I examine, and defend, the idea that human experience is religiously ambiguous. Necessary conditions for there to be ambiguity of any sort are presented. The sort of ambiguity that (it is later argued) is exhibited in the area of religion is clarified in a series of stages. Then the case is made for the application of this notion of ambiguity in the case of religion.

Stephen Jay Gould and others have argued that what we know about evolution implies that human beings are a ‘cosmic accident’. In this paper I examine an argument for Gould's view and then attempt to show that it fails. Contrary to the claims of Gould, Daniel Dennett, and others, it is a mistake to think that what we have learned from evolutionary biology somehow shows that human beings are mere accidents of natural history. Nor does what we know about the contingency of evolution give us good reason to reject the view that human beings came to be according to a divine providential plan.

God and time play crucial, intricately related roles in Descartes' project of grounding mathematical physics on metaphysical first principles. This naturally raises the perennial theological question of God's precise relation to time. I argue, against the strong current of recent commentary, that Descartes' God is fully temporal. This means that God's duration is successive, with parts ordered ‘before and after’, rather than permanent or ‘all at once’. My argument will underscore the seamless connection between Descartes' theology and his physics, and the degree to which he was prepared to depart from orthodoxy in the former in order to secure an a priori foundation for the latter. As Newton would later do, Descartes freed time from its traditional dependence on bodily motion and so removed an important barrier to making God temporal. Acting in time, God makes the physical world intelligible in a way He could not were He timeless.

The free-will defence (FWD) holds that the value of significant free will is so great that God is justified in creating significantly free creatures even if there is a risk or certainty that these creatures will sin. A difficulty for the FWD, developed carefully by Quentin Smith, is that God is unable to do evil, and yet surely lacks no genuinely valuable kind of freedom. Smith argues that the kind of freedom that God has can be had by creatures, without a risk of creatures doing evil. I shall show that Smith's argument fails – the case of God is disanalogous to the case of creatures precisely because creatures are creatures.

Alvin Plantinga and other philosophers have argued that exclusive religious belief can be rationally held in response to certain experiences – independently of inference to other beliefs, evidence, arguments, and the like – and thus can be ‘properly basic’. We think that this is possible only until the believer acquires the defeater we develop in this paper, a defeater which arises from an awareness of certain salient features of religious pluralism. We argue that, as a consequence of this defeater, continued epistemic support for exclusive religious belief will require the satisfaction of non-basic epistemic criteria (such as evidence and/or argumentation). But then such belief will no longer be properly basic. If successful, we will have presented a challenge not only to Plantinga's position, but also to the general view (often referred to as ‘reformed epistemology’) according to which exclusive religious belief can be properly basic.

The dilemma of divine forgiveness suggests it is unreasonable to be comforted by the thought that God forgives acts that injure human victims. A plausible response to the dilemma claims that the comfort derives from the belief that God's forgiveness releases the wrongdoer from punishment for her misdeed. This response is shown to be flawed. A more adequate response is then developed out of the connection between forgiveness and reconciliation.

In his article entitled ‘Divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism’ (Religious Studies, 42 (2006), 177–191), Stephen Maitzen draws our attention to an important feature that is often overlooked in discussion about the argument from divine hiddenness (ADH). His claim is that an uneven distribution of theistic belief (and not just the mere existence of non-belief) provides an atheological challenge that cannot likely be overcome. After describing what I take to be the most pressing feature of the problem, I argue that a hidden premise causes Maitzen to overlook a Molinist solution. The upshot is a softening of the atheological import of the demographic data.

I reply to Jason Marsh's discussion of my article ‘Divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism’. For several reasons, Marsh's inventive Molinist explanation of the lopsided worldwide distribution of theistic believers does not threaten the conclusion I argued for originally: theistic explanations of that distribution are implausible on even their own terms and in any case less plausible than naturalistic ones.

Much moral critique of theodicies is misplaced. Firstly, much of the critique begs the question because it presupposes something else to be true than what the theodicy claims; had the theodicy been true, it would not be immoral. Secondly, much of the moral critique shows situations where theodicies are inappropriate, and argues that they should never be communicated because of these situations. But if a theory is true, there will be some situations where it is appropriate to communicate it, and others where it is not. This is no basis for a moral dismissal of the theory.