Chris Dragos has recently presented two objections to criticisms I've published against Peter van Inwagen's No-Minimum argument. He also suggests that the best way to criticize the No-Minimum argument is via the concept of divine satisficing. In this article I argue that both of Dragos's objections fail, and I question whether satisficing is relevant to the viability of the No-Minimum argument.

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.

In a recent paper in Religious Studies, Clarke criticizes Mumford's definition of a miracle as it fails to recognize a supernatural agent capable of intent. Clarke believes that in order for an event to qualify as a miracle a supernatural agent must intend it. It is my aim to dismiss this qualification and demonstrate how Mumford's intent-neutral definition is less problematic. I will do this by examining each of the three cases against Mumford's definition and give reason to reject Clarke's criticism and his own definition of a miracle.

This paper presents a simple argument against life being the product of design. The argument rests on three points. (1) We can conceive of the debate in terms of likelihoods, in the technical sense – how probable the design hypothesis renders our evidence, versus how probable the competing Darwinian hypothesis renders that evidence. (2) God, as traditionally conceived, had many more options by which to bring about life as we observe it than were available to natural selection. That is, the relevant parameters were, in many cases, far more constrained under natural selection. (3) Utterly mundane features of the world, like that the earth is very old, are actually powerful evidence that the world was not designed, since that outcome was optional on the design hypothesis but nearly inevitable on natural selection.

It is sometimes held that there is something in the very nature of religious pluralism that undermines the rationality of religious belief. This view, I am happy to note, is beginning to receive the sort of attention it deserves from philosophers of religion. Various arguments from religious pluralism against religious belief have recently been canvassed. But in all this activity, as in the relevant historical discussions, one argument – a probabilistic argument from pluralism – seems largely to have escaped notice. In what follows I develop and discuss a version of the argument, and give an estimate of its force. As I hope to show, it is not an argument to be taken lightly.

In the first part of the article I show how Descartes employs the sceptical theist strategy as part of his response to the problem of evil in Meditation Four. However, Descartes's use of this strategy seems to raise a serious challenge to his whole project: if Descartes is ignorant of God's purposes, then how can he be sure that God doesn't have some morally sufficient reason for creating him with unreliable clear and distinct perceptions? Drawing on related objections from Mersenne and Hobbes, I show in the second half of the article how Descartes can sidestep this objection.

Joanna Leidenhag has written a ground-breaking book arguing that the concept of panpsychism can solve several problems facing present-day humans. It can motivate greater commitment to concern for earth's diverse environments and the life forms that inhabit them. And it can solve theological problems connected with human consciousness, notably, how consciousness and matter coexist and interact. This article summarizes and comments on Leidenhag's arguments, then suggests several paths forward for those inspired by Leidenhag's ideas and arguments who wish to explore them and related notions in greater depth.

Every man, says Mencius, has within him this mind (heart) of commiseration, this pu-jen chih hsin that cannot bear to see another person suffer. To support his argument, Mencius cites the parable of the child about to fall into a well. A man with an innate mind of compassion unable to bear to see the child suffer would naturally feel the urge to run ahead to save the child (Mencius 2A.6). Yet elsewhere in Mencius 4A.17, it appears that had the potential victim been a drowning sister-in-law, the man would also be momentarily checked by a fear of impropriety. Since the sense of propriety has its beginning in the mind as much as the sense of compassion, is not the mind of goodness somehow divided against itself? The present essay will examine this possible dilemma.

To many it seems obvious that any reduction of the nature of man to purely physical components involves an (at least) indirect attack on the doctrine of human immortality. To so reduce human nature, it may be argued, is to eliminate the soul and it is this essential component of man, rather than his body, which is the foundation of his immortality. This seems to me an altogether mistaken notion. My purpose in this paper, therefore, is to clarify the relation of physicalism and immortality and thereby to reveal the error in this alleged incompatibility.

Karl Barth has often been compared to Thomas Aquinas. The principal reasons for the comparison have been the systematic power and massive structure of the Kirchliche Dogmatik, with its illuminating interior conversation of the Church with itself, and Barth's searching and vigorous attempt to displace the ontological fulcrum of the Summa Theologiae by a christocentric analysis of God's freedom in revelation to be God for man in the world.

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.

In ‘Reincarnation and Relativized Identity’1 J. J. MacIntosh argues that reincarnation is impossible. I wish to make a slightly backhanded defence of reincarnation by showing that MacIntosh's argument does not succeed. I do not follow his recipe for defence of reincarnation exactly:

Man has always hoped to survive his bodily death, and it is a central tenet of many religions that such survival is a reality. It has been supposed by many that one form such survival might take is reincarnation in another body. Subscribers to this view include Pythagoras, Plato sometimes, and a large number of Eastern thinkers. Other thinkers have, of course, disputed that reincarnation is a fact, and some have even denied that it is a possibility. But seldom has it been claimed by its opponents that reincarnation is a logical impossibility.

When the anthropologist R. R. Marett affirmed that certain forms of religion are ‘not so much thought out as danced out’ (1914, xxxi), he was, in effect, anticipating a criticism that has been levelled at philosophy of religion in recent decades – namely, the criticism that this branch of philosophy has frequently underplayed the extent to which religions often prioritize ritual activities (including dance) over intellectual matters. Taking Marett's observation as a point of departure, this article reflects philosophically on the Afro-Brazilian tradition of Candomblé as an exemplary case. Special attention is given to the themes of (a) dance as a mode of ‘gestural language’ (Wafer 1991, 178) and (b) ‘embodied knowledge’ (Daniel 2005). It is argued that these themes supply opportunities to enrich our understanding not only of a significant dimension of religion – that is, the dimension of dance – but also of what communication and knowledge can amount to in both religious and non-religious contexts.

In response to Pascal's famous wager argument for adopting Christian belief, Denis Diderot noted that ‘An Imam could just as well reason this way’. In this article, I will show how Diderot's observation about Pascal's argument can legitimately be made about Alvin Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology (RE) and its use in defending the rationality of Christian belief. Plantinga's RE can, with some minor adjustments, easily be adopted by Muslims. I shall argue that an Islamic analogue of Plantinga's Christian RE presents an undercutting rationality defeater for Christian belief for those reflective Christians who adopt Plantinga-style religious epistemology. I call this defeater the ‘Diderot Objection’ to Plantinga's RE. As part of my discussion, I will consider how Plantinga attempts to respond to this sort of objection and will show why his response runs into difficulties.

Lady Oppenheimer has shown the need to preserve the richness of religious language and the language of vision if we are to talk about the reality of Christian ethics rather than some skeletal caricature of it. The problem is how to preserve such richness in the face of the astringent effect of the fact/value dichotomy in logic and the principle of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Therefore, rather than attempt to develop or comment directly upon Lady Oppenheimer's sensitive and perceptive exposition of the richness of some Christian ethico-theological concepts I am inclined to relate it to some of the earlier papers and to make some suggestions about the kind of prolegomenon I would like to write for it.

In a 1953 paper H. H Price described a possible set of afterlife conditions for a disembodied self or consciousness. His model has remained something of a benchmark for dualist philosophers up to the present day. The purpose of this article is to begin with Price and, noting certain major weaknesses in his position, put forward an alternative view which is both more consistent and more theistic.

In this article, I argue that foundationalist reconstructions of religious experience lose on all counts: First, philosophical defences of foundationalism are untenable. Second, the theological benefits that can be reaped from foundationalism come at too high a price. I show that both William Alston's and Alvin Plantinga's foundationalism leads to sceptical conclusions. Third, I argue that the epistemic implications of foundationalist reconstructions of religious experience are incompatible with Christian ontology. Criticizing the account Plantinga develops in his books on warrant, I suggest that it is preferrable to reconstruct religious experience in antifoundationalist, i.e., coherentist, terms and develop the model of a mobile for these purposes.