Substitution and satisfaction theories of the atonement connect suffering or punishment to the possibility of forgiveness. I argue that even the most sophisticated versions of these theories cannot explain why the atonement was necessary. Instead, I suggest that the meaning of the atonement is in establishing the authority of God. God's authority, on this view, is analogous to the authority of a parent or friend. Christ's experience changed God to make him more like his children, and thereby to share a relationship of authority with them. On this proposal, the atonement is an act of divine humility.

The article argues that evils perpetrated in the name of God (‘religious evils') generate a special version of the problem of evil, and a concomitant evidential argument, that cannot be solved by any of the current defences and theodicies. The article draws on historical examples to clarify the concept of religious evil, it shows that religious evil is a candidate defeater of theism, and it claims that the resulting evidential argument cannot be defused by defences and theodicies currently on offer. The last section outlines a solution.

This article discusses the ceremonial laws in Judaism as a language of religion and assesses their role within human self-formation (Bildung). Moses Mendelssohn's groundbreaking account on the function of ritual offers both a solution and a threat to this issue: on the one hand the capacity to perform and understand rituals can be seen as a form of self-liberation. At the same time, the general openness to interpretation makes this conception vulnerable to the destructive force of idolatry. With the aid of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, this article offers a solution to this problem by showing how ritual functions as a dialogue between the members of a community; a dialogue that carries a distinctively ethical outreach.

We reconstruct Hegel's implicit version of the ontological argument in the light of his anti-representationalist idealist metaphysics. For Hegel, the ontological argument had been a peculiarly modern form of argument for the existence of God, presupposing a ‘representationalist’ account of the mind and its concepts. As such, it was susceptible to Kant's famous refutation, but Kant himself had provided a model for an alternative conception of concept, one developed by Fichte with his notion of the I=I. We reconstruct an Hegelian version of the ontological argument by considering the possibility of a Fichtean version, and then subjecting it to a critique based on Hegel's critical appropriation of Fichte's I=I.

Split brains that result in two simultaneous streams of consciousness cut off from each other are wrongly held to be grounds for doubting the existence of the divinely created soul. The mistake is based on two related errors: first, a failure to appreciate the soul's dependence upon neurological functioning; second, a fallacious belief that if the soul is simple, i.e. without parts, then there must be a unity to its thought, all of its thoughts being potentially accessible to reflection or even unreflective causal interactions. But a soul theorist can allow neurological events to keep some conscious thoughts unavailable to others.

An interesting version of religious pluralism has been proposed by Peter Byrne in his Prolegomena to Religious Pluralism. Byrne's pluralism aims to unite an affirmation of the equal cognitive and salvific success of all major religions with a realist view of religious truth and a severe agnosticism about specific descriptions of religious reality. I argue that Byrne's proposal, while an improvement upon non-realist versions of pluralism, fails to resolve the tensions between its agnosticism about detailed descriptions of the sacred reality and its realist conception of religious truth, which requires the revisability of descriptions of the sacred offered by diverse religions.

There has been a trend within natural theology to present arguments for theism deductively, such that at least one of the premises is likely to be extremely controversial. For those arguments with less controversial premises, the conclusion is usually something short of theism. On these grounds, some have employed probabilistic reasoning to revive classical arguments – to use less controversial premises in achieving a conclusion directly relevant to whether theism is true or not. Here, I formulate the kalam cosmological argument in Bayesian terms, and argue that doing so renders many objections levelled against it obsolete.