In this article, I consider the cases of religious Moorean propositions of the form ‘d, but I don't believe that d’ and ‘d, but I believe that ~d’, where d is a religious dogma, proposition, or part of a creed. I argue that such propositions can be genuinely and rationally asserted and that this fact poses a problem for traditional analysis of religious assertion as an expression of faith and of religious faith as entailing belief. In the article, I explore the possibility of undermining these commonly held assumptions and argue that the assertability of religious Moorean propositions can be justified by an account of faith as an intention to form religious beliefs. In the end, I also consider the consequences of such a stance, especially concerning the debate on the ethics of religious belief and doxastic voluntarism.

In his article ‘Divine Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism’ Stephen Maitzen (2006) develops a permutation of the argument from divine hiddenness which focuses on the uneven distribution of theistic belief around the globe. Max Baker-Hytch (2016) responds to this argument by providing a theodicy which appeals to the fact that humans are epistemically interdependent. In this article I argue that Baker-Hytch's response is at best incomplete and at worst relies on a faulty modal judgement. After exploring some ways Baker-Hytch might salvage his theodicy and maintaining their failure, I conclude with the success of Maitzen's argument.

This article proposes a novel theory of the truth of doctrine. A signpost theory of the truth of doctrine is informed by practice-based philosophy of science. I argue that a theory of the truth of doctrine needs to explain the construction, use, and judgement of doctrine. So, I raise questions about the truth of doctrine in reference to the relation between a theory of the truth of doctrine and the role of doctrine in the religious practice of believers. I argue that a signpost theory of the truth of doctrine learns from an empirical understanding of measurement and modelling in scientific practice. The examples of entropy and time provide insights into the construction, use, and judgement of measurements and modelling in scientific practice. An empirical understanding of measurement in scientific practice provides resources for linking representations with reality without ignoring the contextual construction, use, and judgement of representations. I conclude with a brief articulation of how a signpost theory of the truth of doctrine learns from an empirical understanding of measurements and models in scientific practice by highlighting the similarities and differences between the construction, use, and judgement of doctrine and of scientific representations.

Establishing the distribution of belief in something, especially something that spans cultures and times, requires close attention to empirical evidence and to certain inadequacies in our concept of belief. Arguments from divine hiddenness have quickly become one of the most important argument types in the philosophy of religion. These arguments and responses to them typically rely on robust but relatively undefended empirical commitments as to the distribution of belief in God. This article synthesizes results from psychology, anthropology, and the cognitive science of religion to show that the distribution of belief in God is much more messy and much more philosophically interesting than is currently appreciated. I then derive some implications for how one might reconceive the hiddenness debate in light of these findings.

Contemporary analytic treatments of meaning in life in the English-speaking Anglo-American-Australasian tradition have largely proceeded from the atheistic and naturalistic assumptions common to the sciences. With the recent publication of Seachris and Goetz's God and Meaning (2016), T. J. Mawson's God and the Meanings of Life (2016), and Thaddeus Metz's God, Soul and the Meaning of Life (2019), more analytic philosophers might be drawn to (re)examining what role, if any, God might play in life's meaning. But the focus tends to be on ‘God’ as understood in the Abrahamic faiths. Examining meaning in the light of another concept of God, familiar to billions of individuals in various Eastern religions and intellectual traditions, might offer useful insights. I have two principle aims in this article. First, I describe an ancient Indian concept of ‘God’, showing how it radically differs from the concept of God currently under examination by philosophers of meaning. Second, I offer a novel case for why and how this concept of ‘God’ could fruitfully contribute to analytic discussions on God's possible role in life's meaning.

Occasionalism is often seen as a peculiarity of early modern philosophy. The idea that God is the sole source of efficient causation in the world strikes many as at best implausible. It was, however, a natural inference based on the seventeenth-century view that the laws of nature are simply God's decrees. The question here is whether such a view and its more recent descendants entail occasionalism. I argue that they do not, but showing why involves a new take on what exactly the laws of nature do.

Jeremiah Carey presents a version of panentheism which he attributes to Gregory Palamas, as well as other Greek patristic thinkers. The Greek tradition, he alleges, is more open to panentheistic metaphysics than the Latin. Palamas, for instance, hold that God's energies are participable, even if God's essence is not. Carey uses Palamas' metaphysics to sketch an account on which divine energies are the forms of created substances, and argues that it is open to Orthodox Christians to affirm that God is in all things as their formal cause. I argue that Carey's reading is premised on a superficial examination of the patristic literature. More importantly, Palamas' metaphysics is opposed to that of Carey, since Palamas' distinction aims to uphold the view that created persons are only contingent participants in God. On this, Palamas and the Latins are in complete accord. In conclusion, I propose that panentheistic metaphysics begins from a false dilemma.

This article explores the intersection of two developing fields of study: the psychological field of shared intentionality and the philosophy of religion field of ramified natural theology. In shared intentionality, agents share mental states and cooperate to achieve a common goal. Many psychologists in this field believe that of all the primates, only humans share intentionality – humans alone form a ‘we’. Ramified natural theology is the project of presenting philosophical evidences for core doctrines of the Christian faith. In this article I investigate some applications of shared intentionality for Christian natural theology. In the Anselmian tradition I offer two deductive arguments that deploy shared intentionality to argue that there are multiple divine persons. I then suggest that analogical arguments – often overlooked by philosophers of religion – provide a better fit for psychological findings, such as shared intentionality. After sketching some fundamental features of analogical arguments, I advance two arguments by analogy for the conclusion that God, like humans, shares intentionality. These arguments show that the psychology of shared intentionality, and empirical psychology more generally, is a promising source for theological reflection.