This article expounds and defends a compositional view of the incarnation, in which the eternal divine Son assumes a human body and soul as parts of himself. Objections to the view are answered, and it is argued that it is superior to other metaphysical accounts of the incarnation.

Substance dualism is on the move. Though the view remains unfashionable, a growing and diverse group of philosophers endorse it on impressive empirical, religious, and purely metaphysical grounds. In this note, I develop and evaluate one conceptual argument for substance dualism. According to that argument, we may derive a conclusion about our nature from the mere fact that we have the concept of a spirit. The argument is intriguing and fruitful; but I shall contend that it is, nonetheless, unsound.

In ‘Undermining the case for evidential atheism’, Religious Studies, 48 (2012), 83–93, I challenged positive evidential atheism on the basis of some considerations from divine hiding, if God exists. Scott Aikin, in ‘Does divine hiding undermine Positive Evidential Atheism?’, Religious Studies, 52 (2016), 205–212, attempts to rehabilitate positive evidential atheism in the face of my challenge. I contend that his attempt fails, owing not only to his misunderstanding of my challenge from divine hiding but to also his defective positive case for atheism. The main defect is in his portrait of how evidence would count against God's reality. I explain how a serious epistemic problem for evidential atheism persists, relative to available relevant evidence, despite Aikin's proposed defence.

Islamic ‘Traditionalists’ and ‘Rationalists’ have much in common. They agree that the Qur'an is divine revelation and acknowledge the authority of the Sunna, accept the value of logical reasoning and argumentation, recognizing the validity of basic logical principles and laws, and affirm that basic empirical and historical facts ought to be taken into consideration when interpreting the Qur'an. They disagree in that Rationalists accept but Traditionalists deny that human reason can discern objective moral truths independent of divine revelation. I present an argument for Rationalism that makes use of premises that are equally acceptable to Traditionalists and Rationalists alike.

This article brings mathematical realism and theological realism into conversation. It outlines a realist ontology that characterizes abstract mathematical objects as inaccessible to the senses, non-spatiotemporal, and acausal. Mathematical realists are challenged to explain how we can know such objects. The article reviews some promising responses to this challenge before considering the view that the object of theology also possesses the three characteristic features of abstract objects, and consequently may be known through the same methods that yield knowledge of mathematical objects.

In this article I make plausible ‘a metaphysics of belief’ by showing how Collingwood's metaphysics of absolute presuppositions helps us understand various comments and fragments by Wittgenstein regarding ‘the metaphysical subject’. For both, metaphysical beliefs are presuppositional; as such, they constitute twin foci – a terminus ad quem and a terminus a quo – without which the activity of thinking rationally, scientifically, and morally is impossible. Finally, although for both philosophers metaphysical beliefs are not susceptible to conventional modes of explanation, justification, and verification, both seem to suggest in various ways that metaphysical beliefs are nevertheless susceptible to a certain kind of ‘practical’ justification.

William Wood has importantly distinguished between a ‘hard problem’ and a ‘harder problem’ in explaining the devil's fall. He points out that previous attempts to explain Satan's sin have focused only on the former and cleverly argues that consumer preference theory, when applied to Anselm's account of Satan's sin, can solve the latter. In this article, I demonstrate that Wood's solution (i) undermines itself, (ii) fails to absolve God of the charge of being tyrannical, (iii) surreptitiously reintroduces the harder problem, and (iv) eventually collapses back into the initial hard problem. I conclude by suggesting why one might nonetheless be motivated to distinguish between the two problems and what this implies about a belief in the devil's fall.

In God's Own Ethics: Norms of Divine Agency and the Argument from Evil, I consider what norms of action we should take to regulate God's agency. I also consider what inferences we should draw about the success of the argument from evil when we consider how an all-powerful, all-knowing agent would be motivated, given the ascription of those norms of action to God. This article is a précis of the main arguments of that book.

I advance three challenges for the view Murphy advances in God's Own Ethics. The first two challenges target Murphy's claim that God does not have requiring reasons to prevent the suffering of rational creatures. I develop two arguments against that position, one based on the intrinsic value of human beings, the other based on the intrinsic badness of the suffering of rational creatures. My third challenge targets Murphy's account of God's contingent love for humanity. I seek to raise doubts about whether Murphy's picture is one in which it is true to say that God loves all human beings.

God's Own Ethics introduces a number of philosophical subfields into conversation with philosophy of religion and metaethics in an attempt to discern the ethics of God. While its conception of the divine being is itself controversial, I here take issue with the claim that the divine being described in God's Own Ethics would be one worthy of worship and allegiance. Specifically, I argue that a God lacking in moral perfection of the sort familiar to humans is either unrecognizable as God, or is open to the ‘Ivan Karamazov’ objection that such a God deserves neither worship nor allegiance.

Mark Murphy's attempt to solve the problem of evil appeals to the hypothesis, which I call ‘Murphy's hypothesis’, that an Anselmian God only has justifying reasons and not requiring reasons to promote the well-being of Her sentient creatures. Given this hypothesis, the distribution of benefits and harms that we observe in the world is not unexpected on Anselmian theism. I argue that Murphy fails to solve the problem of evil for two reasons. First, he incorrectly equates the probability of the distribution of benefits and harms given theism with the probability of that distribution given theism conjoined with Murphy's hypothesis. Second, he fails to solve the evidential problem of immorality for Christian Anselmian theists and in fact his views make that problem significantly worse.

In this symposium on God's Own Ethics, Erik Wielenberg, Kristen Irwin, and Paul Draper raise important criticisms of the arguments of that book. I respond to these criticisms.