Religious epistemology is widely regarded as being in a flourishing condition. It is true that some very sharp analytical work on religion has been produced by philosophers in the past few decades. But this work, for various cultural and historical reasons, has been kept within excessively narrow bounds, and the result is that the appearance of flourishing is to a considerable extent illusory. Here I discuss three important ways in which improvements to this situation might be made.

Religious disagreement is, quite understandably, viewed as a problem for religious belief. In this paper, I consider why religious disagreement is a problem—why it is a potential defeater for religious belief—and I propose a way of dealing with this sort of potential defeater. I begin by focusing elsewhere—on arguments for radical skepticism. In section 1, I consider skeptical arguments proposed as potential defeaters for all of our perceptual and memory beliefs and explain what I think the rational response is to such potential defeaters, emphasizing the way epistemic intuitions are involved in both the skeptical arguments and my recommended response. In section 2, I discuss the way in which peer disagreement—on any topic—is a potential defeater for our beliefs, highlighting the conditions under which recognized disagreement is a successful defeater and those under which it isn't. In the third section, I consider how to use a section-1 type of response to deal with a section-2 type of defeater for religious belief.

The problem of evil is the problem of reconciling the existence of a perfect God with the existence of horrible things in the world. Many take this problem as a convincing reason to be an atheist. But others think that the problem can be solved. One prominent solution is called ‘sceptical theism’. A sceptical theist is someone who believes in God but thinks that the problem of evil is not a real problem since humans are unable to see whether the horrible things in our world are truly pointless or else serve some greater purpose.

Skeptical theism is a popular - if not universally theistically endorsed - response to the evidential problem of evil. Skeptical theists question how we can be in a position to know God lacks God-justifying reason to allow the evils we observe. In this paper I examine a criticism of skeptical theism: that the skeptical theists skepticism re divine reasons entails that, similarly, we cannot know God lacks God-justifying reason to deceive us about the external world and the past. This in turn seems to supply us with a defeater for all our beliefs regarding the external world and past? Critics argue that either the skeptical theist abandon their skeptical theism, thereby resurrecting the evidential argument from evil, or else they must embrace seemingly absurd skeptical consequences, including skepticism about the external world and past. I look at various skeptical theist responses to this critique and find them all wanting.

Sceptical theism claims that we have vast ignorance about the realm of value and the connections, causal and modal, between goods and bads. This ignorance makes it reasonable for a theist to say that God has reasons beyond our ken for allowing the horrendous evils we observe. But if so, then does this not lead to moral paralysis when we need to prevent evils ourselves? For, for aught that we know, there are reasons beyond our ken for us to allow the evils, and so we should not prevent them. This paralysis argument, however, shall be argued to rest on a confusion between probabilities and expected utilities. A connection between this paralysis argument and Lenman's1 discussion of the butterfly effect and chaos will be drawn, and the solution offered will apply in both cases.

Some truths cannot be accessed ‘cold’, from a detached and impersonal standpoint, but require personal commitment and even moral change in order for the relevant evidence to come to light. The truths of religion may be of this kind. Moreover, recent work in psychology and neurophysiology suggests that our knowledge of the world comes in different forms, the detached critical scrutiny associated with ‘the left-brain’ and the more intuitive and holistic awareness mediated by the ‘right brain’. Much contemporary philosophy privileges the former kind of knowledge, but in areas such as religion this may be a mistake.1

A novel account of the rationality of religious belief is offered, called quasi-fideism. According to this proposal, we are neither to think of religious belief as completely immune to rational evaluation nor are we to deny that it involves fundamental commitments which are arational. Moreover, a parity argument is presented to the effect that religious belief is no different from ordinary rational belief in presupposing such fundamental arational commitments. This proposal is shown to be rooted in Wittgenstein's remarks on hinge commitments in On Certainty, remarks which it is claimed were in turn influenced by John Henry Newman's treatment of the rationality of religious belief in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.

This paper challenges a common assumption in the literature concerning the problem of divine hiddenness, namely, that the following are inconsistent: God's making available adequate evidence for belief that he exists and the existence of non-culpable nonbelievers. It draws on the notions of defeated evidence and glimpses to depict the complexity of our evidential situation with respect to God's existence.

The fine-tuning argument purports to show that particular aspects of fundamental physics provide evidence for the existence of God. This argument is legitimate, yet there are numerous doubts about its legitimacy. There are various misgivings about the fine-tuning argument which are based on misunderstandings. In this paper we will go over several major misapprehensions (from both popular and philosophical sources), and explain why they do not undermine the basic cogency of the fine-tuning argument.