the irrelevance of evidence to the existence of God would apply to any state of affairs that entails some metaphysical necessity. In S5, every state of affairs entails some metaphysical necessity, so Almeida should conclude that non-trivial evidence for or against any state of affairs is impossible. I argue that the problem is not with S5 but with inadequately motivated assumptions about evidential support. Avoiding those assumptions disables the argument for sweeping scepticism and without foreclosing the possibility of non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God.