This article has developed in response to a series of observations made over a decade ago by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his The Meaning and End of Religion. In that work, Smith made the point that the concepts ‘religion’, ‘religions’, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’ are rather recent, of Western origin, and, in an attempt to understand mankind's religiousness, inadequate. In developing his argument, Smith considered the Buddhist case with penetrating insight but, because his thesis was of such comprehensive scope, chose not to go into a detailed consideration of relevant matters in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition.

I advance a novel challenge for Divine Command Theory based on the existence of psychopaths. The challenge, in a nutshell, is that Divine Command Theory has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible. After explaining this argument, I respond to three objections to it and then critically examine the prospect that Divine Command Theorists might bite the bullet and accept that psychopaths can do no wrong. I conclude that the Psychopathy Objection constitutes a serious and novel challenge for Divine Command Theory.

The traditional doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that God became man. But was it necessary that God become the particular man He in fact became? Could some man or woman other than the man born in Bethlehem roughly two thousand years ago have been assumed by the Son to effect our salvation? This essay addresses such questions from the perspective of one embracing Molina's picture of divine providence. After showing how Molina thought his theory of middle knowledge helps alleviate a traditional Christological puzzle, the essay turns to the aforementioned questions concerning God's incarnational alternatives and suggests some fairly radical answers. Finally, the essay presents two substantial objections to these radical answers and argues that these objections fail.

This article combines two things: it explores how one should undertake the project of defining ‘fundamentalism’ and, based on the ensuing desiderata, it actually provides such a definition. After a few preliminary comments on ‘fundamentalism’ and the value of defining it, five goals of definitions are distinguished and elucidated: accuracy, precision, fairness, clarity, and fecundity. After that, various kinds of definitions and their interrelations are spelled out. Finally, the author provides and defends a so-called explicative definition of ‘fundamentalism’ both in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and in terms of stereotypical properties. On the basis of empirical literature and a scoping review, it is argued that a movement is fundamentalist if and only if it is (i) reactionary towards modern developments, (ii) itself modern, and (iii) based on a grand historical narrative. More specifically, a movement is fundamentalist if it exemplifies a large number of the following properties: (i) it is reactionary in its rejection of liberal ethics, science, or technological exploitation; (ii) it is modern in seeking certainty and control, embracing literalism and infallibility about particular scriptures, actively using media and technology, or making universal claims; and (iii) it presents a grand historical narrative in terms of paradise, fall, and redemption, or cosmic dualism.

Neither the existence of God nor the nature of God is apparent or obvious. If God exists, why is it not entirely clear to everyone that this is so? How can theists explain God's hiddenness, and how plausible are their explanations? God, if God exists, is an omnipotent, morally good, omnipresent being, than whom none greater can be conceived. Surely it is well within the abilities of God to let God's existence and nature be known to us. Why isn't the existence and nature of our Heavenly Father as apparent as, say, the existence of our various earthly fathers?

The status of religion in the modern world is intimately related to the rise of science. The clearest way of getting at this relation is to consider the issue of miracle. Given the success of scientists in predicting and controlling natural phenomena, many of the leading theologians of the modern era abandoned the understanding of miracle as a supernatural violation of natural regularities. They conceded the capacity of scientists to offer natural explanations of phenomena that are naturally observable and shifted their theological focus from the observable patterns of nature to morality, religious experience, and history. Although many liberal and existentialistic theologians affirmed the miraculous, especially with regard to the Resurrection, they avoided a head on collision with science.

This paper argues that William Hasker's ‘A new anti-Molinist argument’ offers a fascinating but ultimately unsuccessful new instalment in his continuing campaign to discredit the picture of providence based on the theory of middle knowledge. It is first shown that Hasker's argument, though suffering from a seemingly irreparable logical gap, does nicely highlight a significant (and hitherto unduly underemphasized) point of contention between Molinists and anti-Molinists – the question whether or not Molinists are committed to viewing counterfactuals of creaturely freedom as part of the history of the world. Hasker's argument that they are so committed is shown to be lacking, for that argument depends upon a premise against which several contemporary Molinists have already presented independent arguments. Furthermore, the premise is not one which, on reflection, many traditional Christians could easily accept. Hence, Hasker's argument fails. It may remind us that some of the things Molinists are led to say are surprising, but it by no means shows that those surprising consequences make the view unworthy of our allegiance.

What good is divinity if it can come only in dreams and shadows…? (Wallace Stevens)

It is a well-known and rarely challenged assumption that one of the chief merits of Whitehead's cosmology is that it enables religious thinkers to come at the problem of God in relation to the presence of evil in an entirely new way. Among the virtues most commonly appealed to in praise of the Whiteheadian theodicy are its emphasis on God's persuasive, rather than controlling power; its defence of the moral goodness of the God whose nature is reconceived in the light of the problem of evil; and its provision for a realistic hope in the redemptive processes operative in divine and human history. However, none of these aspects of process theodicy is without serious problems. In what follows I will present certain reasons why I do not believe process theism has made good its claim to have solved, with the help of Whitehead's philosophy, the problem of evil. Rather, I will suggest that like the story of what happened to the donkey laden with salt, who took to the water, process theology's ‘solution’ to the problem of evil dissolves in the dialectic river of life, until nothing is left but the verbal sack in which it is contained. Much of the force of this critique will hinge on recognizing the systematic implications of the role of ambiguity in a processive-relational universe, a position I will summarize in conclusion.

If one believes in a personal God, must one also believe that God is a person? I hold that the former is essential to Christian faith, the latter an impediment to it. Several recent writers in the philosophy of religion have however assumed that to believe in God is to believe in a person. The most subtle and influential proponent of ‘bodiless person theism’ is Richard Swinburne. I hope to show that this philosophical presentation of theism is unwarrantable and misrepresents what the theological tradition says about God. In section (I) I describe how Swinburne justifies his view that God is a person. In section (II) I show that this view is defective. In section (III) I uncover a common, though mistaken, procedure among several other advocates of this type of theism. In section (IV) I suggest that the belief that God is a person is foreign to Christian theology, with the unfortunate consequence that a philosophical defence of it is not only mistaken: it is also pointless.

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.

In his recent two volumes on epistemology, Alvin Plantinga surveys contemporary theories of knowledge thoroughly, and carefully defends an externalist epistemology. He promises that in a third volume, Warranted Christian Belief, he will present John Calvin's sensus divinitatis as an epistemic module akin to sense perception, a priori knowledge, induction, testimony and other epistemic modules. Plantinga defines the sensus divinitatis as a ‘many sided disposition to accept belief in God (or propositions that immediately and obviously entail the existence of God) in a variety of circumstances’. Like other epistemic modules, it produces beliefs in an appropriate cognitive environment, aims at the production of true beliefs, and generates beliefs which have a high statistical probability of being true.

Descartes held the doctrine that the eternal truths are freely created by God. He seems to have thought that a proper understanding of God's freedom entails such a doctrine concerning the eternal truths. In this paper, I examine Descartes' account of divine freedom. I argue that Descartes' statements about indifference, namely that indifference is the lowest grade of freedom and that indifference is the essence of God's freedom are not incompatible. I also show how Descartes arrived at his doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths by consideration of the nature of God's freedom.

Assuming S5, the main controversial premise in modal ontological arguments is the possibility premise, such as that possibly a maximally great being exists. I shall offer a new way of arguing that the possibility premise is probably true.

I attempt to show that a cosmic theistic scheme that includes multiple lives as part of a benign plan for the world is likely to be the most moral scheme. It has the best chance of dealing with key aspects of the problem of evil, or of apparent cosmic injustice – particularly when compared to a single-life scheme. Its advantages have to do with the initial disparate condition of children, and with the massive nature of undeserved harm. A multiple-lives scheme is also promising for handling broader meaning of life questions. I end by replying to some common objections to multiple-lives schemes.

The aim of this article is to explore where and why religious naturalism differs from its rivals, and also to consider some of the challenges religious naturalism faces. I argue that religious naturalism is best conceived as a reaction against both theists who are religious and naturalists who are atheists: the best option is taken to be a naturalist who is religious. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to say more exactly what claims the view contains. In fact, it is argued, three forms of religious naturalism must be distinguished and contrasted with their rivals, which are taken to be non-religious naturalism, scientific naturalism, theism (including panentheism), divine transcendentalism, religious agnosticism, and religious relativism.

In ‘Omniprescient Agency’ (Religious Studies 28, 1992) David P. Hunt challenges an argument against the possibility of an omniscient agent. The argument – my own in ‘Agency and Omniscience’ (Religious Studies 27, 1991) – assumes that an agent is a being capable of intentional action, where, minimally, an action is intentional only if it is caused, in part, by the agent's intending. The latter, I claimed, is governed by a psychological principle of ‘least effort’, namely, that no one intends without antecedently feeling that (i) deliberate effort is needed to achieve desired goals, (ii) such effort has a chance of success, and (iii) it is yet contingent whether the effort will be expended and the goals realized. The goals can be anything from immediate intentional doings, tryings or basic actions, to remote and perhaps unlikely consequences of actions, e.g. global justice. The thrust of the principle is that it would be impossible for a wholly rational self-aware agent to intend without a background presumption of an open future as concerns the desired state and the means to it. But this presumption embodies a sense of contingency which, in turn, requires an acknowledged ignorance about what the future holds, otherwise the future would appear closed relative to present knowledge with the desired state presented as either guaranteed (necessary) or ruled out (impossible). Regardless whether this self-directed attitude is accurate, it follows that intentional action precludes complete knowledge of one's present and future. Consequently, no omniscient or omniprescient being can be an agent.

In this paper I give an account and defence of the thought and practice associated with the notion of obedience in religious ethics, especially in reply to the claim that obedience is necessarily unconscientious. First, I argue that it is conscientious to give weight to commands if they are identifiable as pieces of authoritative advice, or, as theists commonly believe, if they have intrinsic moral force. Second, I argue that a theist's strictly moral reasons for fulfilling obligations are not replaced but reinforced by reasons arising out of a personal relationship with God. Anyone who loves God will want to please God, to act in accordance with His teaching and to avoid His punishment, and theists can do these things by respecting existing moral reasons for action. Third, I show how it can be valuable that people submit to God in further ways, by doing what God commends, and by committing themselves to obeying divine commands which would not otherwise be addressed to them. Finally, I argue that subordinating oneself to God's will is itself a partial attainment of the spiritual ideal of mystical union with God.

Traditional Western conceptions of immortality characteristically presume that we come into existence at a particular time (birth or conception), live out our earthly span and then die. According to some, our death may then be followed by a deathless post-mortem existence. In other words, it is assumed that (i) we are born only once and die only once; and (ii) that – at least on some accounts – we are future-sempiternal creatures. The Western secular tradition affirms at least (i); the Western religious tradition – Christianity, Judaism, Islam – generally affirms both (i) and (ii). The Indian tradition, however, typically denies both (i) and (ii). That is, it maintains both that we all have pre-existed beginninglessly, and that we have lived many times before and must live many times again in this world. The Indian picture, then, is that we have died and been reborn innumerable times previous to this life and (failing our undertaking some spiritual discipline) we will be reborn many times in the future. This is sometimes called the Indian belief in reincarnation. The difficulty with this usage is that the term ‘reincarnation’ suggests a belief in an immortal soul that transmigrates or reincarnates. However Buddhism, while affirming rebirth, specifically denies the existence of an eternal soul. Thus the term ‘rebirth’ is preferable for referring to the generally espoused Indian doctrine.

In this article, I argue that, if ‘the overrepresentation of Christian theists in analytic philosophy of religion is unhealthy for the field, since they would be too much influenced by prior beliefs when evaluating religious arguments’ (De Cruz & De Smedt (2016), 119), then a first step towards a potential remedy is this: analytic philosophers of religion need to restructure their analytical tasks. For one way to mitigate the effects of confirmation bias, which may be influencing how analytic philosophers of religion evaluate arguments in Analytical Philosophy of Religion (APR), is to consider other points of view. Applied to APR, this means considering religious beliefs, questions, and arguments couched in non-Christian terms. In this article, I focus on Islam in particular. My aim is to show that Islam is a fertile ground of philosophical questions and arguments for analytic philosophers of religion to engage with. Engaging with questions and arguments couched in non-Christian terms would help make work in APR more diverse and inclusive of religions other than Christianity, which in turn would also be a first step towards attracting non-Christians to APR.

Most analytic philosophers hold that if God exists, He exists with broad logical necessity. Richard Swinburne denies the distinction between narrow and broad logical necessity, and argues that if God exists, His existence is narrow-logically contingent. A defender of divine broad logical necessity could grant the latter claim. I argue, however, that not only is God's existence broad-logically necessary, but on a certain understanding of God's relation to modality, it comes out narrow-logically necessary. This piece argues against Swinburne's overall account of modality and rebuts his argument for narrow-logical contingency.