Many traditional theists maintain that God is the ultimate explanation of the universe, for why anything exists at all. For the traditional theist, only a being who is fundamental and transcendent can provide an ultimate ground and explanation of the universe. This requirement that God transcend the universe in order to ultimately explain it poses a challenge for pantheism, the view that God is numerically identical with the universe. If God is identical with the universe, and God is supposed to be the ultimate explanation of the universe, the result is an instance of circular explanation. And circular explanations are allegedly illegitimate. In this article, I develop two explanatory models in an attempt to show that pantheism is consistent with non-circular explanations of the universe. All else being equal, I argue that pantheism is not explanatorily deficient in comparison to traditional theism.

Published in 1892, St. George Jackson Mivart’s remarkably original article ‘Happiness in Hell’ was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum almost immediately. In his article, Mivart proposed a solution to the problem of hell whose core contention is that hell is horrible only from a heavenly point of view. From a this-worldly point of view, by contrast, hell is a place of breathtaking felicity. In my opinion, this proposal has some striking merits, at least if it is updated and developed in certain respects. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct it, to reassess it, and to put it back on the table of eschatological ideas.

James Dominic argues in response to a previous article by me that the view according to which God is the formal cause of creatures is unorthodox and ultimately incoherent. This is because it involves either making God a part of creatures, or dividing God into finite parts, both of which, he claims, lead to contradictions with traditional Christian claims. However, Rooney both misunderstands central parts of my presentation, and fails to make his case.

The article takes as point of departure the influential book An Interpretation of Religion by John Hick both to understand an Afro-Brazilian religion called Candomblé and to suggest a way to define this human activity as a whole. After a description of Hick’s proposal, his ideas will be applied to Candomblé to see what kind of religion it is. From the problems raised in this classification, the article puts forward two formal refinements in Hick’s proposal, which can increase its internal coherence as well. In addition, in view of a salient feature of Candomblé, it is argued that the concept of religion should include the experience of evil as an essential element. The resulting definition is justified by its explanatory power, amplitude and fruitfulness.

This article is part of Religious Studies’ new initiative to publish a series of interviews with distinguished philosophers of religion. Each interview explores the personal and academic background of the interviewee and discusses their core philosophical views. The aim is to inspire students and scholars and to provide an overview of some of the most important works developed by contemporary philosophers of religion. In the first interview, Max Baker-Hytch interviews Richard Swinburne, covering such topics as his upbringing, his days as a student in Oxford in the 1950s, and his views on natural theology, the problem of evil, and the mind-body problem.

Christians talk a lot about humility. They also talk a lot about the kinds of radical faith that seem to fly in the face of intellectual humility. I explore how best to resolve this tension, from a Christian perspective. I argue that rather than prohibiting radical, ‘all-in’ faith or giving up on an intellectual humility requirement, Christians should conceive of intellectual humility as rooted in (non-)concern for one’s intellectual ego. This kind of intellectual humility is compatible with radical faith, but it also suggests a critique of some actual, ego-driven faith commitments.

It is a reasonable worry that God would not truly love us and want our salvation if He fixed a definite point after which He will no longer offer us the graces to repent of our sins. I propose that Thomas Aquinas succeeds in showing us that God would not be cruel or arbitrary in setting up a world where embodied agents end up after death in a state where they will inevitably fail to repent of their sins. Aquinas proposes that being disembodied is to be in a state where a person cannot be mistaken about what they want, given that they know themselves perfectly. If the disembodied state were like this, it would not be surprising that being in that state makes repentance impossible, since a soul would become fully integrated around whatever one desired, without any conflicting desires that could prompt repentance. Thus, humans would persist in whatever desires they had at the moment of death and disembodiment. I conclude by arguing that, while this scenario stands in need of fuller theodicy, Aquinas’s scenario is helpful in defending a view that God is not cruel or arbitrary for creating a world in which post-mortem repentance is impossible.

There are mainly two types of questions asked about religious language: those about identity (e.g., what is a religious language?) and those about meaning (e.g., what do its sentences say?). Most philosophers focus on the latter because while they disagree about meaning, they agree that some sentences are religious and that our understanding of them does not depend on us knowing what makes them religious. In this article, I provide two reasons why questions about identity should receive more attention. First, theories of identity and theories of meaning share a two-way relationship where the characteristics of one influence those of the other, and so overlooking identity overlooks important characteristics of meaning. Second, the study of religious language has been shaped by this relationship for some time and being aware of it improves our understanding of conventional trends and contemporary debates. If successful, this article will motivate philosophers to reconsider the role of identity in research and to dedicate more effort to its study.

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness – those that take there to be absolute goodness – are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this article we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea.

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 is a collection of replies to critics of Divine Contradiction, each critic a symposiast in the Religious Studies symposium on said book.

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.

I aim in this article to contribute two points to the ongoing discussion regarding strong DDS and modal collapse. First, I will examine a recent version of the modal collapse objection formulated by R. T. Mullins, demonstrating that one can modify the argument to survive its most forceful rejoinder. Having established the cogency of Mullins's modal collapse argument, I next aim to heighten the severity of the conclusion. In particular, I demonstrate that the success of the modal collapse argument entails a moral collapse wherein well-established principles of ethical reasoning fail. Finally, I examine a recent attempt by Katherine Rogers to undercut some of the unwelcomed results of a modal collapse via an appeal to the theistic multiverse. I conclude that this manoeuvre proves ineffective against the moral collapse objection.

Theological voluntarism is a family of metaethical views that share the claim that deontological statuses of actions are dependent on or identical with some divine feature. Adams's version of this theistic metaethical view is a divine command theory (DCT). According to Adams's DCT, the property being-morally-obligated is identical to the property being-commanded-by-God. Thus, a natural consequence of Adams's DCT is that an agent is morally obligated to do something just in case God commands that agent to do such a thing. From Adams's DCT, it follows that God is morally obligated to act just in case God commands himself to act. Quinn argued that commanding oneself is incoherent and, therefore, that God cannot be morally obligated to act. The claim that commanding oneself is incoherent has seldom been discussed in the divine command theory literature. This article is an attempt to change that. Here, I argue (contra Quinn) that that no constitutive rule (or condition of satisfaction) of self-commands is incoherent, from which it follows that self-commanding is not an incoherent speech act. I conclude that divine command theorists can, without the charge of incoherence, affirm that God can be morally obligated because God can command himself.

In the past decade, philosophers have devoted a great deal of attention to the practice of petitionary prayer. Philosophical inquiries have posed a priori problems – issues that arise from an analytical investigation of the concept of God, the concept of petitionary prayer, and the relationship between the two. Taking a different direction, this article shifts the focus from possibility to actuality. Accordingly, this article does not deal with the question ‘Can God answer petitionary prayers?’ but rather with the question ‘Does God answer petitionary prayers?’ and, mainly, its implications. More accurately, I will present the tension between the religious belief that petitionary prayers can be effective and the fact that this does not seem to be so in reality, a claim that has been the conclusion of several empirical studies. Then I will present and examine several solutions to this tension. Although I will try to promote my preferred solution, my main aim is to clarify the problem and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the solutions offered to solve the problem under discussion.

Sceptical theists respond to the problem of evil by arguing that we should be sceptical of our abilities to understand God's plan and the justifying reasons for his actions. A major difficulty faced by sceptical theism is the problem of moral paralysis. Some sceptical theists have proposed a divine command response: theists can appeal to God's commands in acting, and this circumvents the need to exercise value judgement in moral deliberations. This article provides an objection to the divine command response by arguing that it renders love impossible and practically undermines the possibility of the theistic way of life. As a result, this article demonstrates a constraint on any potential solution to the problem of moral paralysis in sceptical theism: the access to values of loving relationship and human well-being, as well as their role to play in agents’ deliberative process, should be safeguarded.

My objective is to explore a possible contribution of Afro-Brazilian religions to a pluralist philosophy of religious diversity. I will especially explore the syncretic wisdom of these religious traditions, showing how it can help us better understand interreligious dynamics. To do this, I begin by exposing some challenges of pluralist theses, highlighting two problems: homogenization and isolationism. Following that, I briefly introduce some characteristics of Afro-Brazilian religiosity, emphasizing its syncretic aspects, and then argue in favour of syncretism as a kind of wisdom intrinsic to Afro-Brazilian religiosity. This wisdom encompasses both practical and conceptual aspects. I conclude by demonstrating how this Afro-Brazilian wisdom can contribute with philosophical studies on religious diversity.

Jc Beall's Divine Contradiction is a fascinating defence of the idea that contradictions are true of the tri-personal God. This project requires a logic that avoids the consequence that every proposition follows from a contradiction. Beall presents such a logic. This ‘gap/glut’ logic is the topic of this article. A gap/glut logic presupposes that falsity is not simply the absence of truth – for a proposition that is true may also be false. This article is essentially an examination of the idea that falsity is not simply untruth. The author rejects this position but does not claim to have an argument against it. In lieu of an argument, he presents three ‘considerations’. First, it is possible to give an intuitive semantics for the language of sentential logic that yields ‘classical’ sentential logic (including ‘p, ¬ p ⊢ q’) and which makes no mention of truth-values. Second, it is possible to imagine a race who manage their affairs very well without having the concept ‘falsity’. Third, it is possible to construct a semantics that yields a logic identical with the dialetheist logic and which makes no mention of truth-values – and which, far from being plausible, seems pointless.

In a previous work, I argue that traditional Islamic theism's understanding of the world, when juxtaposed with key facts of our world's religious diversity, is implausible. On this understanding, roughly, the truth of tawḥīd (Islamic monotheism) is universally evident, as is belief in its truth. Faithful Muslims act appropriately on knowledge of tawḥīd and are rewarded with heaven, whereas non-Muslims culpably refuse to do so and are eternally punished in hell. Such a view of the world, I argue, is not borne out by empirical observation and philosophical reflection. In a recent article, Ayşenur Ünügür Tabur criticizes this argument, presenting a number of objections to it. In this rejoinder, I argue that her objections, which primarily consist of misstatements and irrelevancies, fail to refute my argument. Since traditional Islamic theism's understanding of the world includes the view that some people will be eternally punished in hell, Tabur augments her discussion of my argument by attempting to solve the Problem of Hell. In my rejoinder to Tabur, I further argue that her proffered solution to this problem is woefully inadequate.