A common objection to the Molinist account of divine providence states that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (CCFs) lack grounds. Some Molinists appeal to brute counterfactual facts about the subject of the CCF in order to ground CCFs. Others argue that CCFs are grounded by the subject's actions in nearby worlds. In this article, I argue that Open Theism's account of divine providence employs would-probably conditionals that are most plausibly grounded by either brute facts about the subject of these conditionals or non-actual entities. As a result, Open Theism's revision of the traditional notion of divine providence is unmotivated. The Molinist can ground CCFs just as easily as the Openist can ground would-probably conditionals but the Molinist has the advantage of maintaining a robust account of divine providence.

This article challenges Philip Kitcher's recent proposals for an ‘enlightened secularism’. I use William James's theory of the emotions and his related discussion of ‘temperaments’ to argue that religious and naturalistic commitments are grounded in tacit, inarticulate ways that one finds oneself in a world. This indicates that, in many cases, religiosity and naturalism are grounded not in rational and evidential considerations, but in a tacit and implicit sense of reality which is disclosed through phenomenological enquiry. Once the foundational role of these temperaments is appreciated, it emerges that enlightened secularism relies upon a facile conception of the nature of religious belief – one that lessens its chances for success. The article ends with some positive proposals for incorporating phenomenological insights into debates about science, religion, and secularism.

I discuss some trends in recent philosophy of religion, focusing on J. L. Schellenberg's Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion. I pay special attention to Schellenberg's dual emphases on ‘the Ultimate’ as metaphysical object of inquiry and various non-doxastic states (‘faith that’, ‘faith in’) as psychological objects of inquiry. This view is contrasted throughout to what might be called a ‘liturgical’ orientation in philosophy of religion.

This article is a reply to Thaddeus Metz's ‘The good, the true, and the beautiful’ (2011). I suggest that Metz's theory is too broad since it entails that merely understanding Einstein's or Darwin's views can make a life highly meaningful. Furthermore, it is unclear whether ‘fundamental conditions’, toward which highly meaningful lives are oriented, may or may not be necessary conditions to ‘non-fundamental conditions’, how completely the former should explain the latter, and whether Metz's account is indeed non-consequentialist. While acknowledging the importance of Metz's contribution, I consider alternative directions that future research might take.

In the first part of the article I show how Descartes employs the sceptical theist strategy as part of his response to the problem of evil in Meditation Four. However, Descartes's use of this strategy seems to raise a serious challenge to his whole project: if Descartes is ignorant of God's purposes, then how can he be sure that God doesn't have some morally sufficient reason for creating him with unreliable clear and distinct perceptions? Drawing on related objections from Mersenne and Hobbes, I show in the second half of the article how Descartes can sidestep this objection.

According to J. L. Schellenberg, sceptical faith in the Ultimate is not merely permitted, but is rationally required. It is, all things considered, the response that we should make. In this article, I assess just three of Schellenberg's arguments for this bold conclusion. I explain why I find each of them unpersuasive.

This article presents a discussion of the concept of ‘non-belief’, focusing on a variety of difficulties it raises for the theist. After considering how the notion of ‘non-belief’ may be construed, I catalogue five major problems facing the theist who insists on maintaining the traditional notion of ‘non-belief’. Those theists who insist on maintaining this traditional notion sometimes appeal to the ‘sin defence’ in an attempt to defend their position. I critique this defence and conclude with a mention of how rejecting the traditional notion of ‘non-belief’ will lead us towards revisionary theologies.

The topic of divine omniscience is well-trodden ground, with philosophers and theologians having asked virtually every question there is to ask about it. The questions regarding God's omniscience to be addressed here are as follows. First, is omniscience best understood as maximal propositional knowledge along with maximal experiential knowledge (both to be defined shortly)? I argue that it is. Second, is it possible for God to be essentially omniscient? I argue that it is not.

One challenge to the rationality of religious commitment has it that faith is unreasonable because it involves believing on insufficient evidence. However, this challenge and influential attempts to reply depend on assumptions about what it is to have faith that are open to question. I distinguish between three conceptions of faith (faith as belief-plus, trusting acceptance, and hopeful affirmation) each of which can claim some plausible grounding in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Questions about the rationality or justification of religious commitment and the extent of compatibility with doubt look different on accounts of faith in which trust or hope, rather than belief, are the primary basis for the commitments. On such accounts, while the person of faith has a stake in the truth of the content (e.g. that God exists), practical as well as epistemic considerations can legitimately figure in normative appraisals. Trust and hope can be appropriate in situations of recognized risk, need not involve self-deception, and are compatible with the idea that one's purely epistemic opinions should be responsive only to evidence.

Peter van Inwagen's ‘No-Minimum’ argument boldly rejects a proposition widely accepted by theists and atheists alike: God and gratuitous evil are incompatible. Jeff Jordan (2003) criticizes van Inwagen's argument and (Jordan 2011) defends his position against Michael Schrynemakers (2007). I present two criticisms of Jordan. Concerning his first paper, I argue that if it is plausible to suppose that there exist undetectable evils, Jordan's argument is incomplete. Concerning his second paper, I show how Jordan fails to engage adequately with Schrynemakers's reply and, more seriously, with the notion of satisficing implicit in van Inwagen's No-Minimum argument. To draw out this second criticism, I make use of another debate in the philosophy of religion: the problem of no-best-world.

In his recent trilogy, J. L. Schellenberg presents a new religious option: to have beliefless faith in a general object of religious concern that he thinks is referenced at the core of most sectarian religions – the axiological, soteriological, and metaphysical ultimate, which I call ‘UUU’. After explaining what UUU is more fully, I argue that the claim that UUU exists should not be, as Schellenberg says, the only focus for philosophy of religion. Still, I argue that such a claim is a good basis for a new form of religion, especially if it is modified in a couple of ways.

The aim of this article is to explore where and why religious naturalism differs from its rivals, and also to consider some of the challenges religious naturalism faces. I argue that religious naturalism is best conceived as a reaction against both theists who are religious and naturalists who are atheists: the best option is taken to be a naturalist who is religious. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to say more exactly what claims the view contains. In fact, it is argued, three forms of religious naturalism must be distinguished and contrasted with their rivals, which are taken to be non-religious naturalism, scientific naturalism, theism (including panentheism), divine transcendentalism, religious agnosticism, and religious relativism.

In this article, I consider what states of knowledge of the value of outcomes are consistent with a classical theist's praying to God that He bring about those outcomes. I proceed from a consideration of the cases which seem least problematic (the theist knows these outcomes to be ones which would be, at least after they've been prayed for, best or at least good), through a consideration of cases where the outcomes prayed for are ones the goodness and badness of which the theist is agnostic about, to consider finally praying for outcomes that the theist knows would be bad at the time he or she is praying for them. I conclude that even prayers of this last sort should, albeit only on rare occasions, be prayed.

I argue that J. L. Schellenberg's sceptical religion faces two problems of religious adequacy. The first has to do with its relationship to the goal of bringing persons into proper alignment with an ultimate good; the second, with the desideratum of sceptical religion's becoming sufficiently well-established as to be a vehicle for the accomplishment of great things on the stage of history. I argue that actual sceptical religion would need to accommodate itself to the requirements of historical existence, and that such accommodation might well lead to a blurring of the distinctions Schellenberg draws between ‘sectarian’ and sceptical religion.

This article reflects critically on some of the claims of J. L. Schellenberg's trilogy and on the fundamental decisions lying behind them. Some of the latter are found to be tied to his earlier work on atheism in ways that can be questioned.

The article argues that religious fundamentalism, understood, roughly, as the view that people must obey God's commands unconditionally, is conceptually incoherent because such religious fundamentalists inevitably must substitute human judgement for God's judgement. The article argues, first, that fundamentalism, founded upon the normal sort of indirect communications from God, is indefensible. Second, the article considers the crucial case in which God is said to communicate directly to human beings, and argues that the fundamentalist interpretation of such communications is also incoherent, and, on this basis, argues that religious fundamentalism is actually an extreme form of irreligiousness. Finally, the article considers Kierkegaard's prima facie defence of unconditional religious faith, and argues that, despite some similarity with the fundamentalists, Kierkegaard's appreciation of human finitude leads him to a profoundly anti-fundamentalist stance.