This article argues for a new understanding of pantheism whereby God is a multi-located mereological simple which constitutes the cosmos. I argue that the traditional theist can more readily accept this version of pantheism than a version identifying God with the cosmos.1

The objection of horrible commands claims that divine command metaethics is doomed to failure because it is committed to the extremely counterintuitive assumption that torture of innocents, rape, and murder would be morally obligatory if God commanded these acts. Morriston, Wielenberg, and Sinnott-Armstrong have argued that formulating this objection in terms of counterpossibles is particularly forceful because it cannot be simply evaded by insisting on God's necessary perfect moral goodness. I show that divine command metaethics can be defended even against this counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands because we can explain the truth-value intuitions about the disputed counterpossibles as the result of conversational implicatures. Furthermore, I show that this pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics has several advantages over Pruss's reductio counterargument against the counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands.

Nick Bostrom has famously defended the credibility of the simulation hypothesis – the hypothesis that we live in a computer simulation. Barry Dainton has recently employed the simulation hypothesis to defend the ‘simulation solution’ to the problem of natural evil. The simulation solution claims that apparently natural evils are in fact the result of wrong actions on the part of the people who create our simulation. In this way, it treats apparently natural evils as actually being moral evils, allowing them to be explained via the free will theodicy. Other theodicies which assimilate apparently natural evils to moral ones include Fall theodicies, which attribute apparently natural evils to the biblical Fall, and diabolical theodicies, which attribute them to the activity of demons. Unfortunately, Dainton fails to give compelling reasons for preferring the simulation solution to Fall or diabolical theodicies. He gives one argument against diabolical theodicies, but it has no force against their best version, and he does not discuss Fall theodicies at all. In this article, I attempt to rectify this. I discuss several problems faced by Fall and diabolical theodicies which the simulation solution avoids. These provide some reason to prefer the simulation solution to these alternatives.

This article proposes a new approach to employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy in the philosophy of religion. Rather than finding a latent theology in Merleau-Ponty – as some interpreters do – this article argues that Merleau-Ponty's later ontology can provide the basis for a philosophical anthropology which can help us understand why human beings are drawn to religion and how this is expressed in affective and ritual practice. This ontology can help us to understand the notion of freedom as it applies to affective, embodied, and ritual religious practices and begins to sketch out how freedom might be understood in light of embodiment.

I present Ned Markosian's episodic account of identity under a sortal, and then use it to sketch a new model of the Trinity. I show that the model can be used to solve at least three important Trinitarian puzzles: the traditional ‘logical problem of the Trinity’, a less-discussed problem that has been dubbed the ‘problem of triunity’, and a problem about the divine processions that has been enjoying increased attention in the recent literature.

In his ‘Does God have beliefs?’, William Alston argues for an intuitive construal of the nature of Divine knowledge according to which God's knowledge consists in His direct awareness without any beliefs. Recently, Travis Dickinson has raised some objections to Alston's view and has developed an alternative account of God's knowledge as His acquaintance with a fact, a corresponding thought or belief, and a correspondence between these two. In this article, I respond to Dickinson's objections and show that there is no reason to favour his acquaintance construal of God's knowledge over Alston's intuitive view of the nature of God's knowledge.

Supposing that Christ is impeccable – that, necessarily, Christ does not sin – what explains that impeccability? While there have been multiple theories of how the operations of Christ's human will could be fully free while Christ's sinlessness is nevertheless guaranteed, such accounts cannot be exploited to provide the requisite explanation. And not all of the divine purposes sufficient for becoming incarnate would also be sufficient to explain why Christ must be sinless. We should instead explain Christ's impeccability normatively, in terms of the reasons that God has to respond appropriately to God's own perfection by refraining from taking on a human nature with a will that ever opposes the divine will. Such reasons are reasons of divine holiness.

The evil-god challenge holds that theism is highly symmetrical to the evil-god hypothesis and thus it is not more reasonable to accept one rather than the other. But, since it is not reasonable to accept the evil-god hypothesis, it is not reasonable to accept theism. This article will primarily focus on defending the challenge from two recent objections which hold that it follows from the nature of moral motivation that theism is intrinsically much more likely to be true than the evil-god hypothesis. However, I will also argue that there is a different intrinsic asymmetry between the hypotheses which favours theism.

Milan Kundera suggests that human excrement poses a special problem for classical theism. Is there really a problem here, and if there is, how might the theist respond? This article explores Jewish sources in order to construct a real philosophical problem from Kundera's concern, and suggests two responses to that problem, both, once again, drawn from the Jewish tradition.

In this article, I seek charitably to develop an argument suggested by Thaddeus Metz. This is an argument against the view that it is consistent to hold that, while our lives may have some meaningfulness even if there is no heavenly afterlife awaiting us, if there is such an afterlife, they are even more meaningful, because heaven adds a potential infinity of meaningfulness. Having developed this argument on Metz's behalf, I criticize it. I conclude that – while throwing out a number of interesting ideas and possibilities along the way – no argument along Metz's lines can finally reach the conclusion aimed for.

In this article, I respond to Stephen Law's evil god challenge (EGC) to traditional theism. I argue that while there are credible a priori grounds for believing that the first cause is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, there are no credible a priori grounds for believing that the first cause is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-evil. Because of this, theists have a reason for explaining away the a posteriori evidence against theism. The hypothetical evilist, on the other hand, does not. Thus, while the problem of the good makes it absurd to believe in evilism, the problem of evil does not make it absurd to believe in theism.