Sang Hyun Lee's account of Jonathan Edwards's ontology has become the benchmark of many recent discussions of Edwards's thought. In this paper, I argue that this Lee interpretation is flawed in several crucial respects. In place of Lee's understanding of Edwards I offer an account of Edwards's work according to which Edwards is an idealist-occasionalist, but not an advocate of a purely dispositional ontology of creation.

According to Plantinga's version of the free-will argument (FWA), the existence of free beings in the world who, on the whole, do more good than evil is the greater moral good that cannot be secured by even an omnipotent God without allowing some evil and thereby shows the logical compatibility of God with evil. In this essay, I argue that there are good empirical and moral reasons, from the standpoint of one plausible conception of Christian ethics, to doubt that Plantinga's version of the FWA succeeds as a theodicy. In particular, I argue that, given this understanding of Christian ethics, it seems reasonable to think it false that free beings are doing more good than evil in the world. While there are surely possible worlds in which free beings do more good than evil, this material world seems clearly not one of those. Thus, while Plantinga's version might succeed as a defence against the logical problem of evil, it will neither rebut the evidential problem of evil nor, without more, ground a successful theodicy that reconciles God's existence with the evil that occurs in this world.

The traditional Christian view that God foreknows the future exclusively in terms of what will and will not come to pass is partially rooted in two ancient Hellenistic philosophical assumptions. Hellenistic philosophers universally assumed that propositions asserting ‘x will occur’ contradict propositions asserting ‘x will not occur’ and generally assumed that the gods lose significant providential advantage if they know the future partly as a domain of possibilities rather than exclusively in terms of what will and will not occur. Both assumptions continue to influence people in the direction of the traditional understanding of God's knowledge of the future. In this essay I argue that the first assumption is unnecessary and the second largely misguided.

In contemporary epistemology of religion, evidentialism has been included in a wider critique of traditional foundationalist theories of rational belief. To show the irrelevance of evidentialism, some critics have offered alternatives to the foundationalist approach, prominent among which is Alvin Plantinga's ‘warrant as proper function’. But the connection between evidentialism and foundationalism has been exaggerated, and criticisms of traditional foundationalism do not discredit evidentialism in principle. Furthermore, appeals to warranted belief imply that the heart of evidentialism – the proportioning of belief to rational grounds – has not been discredited but assimilated to the reliabilist view of knowledge by expanding the concept of evidence to include religious experience. In the end, the warrant concept extends the reach of evidentialism, thereby enhancing rather than diminishing its relevance for rational belief.

Andrew Eshleman has argued that atheists can believe in God by being fully engaged members of religious communities and using religious discourse in a non-realist way. He calls this position ‘fictionalism’ because the atheist takes up religion as a useful fiction. In this paper I critique fictionalism along two lines: that it is problematic to successfully be a fictionalist and that fictionalism is unjustified. Reflection on fictionalism will point to some wider problems with religious anti-realism.

In his paper, ‘A critique of religious fictionalism’, Benjamin Cordry raises a series of objections to a fictionalist form of religious non-realism that I proposed in my earlier paper, ‘Can an atheist believe in God?’. They fall into two main categories: those alleging that an atheist would be unjustified in adopting fictionalism, and those alleging that fictionalism could not be successfully implemented, or practised communally. I argue that these objections can be met.

In this paper I evaluate Brian Zamulinski's recent attempt to rebut an argument to the conclusion that having any kind of religious faith violates a moral duty. I agree with Zamulinski that the argument is unsound, but I disagree on where it goes wrong. I criticize Zamulinski's alternative construal of Christian faith as existential commitment to fundamental assumptions. It does not follow that we should accept the moral argument against religious faith, for at least two reasons. First, Zamulinski's Cliffordian ethics of belief is defective in several regards. Second, the truth of doxastic involuntarism and the possibility of doxastic excuse conditions can be used to demonstrate that the argument is unconvincing.

In ‘The ethics of belief and Christian faith as commitment to assumptions’, Rik Peels attacks the views that I advanced in ‘Christianity and the ethics of belief’. Here, I rebut his criticisms of the claim that it is wrong to believe without sufficient evidence, of the contention that Christians are committed to that claim, and of the notion of that faith is not belief but commitment to assumptions in the hope of salvation. My original conclusions still stand.

Peter Byrne has presented arguments against the effectiveness of two ‘defensive strategies’ deployed in my books Eternal God and The Providence of God respectively. These strategies were originally presented to support the cogency of ‘theological compatibilism’ by arguing against the claims that it is inconsistent with human responsibility, and that it entails that God is the author of sin. In this present article the author offers a number of clarifications to his original thesis and argues that Byrne's arguments do not succeed in their aim of undermining the two strategies.