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.

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 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.

Materialists about human persons say that we are, and must be, wholly material beings. Substance dualists say that we are, and must be, wholly immaterial. In this article, I take issue with the ‘and must be’ bits. Both materialists and substance dualists would do well to reject modal extensions of their views and instead opt for contingent doctrines, or doctrines that are silent about those modal extensions. Or so I argue.

In this article, my objective is to argue for the compatibility between religious diversity and Christian theism by invoking the concept of divine creativity. I propose that, if God is a being of infinite powers and infinite creativity, He is such that it is possible for Him to create different and varied realities in a continuous process of creation. More than that, given His infinite creativity, God can reveal Himself in the most creative and diverse ways possible. There is no need for Him to reveal Himself as one and in a unique way, as some scholars of Christian theism argue. Basing my discussion on these ideas, I suggest that from the infinite creativity of God, it is possible to develop an argument in favour of a transformative pluralist view in face of religious diversity.

I examine two related arguments for the claim that if God is omnipotent, God cannot lack abilities such as the ability to do evil or to act irrationally. Both arguments concern the idea that omnipotence is inconsistent with being dominated with respect to abilities. I raise new issues in the formulation of such dominance principles about ability, and attempt to solve them. I also discuss and reject existing objections to these arguments. I conclude that these arguments are promising but not conclusive, and that important work remains to be done in formulating the relevant dominance principles.

Antony Flew argued for a ‘presumption of atheism’ that intended to put the philosophical debate about God under a light which demands setting the meaningfulness and logical coherence of the theistic notion of ‘God’ before any arguments for His existence are suggested. This way of proceeding, discussing divine attributes before considering the arguments for the existence of God, became dominant in analytic philosophy of religion. Flew also stated that Aquinas presented his five ways as an attempt to defeat such a presumption of atheism. However, Aquinas proceeds in the reverse order, beginning with God's existence before discussing the divine attributes. He does so because he believes that natural knowledge of God must be drawn from creatures. Accordingly, from the Thomist perspective, natural theology is necessary not because it provides rational justification for religious belief in God's existence, but rather as a means to fix the referent for the word ‘God’ (semantic function) and provide an intelligible account of the divine nature (hermeneutic function). We should also acknowledge a correlative hermeneutic function of religious faith. Therefore, natural theology should not begin from a presumption of atheism nor proceed in the way suggested by Flew, because its main intention is not strictly apologetical.

Darwin's Doubt (DD) – a thesis according to which the probability of the human cognitive mechanism's reliability given non-guided evolution is low – is central to Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism and his suggestion that the adoption of guided evolution thesis is preferable from a theory choice point of view. In this article I'll argue that there are three fundamental failures in Plantinga's argument. First, I argue that Plantinga's argument for DD is question-begging. Second, I point out that this very same argument is not in accordance with the way the evolutionary scientists usually reason. And finally I argue that the replacement of non-guided by guided evolution violates some reasonable belief-revision procedures in the history of science.

Mark Murphy has recently defended a novel account of divine agency on which God would have very minimal requiring reasons and a wide range of merely justified reasons. This account grounds his response to the problem of evil. If God would not have requiring reasons to promote the well-being of creatures, Murphy argues, then the evil we observe would not count as evidence against theism. I argue that Murphy's conclusion, if successful in undermining the problem of evil, also undermines probabilistic arguments for theism. However, there is good reason to resist his conclusion. Even if God does not have requiring reasons, but merely has justifying reasons, to promote creaturely well-being, God may nevertheless have most motivating reason to do so, and this would be enough to predict divine action, at least given Murphy's further assumption that God is perfectly free. It does not follow from the rational permissibility of God's Φ-ing that it is possible for God to Φ.

I argue that Grim's diagonalization argument against the possibility of omniscience is not sound by arguing that the properties of being a proposition or a truth are not legitimate sortal properties. Thus, the fact that there can be no set corresponding to the extension of these properties does not imply that there is no completed totality of the things possessing it. First, I demonstrate that a correspondence theory of truth implies that propositions are non-linguistic representations of a type that resist determinate and uniform individuation into units and allow for arbitrary division into parts that are also propositions. The property is, therefore, an abstract mass property with no determinate cardinality of individuals that possess it. I then sketch a new theory of omniscience with this as its basis.

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.

In this article I present some modal-epistemic arguments for the existence of God, based on the possibility of omniscience. For this, I provide modal formal systems that allow obtaining the existence of God as a theorem. Moreover, based on what I assume as reasonable premises, they show that the strong agnostic position is contradictory, since it allows the conclusion both that God exists and that God does not exist.

In this article, I present a defence of conceptual plausibility, understood as an epistemic way to qualify concepts that situates them between the merely possible and the actual. To show that there is such a thing as conceptual plausibility, I rely on what seems to lie at the heart of many uses of the phrase ‘plausible concept’: explanatory fruitfulness. To make an effective case for the claim that conceptual plausibility is of philosophical interest, I present an argument based on the debate over the rationality of theistic belief and the concept of God. To show that conceptual plausibility is philosophically feasible, I first show that it cannot be reduced to propositional plausibility. Next, I offer a minimally precise characterization of conceptual plausibility; I approach this from a qualitative and comparative perspective as well. Finally, I show how these qualitative and comparative criteria of conceptual plausibility might be applied to the debate over the rationality of theistic belief and the concept of God.

This article contributes to ongoing discussions on the place of theology in secular research universities by examining the relationship between analytic theology and science-engaged theology. Writing in response to William Wood's Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion, I consider if and how one might demarcate these two recent movements in academic theology given that both sociological and substantive definitions result in significant overlap. To show the extent of this overlap, I argue that both analytic theology and science-engaged theology are forms of faith seeking understanding, which use the tools and methods from other disciplines in order to make incremental progress on specific theological questions. I then offer two critiques of Wood's argument (made by analogy with the natural sciences) that the doctrine of creation provides theological warrant for the extension of common human reason seen in analytic philosophy and theology. My own attempt at a demarcation suggests that whereas analytic theology is best understood as an intellectual tradition, science-engaged theology is an intellectual disposition. This means that although science-engaged theology may not always be analytic, analytic theologians (and theologians more widely) should always be science-engaged.

William Wood argues that analytic theology can be included as a part of the academic study of religion. He describes two types of benefits to this inclusion: benefits accruing to the study of religion on the one hand, and benefits accruing to analytic theology on the other. I find the first type of benefit that he describes to be real, but think that within the overall compass of the interests of the academic study of religion in Christian traditions it is quite small in scope, even in a context in which doctrines are a topic of particular interest. The second type of benefit, that accruing to analytic theology, is more of a puzzle. On the one hand, I find that one species of benefit that Wood describes with some clarity is unpromising, as it seems to amount to an opportunity for yet more defensive apologetics. But on the other hand, some of what Wood says is compatible with the idea that analytic theology stands to be improved in ways that are not yet clear by engagement with the academic study of religion. I conclude with a critical glance at Wood's attempt to defend analytic theology as a method of inquiry from the charge of historical shallowness.

In Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion William Wood argues that the discipline of analytic theology (AT) can make a distinctively valuable contribution to the mainstream academic study of religion. He deftly navigates the intellectual public relations work required to secure mutual appreciation across these domains of scholarly discourse. In evaluating the characteristic goods of AT, Wood also seeks to recognize and address what Laruen Winner calls ‘characteristic damage’ or deformation in the practice of AT, which he identifies with its apparent inadequacies in addressing ‘history, mystery, and practice’ in the study of religion and theology. I argue that Wood's diagnosis fails to recognize how AT's characteristic damage emerges from its monomaniacal fixation on the epistemic value of theological theorizing to the exclusion of disciplined attention to other kinds of value. While at one point he engages a previously published version of this critique (as an explanation for AT's neglect of liberation theology), he mischaracterizes my argument in that paper in ways that lead him to miss its relevance to the objections from history, mystery, and practice. These objections can be met, I suggest, but only by significant reform to AT as currently practised.

An overarching question in William Wood's Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion concerns the conditions under which theology belongs in the public university. On this question, many or most academics today are methodological naturalists, and they would not accept explanations that appeal to supernatural entities. Wood devotes a chapter to arguing against that position. Nevertheless, Wood is not a ‘sectarian’ who argues that Christian theology should only answer to its own, tradition-specific norms, and so it is important to see how close his proposal and methodological naturalism (MN) actually are. In this response, I seek to clarify both MN and Wood's proposal regarding the proper norms for academic inquiry. Key to my argument is a distinction between a MN based on strict or scientific naturalism and a MN based on liberal or expansive naturalism. Analytic theologians and expansive naturalists can agree both that a theology that operates according to proper norms for academic inquiry belongs in the public university and that strict naturalism is not the norm that we want.