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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The article criticizes Gale and Pruss's new cosmological argument (hereafter GP) which purports to prove that the world is created/designed by a powerful intelligent necessarily existing supernatural being (not the full-fledged God of theism). First, the article employs a ‘necessitist’ counterexample to GP's modal premise, S5. Second, it is argued that GP presupposes a restricted range of possible accounts of the generation of the universe. Third, it is argued that GP's argument that the creator is a necessary being is flawed. Fourth, it is argued that GP's argument against Quinn's objection, modelled on the advaita Hindu view of creation by an impersonal being, also fails.

The two most prominent arguments against theism are the problem of evil and the problem of divine hiddenness. Here I argue that if the evidential problem of evil is truly forceful, it could block the ability of God to reveal His existence in a rationally indubitable way, which would in turn undermine the evidential problem of divine hiddenness.

Philosophical pagans in late antiquity charged Christians with believing ‘without evidence’, but were themselves accused of arbitrariness in their initial choice of philosophical school. Stoics and Platonists in particular adopted a form of cosmic religion that Christians criticized on rationalistic as well as sectarian grounds. The other charge levelled against Christians was that they had abandoned ancestral creeds in arrogant disregard of an earlier consensus, and of the world as pagans themselves conceived it. A clearer understanding of the dispute can be gained from a comparison of Heracles and Christ as divinized ‘sons of God’. The hope on both sides was that we might become, or somehow join with, God. Both sought an escape from the image of a pointless, heartless universe – an image that even moderns find difficult to accept and live by. The notion that pagans and Christians had of God, and of the divine life we might hope to share, was almost identical – up to the point, at least, where both philosophical and common pagans conceived God as Pheidias had depicted him (the crowned Master), and Christians rather as the Crucified, ‘risen against the world’.

The classical conception of God is that of a necessary being. On a possible worlds semantics, this entails that God exists at every possible world. According to the modal realist account of David Lewis, possible worlds are understood to be real, concrete worlds – no different in kind from the actual world. But, modal realism is equipped to accommodate the existence of a necessary being in only one of three ways: (1) By way of counterpart theory, or (2) by way of a special case of trans-world identity for causally inert necessary beings (e.g. pure sets), or else (3) causally potent ones which lack accidental intrinsic properties. I argue that each of these three options entails unacceptable consequences – (1) and (2) are incompatible with theism, and (3) is incompatible with modal realism. I conclude that (at least) one of these views is false.