The notion of omnipotence has proved to be quite recalcitrant to analysis. Still, during the last three decades or so, there has resurfaced a clever argument to the effect that, whatever omnipotence is, it cannot be exemplified in God: an allegedly impeccable and all-perfect being. Scrutinizing this argument, however, I find it less than convincing. Moreover, and more importantly, I venture a positive account of my own: a non-technical and distinctively metaphysical definition of omnipotence which, if true, sidesteps quite a number of well-known pitfalls. Also, by way of introduction, I review some earlier attempts.

A well-known objection to divine will/divine command moral theories is that they commit us to the view that God's will is arbitrary. I argue that several versions of divine will/divine command moral theories, including two of Robert Adams's versions of the DCT and my own divine preference theory, can be successfully defended against this objection. I argue that, even if God's preferences are somewhat arbitrary, we have reasons to conform our wills to them. It is not a fatal objection to divine will/divine command moral theories if they imply that God's will/God's commands is/are arbitrary, to some extent.

Bayne and Nagasawa have argued that the properties traditionally attributed to God provide an insufficient grounding for the obligation to worship God. They do so partly because the same properties, when possessed in lesser quantities by human beings, do not give rise to similar obligations. In a recent paper, Jeremy Gwiazda challenges this line of argument. He does so because it neglects the possible existence of a threshold obligation to worship, i.e. an obligation that only kicks in when the value of a parameter has crossed a certain threshold. This article argues that there is a serious flaw in Gwiazda's proposal. Although thresholds may play an important part in how we think about our obligations, their function is distinct from that envisaged by Gwiazda. To be precise, this article argues that thresholds are only relevant to obligations to the extent that they transform a pre-existing imperfect obligation or act of supererogation into a perfect obligation. Since it is not clear that there is an imperfect obligation to worship any being, and indeed since on a certain conception of moral agency it is highly unlikely that there could be, the search for a rational basis for the obligation to worship must continue.

Some of the most significant religious appeals can be taken as reasons of a distinctively religious kind. But many popular ways of interpreting religious reasoning pose obstacles to appreciating religious reasons as such. To avoid binding the concept of religious reason to an intellectual programme that requires a disjunction between the religious and the rational or that dissolves all tension between religious claims and general rational standards of validity and normativity, religious reasons can be defined for purposes of liberal study by their challenging yet rationally appreciable transvalid claims and transnormative implications. Examples from the book of Amos and the Chandogya Upanishad are discussed.

The traditional problem of evil sets theists the task of reconciling two things: God and evil. I argue that theists face the more difficult task of reconciling God and evils that God is specially obligated to prevent. Because of His authority, God's obligation to curtail evil goes far beyond our Samaritan duty to prevent evil when doing so isn't overly hard. Authorities owe their subjects a positive obligation to prevent certain evils; we have a right against our authorities that they protect us. God's apparent mistake is not merely the impersonal wrong of failing to do enough good – though it is that too. It is the highly personal wrong of failing to live up to a moral requirement that comes bundled with authority over persons. To make my argument, I use the resources of political philosophy and defend a novel change to the orthodox account of authority.

In a recent article Mark Ian Thomas Robson argues that there is a clear contradiction between the view that possible worlds are a part of God's nature and the theologically pivotal, but philosophically neglected, claim that God is perfectly beautiful. In this article I show that Robson's argument depends on several key assumptions that he fails to justify and as such that there is reason to doubt the soundness of his argument. I also demonstrate that if Robson's argument were sound then this would be a problem for all classical theists and not just those who hold the possible worlds view.

Richard Beardsmore once argued that, although it is possible for atheists and religious believers alike to regard life as a gift, the regarding of one's own death as a gift is open only to the (Christian) believer. I discuss this interesting contention, and argue that, notwithstanding some important differences between the attitudinal possibilities available to atheists and believers in God, there are at least three senses in which an atheist could regard death as a gift. Two of these involve death's being conceived as serving some particular purpose, whereas the third derives from a more pervasive affirmatory attitude to life as a whole.