Theists typically believe that God knows all truths. However, accounts of divine omniscience almost always focus on the scope of God's knowledge or perhaps on whether certain kinds of facts are there to be known by God, such as counterfactuals of creaturely freedom or future contingent facts. Very rarely do these accounts include for analysis the nature of God's knowledge. In this article, I develop an acquaintance theory of God's knowledge where acquaintance with an epistemic relation that guarantees that the truth of God's beliefs is necessary for knowledge. I argue that this view achieves an ideal way of knowing, worthy of the divine being.

You don't know that p unless it's on account of your cognitive abilities that you believe truly that p. Virtue epistemologists think there's some such ability constraint on knowledge. This looks to be in considerable tension, though, with putative faith-based knowledge. For at least on a popular Christian conception, when you believe something truly on the basis of faith this isn't because of anything you're naturally competent to do. Rather, faith-based beliefs are entirely a product of divine agency. Appearances to the contrary, I argue in this article that there's no deep tension between faith-based knowledge and virtue epistemology. Not if we learn to conceive of faith as a kind of extended knowledge.

In a ground-breaking series of books, Canadian philosopher J. L. Schellenberg (2005d; 2007b; 2009; 2013a) has developed a systematic non-theistic, non-naturalist philosophy of religion. One of the core claims within his system is that given our limited evidence (and limited capabilities for assessing what evidence we do have), scepticism concerning the truth of religious propositions is at present the only warranted epistemic response. In this article I draw attention to a potential complication for Schellenberg's assessment of the pragmatic implications of this evidential situation, a complication arising from the distinction between exoteric and esoteric religion.

The claim that God is perfectly beautiful has played a key role within the history of a number of religious traditions. However, this view has received surprisingly little attention from philosophers of religion in recent decades. In this article I aim to remedy this neglect by addressing some key philosophical issues surrounding the doctrine of divine beauty. I begin by considering how best to explicate the claim that God is perfectly beautiful before moving on to ask what consequences accepting this claim will have for our broader theorizing in philosophy.

I present a new First Cause argument that builds on modal notions to derive causal finitism, the thesis that all causal chains are of finite length. An independent uniqueness argument is then supplemented to establish the existence of a unique First Cause.

Stephen Law developed a challenge to theism, known as the evil-god challenge (Law (2010) ). The evil-god challenge to theism is to explain why the theist's responses to the problem of evil are any better than the diabolist's – who believes in a supremely evil god – rejoinders to the problem of good, when all the theist's ploys (theodicy, sceptical theism, etc.) can be parodied by the diabolist.

In the first part of this article, I extend the evil-god challenge by showing that additional theist replies to the problem of evil (more theodicies, the privation view of evil, and others) also may be appropriated, with just as much plausibility, in support of the diabolist position. In the second part of the article, I defend the evil-god challenge against several objections.

The truth of one's religious beliefs can be questioned by appeal to hypocrisy or blatant moral failure amongst the adherents of one's religion. Such an appeal implies that the absence of spiritual maturity within a religious individual or group can serve in some way as evidence against the truth of that religion and (presumably), conversely, that spiritual maturity within a religious individual or group can be thought of as providing some sort of evidence for the truth of that religion. The first part of this article attempts to get clear on what sort of evidential force the presence or absence of spiritual maturity has for the rational assessment of religious belief in general. This part of the article concludes that the evidential force of spiritual maturity must ultimately be assessed within the contours of a particular religion with a firm grasp on the sort of moral formational process envisaged by that religion. So, in the second part of the article, the evidential force of spiritual maturity is considered from a Christian perspective and an interpersonal model of sanctification is appealed to as an explanation of the lack of spiritual maturity amongst Christian believers.

Is divine goodness incompatible with efficacious petitionary prayer? Scott Davison has recently argued that prayer cannot make a difference in what God would do since a good God must always do what is best. I examine Davison's presentation of the divine goodness problem for petitionary prayer, and argue that the argument fails. I go on to argue that, since there are certain relational benefits uniquely made available through responding to petitionary prayer, divine goodness leads us to expect that God would at least sometimes respond to petitionary prayer – even prayers for third parties.