This article contributes to discussions about the problem of evil and Schelling studies by analysing Schelling's conception of the problem in his 1809 Freiheitsschrift essay. I explicate Schelling's critical response to four classic solutions to the problem (embodiment, degree, dualism, and divine forms) and outline his positive solution. My thesis is that Schelling offers a unique theodicy by arguing for a dialectical conception of the infinite omnipotence of God. In contrast to traditional notions of the infinite as the opposite of the finite, Schelling claims that God is only truly infinite if also embodied in the finite, an embodiment enacted through the human freedom to do evil. To explore Schelling's project, I draw parallels between his account of God's omnipotence and Hegel's ‘good infinite’ and situate Schelling's thesis within Mackie's discussion of the problem of evil in ‘Evil and Omnipotence’.

What is the nature of religious faith as understood in the Abrahamic tradition? This article suggests a novel answer to this question. To this end, I first outline five desiderata, characterized by appealing to conceptions of faith in both the Islamic and Christian traditions, which I think every adequate account of faith should satisfy. These five desiderata are: (1) explaining the principle of the relationship between faith and religious actions; (2) accounting for the maxim of the relationship between faith and moral virtues; (3) showing how the thesis of the priority of faith over knowledge can be the case; (4) providing a basis for the axiom of the gradability of faith; and (5) solving the dilemma of faith as a gift or an achievement. Then I make my case and develop a model of faith that satisfies all five desiderata. Following the accounts in the literature that describes faith as a kind of know-how, the central idea of my suggestion is that religious faith is partly constituted by intellectual, practical, and moral skills.

Debates about God's personhood, or lack thereof, are central to philosophy of religion. This article aims to advance these debates by presenting the ‘greatness of personhood argument’ for God's personhood and a dilemma for those who deny God's personhood. I also consider various objections to this argument and this dilemma and argue that they fail. Notably, my reasoning in defence of personal theism is cross-cultural insofar as personal theists across various religious traditions can use it. Thus, this article defends personal theism in a manner that can bring Western and non-Western theists into closer dialogue regarding the topic of God's personhood.

The Quran contains numerous references to evil and some of these indicate that the responsibility of some instances of evil, which I call self-inflicted evil, lies with human beings rather than God. This idea of evil leads to an exploration of two interconnected issues in philosophical and theological discussions, moral responsibility and desert, along with the related tension between freedom of action and divine determinism. The article delves into this tension as it appears from the Quran and prevailing standpoints in Islamic theology. I propose that the tension between freedom of action and divine determinism resists a satisfactory reconciliation, which ultimately affects the plausibility of the idea of evil as self-inflicted. I further propose that embracing the contradictions arising from verses expressing freedom and responsibility, on the one hand, and those indicating divine determinism, on the other, could be a viable approach for the theologian.

This article examines a construal of the doctrine of original sin which affirms the cognitive corruption of human faculties but denies that humans carry original guilt for Adam's fall or for cognitive corruption. All humans require Christ's atonement, because they either inevitably commit at least one sin or are rejected by God for other reasons. We go on to identify three problems with this account. The first problem is the ‘inevitability’ of sinning. Here, the defender is forced either to accept a compatibilist analysis of responsibility or provide a libertarian-friendly analysis of ‘inevitability’. The latter option contradicts the Augustinian contention that it is impossible for sinners to lead a life of virtue and holiness. The second problem has to do with the mechanics of the cognitive effects of sin. The cognitive effects of original sin make it very difficult or inevitable for humans to perform meritorious actions and very easy or inevitable for them to commit sinful actions. If the sinner's degree of control over her sinful actions is so low, it seems that she does not deserve divine blame and punishment for failing to commit meritorious actions. Finally, we raised some problems regarding the fate of the non-culpable sinners.

We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day Saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God's soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources to endorse a strong soul-making non-identity theodicy. We then introduce two complications for this account rooted in the problem of horrendous evils. First, horrendous evils threaten to undermine our confidence that God is good to each created person within the context of their life. And second, horrendous evils raise concerns about the value of persons whose existence depends on the occurrence of those evils. We may wonder whether those whose existence depends on the occurrence of horrendous evils are valuable enough to motivate God's allowance of those evils. We show that by attending to important structural features of a post-mortem, pre-eschatological state called the spirit world, Latter-day Saints can ameliorate these concerns about horrendous evils.

In this article, I present a defence of conceptual plausibility, understood as an epistemic way to qualify concepts that situates them between the merely possible and the actual. To show that there is such a thing as conceptual plausibility, I rely on what seems to lie at the heart of many uses of the phrase ‘plausible concept’: explanatory fruitfulness. To make an effective case for the claim that conceptual plausibility is of philosophical interest, I present an argument based on the debate over the rationality of theistic belief and the concept of God. To show that conceptual plausibility is philosophically feasible, I first show that it cannot be reduced to propositional plausibility. Next, I offer a minimally precise characterization of conceptual plausibility; I approach this from a qualitative and comparative perspective as well. Finally, I show how these qualitative and comparative criteria of conceptual plausibility might be applied to the debate over the rationality of theistic belief and the concept of God.

This article presents a novel argument against an application of evidential scientism to religious belief. In particular, our target is those arguments at whose core lies the claim that it ought to be the case that, if one holds religious beliefs, then those beliefs are based on the best scientific evidence. Moreover, rather than focussing on the philosophical puzzles that usually fall within the purview of philosophers of religion, we are interested in the mundane beliefs of ordinary believers about their everyday interactions with God. Our argument combines recent work on epistemic partiality in close personal relationships with insights from analytic theology on the personal nature of believer's relationships with God. We argue that it's inappropriate for believers who take themselves to have a personal relationship with God to base their religious beliefs about God's nature on scientific evidence. In particular, it's precisely because these believers are in a personal relationship with God that it's sometimes inappropriate for them to form their beliefs about God's nature on the basis of scientific evidence.

In this article I present some modal-epistemic arguments for the existence of God, based on the possibility of omniscience. For this, I provide modal formal systems that allow obtaining the existence of God as a theorem. Moreover, based on what I assume as reasonable premises, they show that the strong agnostic position is contradictory, since it allows the conclusion both that God exists and that God does not exist.

Antony Flew argued for a ‘presumption of atheism’ that intended to put the philosophical debate about God under a light which demands setting the meaningfulness and logical coherence of the theistic notion of ‘God’ before any arguments for His existence are suggested. This way of proceeding, discussing divine attributes before considering the arguments for the existence of God, became dominant in analytic philosophy of religion. Flew also stated that Aquinas presented his five ways as an attempt to defeat such a presumption of atheism. However, Aquinas proceeds in the reverse order, beginning with God's existence before discussing the divine attributes. He does so because he believes that natural knowledge of God must be drawn from creatures. Accordingly, from the Thomist perspective, natural theology is necessary not because it provides rational justification for religious belief in God's existence, but rather as a means to fix the referent for the word ‘God’ (semantic function) and provide an intelligible account of the divine nature (hermeneutic function). We should also acknowledge a correlative hermeneutic function of religious faith. Therefore, natural theology should not begin from a presumption of atheism nor proceed in the way suggested by Flew, because its main intention is not strictly apologetical.

In this article, my objective is to argue for the compatibility between religious diversity and Christian theism by invoking the concept of divine creativity. I propose that, if God is a being of infinite powers and infinite creativity, He is such that it is possible for Him to create different and varied realities in a continuous process of creation. More than that, given His infinite creativity, God can reveal Himself in the most creative and diverse ways possible. There is no need for Him to reveal Himself as one and in a unique way, as some scholars of Christian theism argue. Basing my discussion on these ideas, I suggest that from the infinite creativity of God, it is possible to develop an argument in favour of a transformative pluralist view in face of religious diversity.

Science-engaged theology has emerged as a new way of conducting research within the vast field of science and religion, with the aim of, at least in one way of understanding it today, solving theological puzzles. In this article we suggest that an analysis of the diversity of approaches in which thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas engaged theological questions with the best knowledge of the natural world available at the time allows twenty-first century science-engaged theologians to move forward the discussion about the different ways of engaging theology with the contemporary natural sciences.

Darwin's Doubt (DD) – a thesis according to which the probability of the human cognitive mechanism's reliability given non-guided evolution is low – is central to Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism and his suggestion that the adoption of guided evolution thesis is preferable from a theory choice point of view. In this article I'll argue that there are three fundamental failures in Plantinga's argument. First, I argue that Plantinga's argument for DD is question-begging. Second, I point out that this very same argument is not in accordance with the way the evolutionary scientists usually reason. And finally I argue that the replacement of non-guided by guided evolution violates some reasonable belief-revision procedures in the history of science.

Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion aims to explain analytic theology to other theologians, and to scholars of religion, and to explain those other fields to analytic theologians. The book defends analytic theology from some common criticisms, but also argues that analytic theologians have much to learn from other forms of inquiry. Analytic theology is a legitimate form of theology, and a legitimate form of academic inquiry, and it can be a valuable conversation partner within the wider religious studies academy. I aim to articulate an attractive vision of analytic theology, foster a more fruitful inter-disciplinary conversation, and enable scholars across the religious studies academy to understand one another better. Analytic theology can flourish in the secular academy, and flourish as authentically Christian theology.

William Wood argues that analytic theology can be included as a part of the academic study of religion. He describes two types of benefits to this inclusion: benefits accruing to the study of religion on the one hand, and benefits accruing to analytic theology on the other. I find the first type of benefit that he describes to be real, but think that within the overall compass of the interests of the academic study of religion in Christian traditions it is quite small in scope, even in a context in which doctrines are a topic of particular interest. The second type of benefit, that accruing to analytic theology, is more of a puzzle. On the one hand, I find that one species of benefit that Wood describes with some clarity is unpromising, as it seems to amount to an opportunity for yet more defensive apologetics. But on the other hand, some of what Wood says is compatible with the idea that analytic theology stands to be improved in ways that are not yet clear by engagement with the academic study of religion. I conclude with a critical glance at Wood's attempt to defend analytic theology as a method of inquiry from the charge of historical shallowness.

This article contributes to ongoing discussions on the place of theology in secular research universities by examining the relationship between analytic theology and science-engaged theology. Writing in response to William Wood's Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion, I consider if and how one might demarcate these two recent movements in academic theology given that both sociological and substantive definitions result in significant overlap. To show the extent of this overlap, I argue that both analytic theology and science-engaged theology are forms of faith seeking understanding, which use the tools and methods from other disciplines in order to make incremental progress on specific theological questions. I then offer two critiques of Wood's argument (made by analogy with the natural sciences) that the doctrine of creation provides theological warrant for the extension of common human reason seen in analytic philosophy and theology. My own attempt at a demarcation suggests that whereas analytic theology is best understood as an intellectual tradition, science-engaged theology is an intellectual disposition. This means that although science-engaged theology may not always be analytic, analytic theologians (and theologians more widely) should always be science-engaged.

An overarching question in William Wood's Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion concerns the conditions under which theology belongs in the public university. On this question, many or most academics today are methodological naturalists, and they would not accept explanations that appeal to supernatural entities. Wood devotes a chapter to arguing against that position. Nevertheless, Wood is not a ‘sectarian’ who argues that Christian theology should only answer to its own, tradition-specific norms, and so it is important to see how close his proposal and methodological naturalism (MN) actually are. In this response, I seek to clarify both MN and Wood's proposal regarding the proper norms for academic inquiry. Key to my argument is a distinction between a MN based on strict or scientific naturalism and a MN based on liberal or expansive naturalism. Analytic theologians and expansive naturalists can agree both that a theology that operates according to proper norms for academic inquiry belongs in the public university and that strict naturalism is not the norm that we want.

In Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion William Wood argues that the discipline of analytic theology (AT) can make a distinctively valuable contribution to the mainstream academic study of religion. He deftly navigates the intellectual public relations work required to secure mutual appreciation across these domains of scholarly discourse. In evaluating the characteristic goods of AT, Wood also seeks to recognize and address what Laruen Winner calls ‘characteristic damage’ or deformation in the practice of AT, which he identifies with its apparent inadequacies in addressing ‘history, mystery, and practice’ in the study of religion and theology. I argue that Wood's diagnosis fails to recognize how AT's characteristic damage emerges from its monomaniacal fixation on the epistemic value of theological theorizing to the exclusion of disciplined attention to other kinds of value. While at one point he engages a previously published version of this critique (as an explanation for AT's neglect of liberation theology), he mischaracterizes my argument in that paper in ways that lead him to miss its relevance to the objections from history, mystery, and practice. These objections can be met, I suggest, but only by significant reform to AT as currently practised.

I respond to challenges posed by Andrew Dole, Joanna Leidenhag, Kevin Schilbrack, and Sameer Yadav. Key topics include: whether the engagement between analytic theology and the academic study of religion really is mutually beneficial, distinguishing analytic theology from science-engaged theology, restrictive methodological naturalism, and whether I misconstrue analytic theology’s ‘characteristic damage’.