Can the persistence of a human being's soul at death and prior to the bodily resurrection be sufficient to guarantee that the resurrected human being is numerically identical to the human being who died? According to Thomas Aquinas, it can. Yet, given that Aquinas holds that the human being is identical to the composite of soul and body and ceases to exist at death, it's difficult to see how he can maintain this view. In this paper, I address Aquinas's response to this objection (Summa Contra Gentiles, IV.80–81). After making a crucial clarification concerning the nature of the non-repeatability principle on which the objection relies, I argue that the contemporary notion of immanent causal relations provides us with a way of understanding Aquinas's defence that renders it both highly interesting and philosophically plausible.

There is a long liberal political tradition of marshalling arguments aimed at convincing Christians that distinctively Christian reasons for issuing coercive laws are not sufficient to justify those laws. In the first part of this paper I argue that the two most popular of these arguments, attributable to Locke, will not reliably convince committed biblical Christians, nor, probably, should they. In the second part I argue that even if the Lockean arguments fail, committed biblical Christians should think that God has authorized the state only to fill the same general role that political liberals have identified for it.

A new emphasis in epistemology is burgeoning, known by the phrase ‘the epistemology of disagreement’. The object of investigation is the situation where the two combatants of a disagreement are equally well situated epistemologically. Central questions include whether peer epistemic conflict reduces the support one has for one's belief, whether the reduction should be understood on internalist or externalist lines, and how often such peer conflict happens. The main objective in the first two sections will be to provide background by bringing key points of contention to the surface in the recent epistemologies of disagreement both in mainstream epistemology and in religious epistemology. A final section asserts that epistemic externalism in religious epistemology doesn't easily escape the challenge of epistemic, peer, religious disagreement.

This a response to D. Z. Phillips's stringent critique of theodicies, including that suggested by myself. I offer counters to his array of arguments, and point to what I see as a fundamental flaw in his philosophy of religion. He appealed to religious language as used by ordinary religious persons. But his account of the meaning of this language was not that of the ordinary religious believer. He thus claimed, by implication, to know better than they did what they really meant. I conclude that he was a non-realist concerning both religious language and the reality of God.

This article responds to one of Thaddeus Metz's criticisms of the theory that the meaning of life is to fulfil a purpose assigned by God. In particular, it addresses the argument that only an atemporal God could ground meaning but that an atemporal God could not assign a purpose. In order to do this, the article first argues that Metz's criticisms misread the relevant sense of purpose. It then argues that on a more plausible reading of ‘purpose’, we can see that it is in fact the kind of thing that an atemporal God could assign.

Elsewhere I have contended that if a God-centred account of meaning in life were true, it would not be because meaning comes from fulfilling God's purpose for us. Specifically, I have argued that this ‘purpose theory’ of life's meaning cannot be the correct God-based view since God would have to be atemporal, immutable, and simple for meaning to logically depend on His existence, and since such a being lacking extension could not be purposive. Jacob Affolter has developed a fresh account of the kind of purpose that is necessary for meaning in life, has argued that a God without extension could ground it, and has also provided some tentative reason to believe that only such a God could do so. I respond in three ways: by questioning whether the sort of purpose Affolter thinks is necessary for meaning in fact is; by arguing that an extensionless God could not ground it; and by indicating the way that a purely physical world could.

Worship is a topic that is rarely considered by philosophers of religion. In a recent paper, Tim Bayne and Yujin Nagasawa challenge this trend by offering an analysis of worship and by considering some difficulties attendant on the claim that worship is obligatory. I argue that their case for there being these difficulties is insufficiently supported. I offer two reasons that a theist might provide for the claim that worship is obligatory: (1) a divine command, and (2) the demands of justice with respect to God's redemption of humanity. I also challenge the soundness of some of the analogies they employ in their argument.

In this paper we respond to Benjamin Crowe's criticisms in this issue of our discussion of the grounds of worship. We clarify our previous position, and examine Crowe's account of what it is about God's nature that might ground our obligation to worship Him. We find Crowe's proposals no more persuasive than the accounts that we examined in our previous paper, and conclude that theists still owe us an account of what it is in virtue of which we have obligations to worship God.

In Religion and Scientific Method, George Schlesinger presented a strikingly original theodicy. In this paper, I explain the strategy underlying Schlesinger's argument. I then present a parallel argument to indicate the weakness of Schlesinger's theodicy. Finally, I show that Schlesinger's theodicy assumes a false principle, and therefore fails.