Eleonore Stump insightfully develops Aquinas's theodicy to account for a significant source of human suffering, namely the undermining of desires of the heart. Stump argues that what justifies God in allowing such suffering is benefits made available to the sufferer through her suffering that can defeat the suffering by contributing to the fulfilment of her heart's desires. We summarize Stump's arguments for why such suffering requires defeat and how it is defeated. We identify three problems with Stump's account of how such suffering is defeated and offer solutions to each. We defend and strengthen Stump's response to the hardest cases for her view, and explain what her view demands of God.

Though Kierkegaard's writings are rarely referenced in discussions of the problem of hell, the choice model of hell, I argue, can be strengthened by a close reading of the relevant passages of The Sickness unto Death that bear on the topic of damnation. Each of the two major forms of the choice model that are discussed in the contemporary philosophical literature are anticipated and developed in masterful psychological detail in this key Kierkegaardian text. The first form of the choice model, which sees damnation as the explicit and direct object of choice of those who are finally lost, faces the challenge of explaining motive: why would anyone freely choose eternal damnation? The second form, in which damnation is the natural consequence of certain free choices but not that which is chosen directly, faces the significant challenge of explaining why God does not annihilate the damned, mercifully putting them out of their misery. I argue that The Sickness unto Death contains conceptual resources for meeting both of these challenges.

I defend a relative identity solution to the identity puzzle posed by the doctrine of the Trinity. It has been argued that relative identity theories which admit absolute identity, such as the account proposed here, do not succeed in saving the doctrine of the Trinity from logical incoherence. I show that this argument fails. Relative identity theories that admit absolute identity are logically conservative, metaphysically innocent, and unproblematic. And, given the account I propose we can, without incurring any logical or metaphysical costs, hold that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the same being but not the same trinitarian person.

Does it make sense for non-theists to feel gratitude for their existence? The question arises because gratitude is typically thought to be directed towards a person to whom one is grateful. Hence the theist may be grateful to God for their existence, experienced as a gift. But can the non-believer feel something similar without being irrational? Can there be gratitude for existence but not to anyone? After analysing gratitude and how we can best understand the idea of non-directed gratitude, I discuss the conditions that need to apply for non-directed gratitude to be appropriate. I end by discussing whether theism provides a psychologically richer and more satisfying framework for understanding existential gratitude.

I advance a challenge to the coherence of Alvin Plantinga's brand of theism that focuses on Plantinga's celebrated free-will defence. This challenge draws on (but goes beyond) some ideas advanced by Wes Morriston. The central claim of my challenge is that Plantinga's free-will defence, together with certain claims that are plausible and/or to which Plantinga is committed, both requires and rules out the claim that it is possible that God is capable of engaging in moral goodness. I then critically evaluate an interesting strategy for responding to my challenge inspired by some recent work by Kevin Timpe, arguing that the response ultimately fails. The upshot of the article is that Plantinga's brand of theism is internally inconsistent; furthermore, because the claims that are in tension with the free-will defence are ones that many theists are likely to find attractive, many theists are not able to appeal to Plantinga's free-will defence in responding to the logical problem of evil.

Towards the beginning of the third book of De libero arbitrio, Augustine defends the compatibility of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. His defence appears to involve the idea that the will is essentially free. I discuss and evaluate Augustine's reasons for thinking that the will is essentially free, and the way that Augustine moves from the essential freedom of the will to the compatibility of human freedom and divine foreknowledge.

I argue that Social Trinitarians can and should conceive of God as a group person. They can by drawing on recent theories of group agency realism that show how groups can be not just agents but persons distinct from their members – albeit, I argue, persons of a different kind. They should because the resultant novel view of the Trinity – that God is three ‘intrinsicist’ persons in one ‘functional’ person – is theologically sound, effectively counters the most trenchant criticisms of Social Trinitarianism, and enjoys independent theological support from the biblical notion of ‘corporate personality’.

Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death famously characterizes despair as the sickness of any human being who does not live a life of faith. Kierkegaard supports this claim by providing a detailed analysis of despair in the first part of this essay. This analysis, I claim, presents the thesis that to be healed of despair is not only to maintain a correct relation to God but also to the world and, moreover, that the two relations are interdependent. Thus, in contrast to prominent readings of this essay, I claim that Kierkegaard's analysis of despair bears the important moral implication that a believer's relationship with other humans is indispensable to a life of faith.

Jonathan Kvanvig has proposed a novel approach to the topics of divine foreknowledge and providence, a view he terms ‘Philosophical Arminianism’. This article expounds and assesses the view; it is maintained that there are at least two major difficulties that have yet to be addressed.

This article argues that Hume's seemingly peculiar treatment of the argument from design in his Natural History of Religion is not indicative of a radical, or even modest, shift in his overall epistemic evaluation of it. His focus is on the argument's impact on the psychology of religious believers, and not its rational acceptability. Hume never strays far from his stated intention for the work, to engage in a socio-psychological analysis of the nature of religious belief, including a thorough assessment of the role of the argument from design. Hume concludes that the argument is inconsequential to religious belief formation.

Eleonore Stump's solution to the problem of suffering fails to show how God could be justified in permitting persons to suffer the dark night of the soul. In this article, I explain why and offer an amendment. I contend that a person who responds to the dark night in the right way experiences positive feedback between suffering and charity. This feedback not only enables the sufferer ultimately to attain his heart's desire but also explains why God is justified in permitting persons to suffer the dark night.

One reason for thinking that theism is a relatively simple theory – and that it is thereby more likely to be true than other theories, ceteris paribus – is to insist that infinite degrees of properties are simpler than extremely large, finite degrees of properties. This defence of theism has been championed by Richard Swinburne in recent years. I outline the objections to this line of argument present in the literature, and suggest some novel resources open to Swinburne in defence. I then argue that scientists' preference for universal nomological propositions constitutes a very strong reason for supposing that theism is simpler than parodical alternatives in virtue of its positing omni-properties rather than parallel ‘mega-properties’.

Pointing to broad symmetries between the idea that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all-good, and the idea that God is omniscient, omnipotent, but all-evil, the evil-God challenge raises the question of why theists should prefer one over the other. I respond to this challenge by drawing on a recent theory in epistemology, pragmatic encroachment, which asserts that practical considerations can alter the epistemic status of beliefs. I then explore some of the implications of my argument for how we do philosophy of religion, arguing that practical and contextual as well as alethic considerations are properly central to the discipline.

In Evolutionary Religion, J. L. Schellenberg synthesizes his previous impressive contributions to an understanding of religion by formulating an account of religion supported by a Darwinian evolutionary theory understood as a science of the deep future. Such a future enables the realization that our present understandings of religion are immature, that future understandings of divine reality may be radically altered and that religious practice may become the centre of human well-being. In this article, I argue that Schellenberg's evolutionary religion represents at best but half the evolutionary story, its epistemic side. Ontologically, it remains fundamentally non-evolutionary. Positively, I suggest naturalistic alternatives to Schellenberg's Ultimate. I conclude that Schellenberg's evolutionary religion is neither adequately evolutionary nor adequately religious.

Positive Evidential Atheism is the two-part view that our available evidence sufficiently supports the belief that God does not exist and that God's non-existence is a morally good thing. Paul Moser's recent work (2012, 2013, 2014, and forthcoming) provides a case that Positive Evidential Atheism is undermined by ‘intentional divine elusiveness’. This essay defends Positive Evidential Atheism from Moser's objection along two lines: (1) Moser's undercutting argument does not respect the fact that the positivity and evidentiality claims of Positive Evidential Atheism are logically connected, and (2) positive atheists needn't be those from whom God has hidden.

The Augustinian conception of faith – according to which faith and belief precede knowledge and understanding – appears to entail an epistemic violation. For Augustine, faith is exercised when a testimonial report that P is believed on the basis of that report. This reconfigures the factors involved in assessing whether what is believed on faith is believed rationally. The specific goal of this article is, however, to determine whether believing specifically Christian testimony – and, thus, faith – is rational. Jonathan Adler identifies six forms of background evidence that constitute epistemic reasons for believing testimony. At least five of them appear to be fulfilled for Augustine in the case of believing Christian testimony. Thus, Augustinian faith is supported by epistemic reasons, and should be considered rational.

Both Molinism and Anselmianism attempt to preserve libertarian freedom for created agents as well as robust divine sovereignty. The two issues intersect in addressing the puzzle of Christ's freedom: If God is necessarily good, how can God Incarnate be free? Anselm answers: while human agents need options for our choices to be up to us, Christ inevitably chooses rightly with perfect freedom. I defend Anselm's answer against a general criticism and then argue that Anselm's position is preferable to the Molinist solution which has recently been championed by Thomas P. Flint.

Hume claims that his argument against miracles applies ‘without any variation’ to prophecies. While Hume's argument against miracles has been thoroughly examined in the philosophical literature, his claim that this argument works against prophecies has been left relatively unexplored. In this article I examine Hume's conception of ‘prophecy’ and I argue that it is flawed. I also argue, however, that Hume's argument against miracles does indeed apply to prophecies, but only if we amend Hume's conception of ‘prophecy’. I articulate and defend such an amendment.

If God commanded something that would ordinarily be classified as a terrible evil, would we have a moral obligation to obey? In two previous articles in this journal, I examined and evaluated several different ways in which a divine command theorist might answer this question. Richard Brian Davis and W. Paul Franks have now provided a vigorous rebuttal, in which they argue that my way of handling the relevant counterpossible conditionals is flawed, and that a divine command theorist who avails herself of the metaphysical platform of theistic activism can consistently say that if (per impossibile) God were to command some terrible evil, it would not be the case that we have a moral obligation to do it. In the present article, I clarify my own view and defend it against Davis and Franks's objections. I also argue that the core claim of theistic activism – that there would be nothing at all if there were no God – does not have all the dramatic implications that Davis and Franks claim for it.

In De servo arbitrio (1525) Luther famously argues that the divine attributes of will, power, foreknowledge, and immutability are incompatible with (human) free will, and hence that free will is a ‘name with no reality’. I survey some earlier explications of Luther's argument in the literature, and reject them as exegetically unsound. I then go on to propose a new explication. On the proposed explication, Luther's argument turns out to be theologically cogent, provided that we follow Luther in understanding the relevant divine attributes in accordance with Augustinian theology.