Petitionary prayer appears pointless in light of divine attributes like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. Several philosophers have attempted to reinstate the significance of petitionary prayer by drawing attention to its indirect benefits. The article analyses the shortcomings in this strategy and defends a different solution to the difficulty. Conceiving of God as motivated by the desire to form a loving partnership with human beings allows one to formulate a collaborative account of petitionary prayer. On this model, God freely chooses to accede to some human requests in order to incorporate human desires and projects into His plan for the world.

Divine commands are typically held, by theists, to be made not only at the foundations of morality, but also in an ‘everyday’ setting, when there are already moral considerations applicable to the addressee(s). My aim is to show how a particular command could relate to these pre-existing moral considerations, if it is more than just a repetition of them. If it is right that an action be obligatory, wrong or supererogatory, why would God want to change its status? Anyone can make a normative difference by giving information, making co-ordination proposals, or transferring rights, and it is clear why these actions will sometimes by worthwhile. The problem must be focused on when God makes a moral difference directly, using a ‘special moral authority’, when His commands are efficacious qua commands. Using this authority, God can perfect imperfect duties, which may make it easier to carry them out. He can extend duties, to make sure more value is produced. He can allocate sacrifices, which can be carried by anyone. And He can resolve conflict games, to everyone's benefit. This explains why God should issue commands in the way that theists typically represent him as doing.

Some of the most significant religious appeals can be taken as reasons of a distinctively religious kind. But many popular ways of interpreting religious reasoning pose obstacles to appreciating religious reasons as such. To avoid binding the concept of religious reason to an intellectual programme that requires a disjunction between the religious and the rational or that dissolves all tension between religious claims and general rational standards of validity and normativity, religious reasons can be defined for purposes of liberal study by their challenging yet rationally appreciable transvalid claims and transnormative implications. Examples from the book of Amos and the Chandogya Upanishad are discussed.

I offer a new approach to the old question of the epistemic value of religious experience. According to this approach, religious experience is a species of desire, desire in this context involving a kind of experience which is cognitive and unmediated. The account is inspired by Levinas and Heidegger, and it involves a conception of experience which is shared by a disjunctivist account of perception. Perceptual disjunctivism is my starting point, and it provides the ground for the ensuing discussion of desire. In the final section of the article I argue that the parallel between perceptual disjunctivism and a Levinasian conception of desire points to a further strength in the account of desire here presented, namely, by suggesting the possibility of a disjunctive style response to scepticism about religious experience.

Anselm begins his famous ontological argument by describing God as the being greater than which none is conceivable. His description seems coherent and intelligible. Consequently a divine being thus described may be spoken of as existing in the understanding. But if so, He must actually exist as well, otherwise a being greater than Him could possibly exist, namely, one of whom the additional great-making-term ‘actual existence’ may also be predicated. The result would be a contradiction, for we would now have to concede, that contrary to our initial claim, the being harbored in our understanding is inferior to the greatest since another being who had actual existence would be greater. To avoid the contradiction we must concede actual existence to the absolutely perfect being.

This article argues for a new understanding of pantheism whereby God is a multi-located mereological simple which constitutes the cosmos. I argue that the traditional theist can more readily accept this version of pantheism than a version identifying God with the cosmos.1

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.

This paper sketches an evidential atheological argument that can be answered only if one of the central tenets of some theistic traditions is rejected, namely, that (propositional) belief in God is a necessary condition for salvation. The basic structure of the argument is as follows. Under theism, God is essentially omniscient, but no one can be both omniscient and irrational. So, if there is reason to hold that God is irrational, then it would follow that God doesn't exist. And there is reason to hold that God is irrational. To wit, God both hides and, according to some theistic traditions, requires belief. But it is irrational for God both to hide and require belief; therefore, God is irrational. Since a crucial – and controversial – premise in the argument is that it is irrational for God both to hide and require belief, a large part of the paper is devoted to defending that premise.

During Leibniz's lifetime, interest in the interpretation of the Bible and biblical prophecy became central to the theological and political concerns of Protestant Europe. Leibniz's treatment of this phenomenon will be examined in the light of his views on the nature of revelation and its role in his defence of Christianity. It will be argued that Leibniz's defence of the miracle of revelation (and its vehicle, biblical prophecy) – unlike his arguments on behalf of the core Christian mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation – is demonstrable by purely natural and scientific means, especially the verification of history.

The argument from evil, though it is the most effective rhetorical argument against orthodox theism, fails to demonstrate its conclusion, since we are unavoidably ignorant whether there is more evil than could possibly be justified. That same ignorance infects any claims to discern a divine purpose in nature, as well as recent attempts at a broadly Irenaean theodicy. Evolution is not, on neo-Darwinian theory, intellectually, morally, or spiritually progressive in the way that some religious thinkers have supposed. To suppose so, indeed, is to misidentify the evils we should fear. But though we should neither conceal the evils of the world nor offer any consequentialist justification of them, we may still reasonably maintain an orthodox theism. Evil is not created so that otherwise unattainable goods may come, but is an unavoidable byproduct of creation which it is – or may be – God's purpose to redeem.

Religious thought often assumes that the principle of physical causal completeness (PCC) is false. But those who explicitly deny or doubt PCC, including William Alston, W. D. Hart, Tim Crane, Paul Moser and David Yandell, Charles Taliaferro, Keith Yandell, Dallas Willard, William Vallicella, Frank Dilley, and, recently, David Chalmers, have ignored not only the explicit but also the implicit grounds for acceptance of PCC. I review the explicit grounds, and extend the hitherto implicit grounds, which together constitute a greater challenge to contemporary religious philosophy than has been realized. Religious philosophers need to find a better way around PCC than has been found, or, if PCC is unavoidable, religious philosophers need to work toward a worldview that both accepts PCC and defends strong forms of religious experience.

Adams (1993) argues that the traditional view that no one in Hell can leave, poses a problem for the theist. This is because, she argues, such a bad state of affairs should be prevented by God. In response, Buckareff and Plug (2005) argue that everyone in Hell can leave. More recently, Matheson (2014) argues that if everyone in Hell can leave, then everyone in Heaven can also leave. However, Matheson provides reason to think that it is impossible for anyone in Heaven to leave. In which case, he argues, no one in Hell can leave either. In this article, I extend this debate, and offer reason to think Matheson's argument is unsound.

Traditional views about God and about deliberation seem to imply that we need a deliberation restriction on the concept of divine omniscience. I will argue, however, that this deliberation restriction is both irrelevant and unnecessary. It is irrelevant because there is no time at which God needs to deliberate; and it is unnecessary because even if God does deliberate, it's possible for him to do so while knowing what the results of that deliberation will be. And because this possibility of deliberating despite knowing the results holds for deliberation in general, my argument provides useful (and perhaps surprising) results not only for discussions of the divine attributes, but also for broader discussions of deliberation itself.

Although not a great deal has been said about heaven in the Christian tradition, it is part of the traditional notion of heaven that the blessed are in a condition of perfect happiness. In this life we can be happy to a certain degree, but mixed with earthly happiness is disappointment, frustration, and even sorrow. In heaven, by contrast, there is no sadness, nothing is lacking, happiness is complete. The usual way of explaining this perfect happiness is in terms of the ‘beatific vision’ – the face to face relationship of knowing and loving God which the blessed enjoy. On earth we experience only finite objects; nothing that we come to know ever completely satisfies our desire to know, and nothing that we love ever completely satisfies our will. But in the beatific vision we shall be in a direct relationship with the infinite God, who in his boundless perfection will completely ‘fill up’ our capacities to know and love. As the completely adequate object of these capacities, God will make us perfectly happy. As Aquinas puts it, ‘…But if God alone were seen, who is the fount and source of all being and of all truth, he would so fill the natural desire for knowledge that nothing else would be desired, and the seer would be completely happy.’

As I shall be taking issue with Michael Durrant for the bulk of this paper, it is appropriate, as well as a good way to start, to register my endorsement of his arguments in chapter 4 of The Logical Status of Godl for the conclusion that sentences about God are typically used to express propositions, and that acts of thanksgiving and petition to God presuppose that some such propositions are true. The present paper is therefore a continuation of Mr Durrant's attempt to locate the status of the term ‘God’ in propositions expressed by sentences of the form ‘God is F’.

Tan Tei Wei in ‘Mr Young on Miracles’ (Religious Studies, X (1974), 333–7) takes me to task over certain contentions of mine regarding the best understanding of ‘the miraculous’. I claim that the notion of a miracle as a violation of a law of nature by a particular interposition of a god, founders on the difficulty of rendering such a notion coherent. I offer instead the following account which is not subject to such a difficulty. Namely, that a miraculous event would be one brought about by God acting as a factor in the causally operative set of factors (out of the perhaps several possible sets sufficient for the event in question's occurrence), such that his activity alters the outcome from what it perhaps would have been if, contrary to fact, he had not been actively involved. It is open to a theist employing this account to say as well that had God not thus actively involved himself as a (specifically rather than just generally) active agent-factor, the (miraculous) effect would not have come about.