It is through ritual that religions often express their deepest truths, and historians and anthropologists of religion have long recognized the impor-tance of its symbolic dimension. Yet it remains to be explained how religious rituals perform this function. That is, in what ways do ritual gestures (the term of art I will henceforth use to refer to all actions and objects that achieve ritual status) symbolize or refer – reserving these two general terms to cover all ways of bearing semantic-like relations to objects, events, and states of affairs? In this essay I will take some first steps toward answering this question by constructing a taxonomy of symbolic gestures in the rituals of Judaism, drawing for this purpose on various categories of reference, first distinguished by Nelson Goodman in his study of symbol systems, including the arts, and more recently elaborated by Israel Scheffler.

The ‘death of self’ appears to be an essential feature of the redemptive goal on which several religious quests converge. It would seem, therefore, that here lies a convenient pragmatic criterion to determine the efficacy of the various religions in achieving their desired ends, and one which would be valid in several religious traditions, thereby overcoming the impasse of particularity in inter-faith discussion.

Joseph Baltimore argues that the account of postmortem survival I offered five years ago fails, based on the plausible assertion that identity is a relation that each thing necessarily stands in to itself. I believe that Baltimore is mistaken when he claims that the account I offer violates the necessity of identity, and also mistaken when he asserts that the account I offer cannot satisfy Noonan's ‘only x and y principle’.

In his reply to my original essay, David Hunt maintains that I do not discuss how his defence of providentially useful simple foreknowledge violates the Metaphysical Principle. Further, he claims that I try to force him into both affirming and denying the accidental necessity of future events and their role in explaining divine advice-giving. In this response, I attempt to articulate more fully why Hunt's defence of simple foreknowledge implies that dependency loops could unfold. Further, I argue that Hunt's scenario is not tenable, whether one affirms that future events are accidentally necessary or contingent.

The topic of divine omniscience is well-trodden ground, with philosophers and theologians having asked virtually every question there is to ask about it. The questions regarding God's omniscience to be addressed here are as follows. First, is omniscience best understood as maximal propositional knowledge along with maximal experiential knowledge (both to be defined shortly)? I argue that it is. Second, is it possible for God to be essentially omniscient? I argue that it is not.

In conversation with Morgan (2015), I point out that the view of relational faith I have elsewhere defended (McKaughan 2013, 2016, 2017) fits rather well with the understanding of pistis that emerges from Morgan's careful reading of New Testament texts. Moreover, the fact that New Testament authors display little interest in examining interior aspects of faith makes it difficult to justify the claim that their understanding of the pistis lexicon requires believing in the modern sense as the attitude Christians must take towards relevant content, in contrast to various other positive but non-doxastic attitudes that philosophers recognize today. Such faith is of contemporary interest, given its congruity with early Christian tradition, the role it can play in helping relationships to persevere through various kinds of challenges (including doubts significant enough to preclude believing), and for the wide range of evidential circumstances in which it can be enacted with intellectual integrity.

I present an argument for God's existence based on the idea that the possibility of God requires the existence of God as a ground. After setting this argument out, I compare it to other arguments for God, concentrating on an argument from Descartes's Third Meditation. I then address various objections and conclude by setting out a non-theistic version of the argument.

‘Faith’ (pistis) is a key term in early Christianity. It not only describes the self-understanding of an individual Christ-follower, but also operates as the social marker of the Christ-groups. Rather than adding to the renaissance of studies on faith in recent years, this article seeks to illuminate what faith is by focusing on the phenomenon of doubt, broadly understood. After some linguistic reflections, the article identifies six basic types of doubt in early Christian writings and then compiles eighteen coping strategies and patterns of resilience reflected in the most prominent texts. The article is not an attempt at systematizing early Christian reflections on doubt but is rather a cornucopia of insights into how the first Christian theologians talked about doubt, dealt with it, and tried to overcome it.

In this response to D. Z. Phillips's critique of my interpretation of Wittgenstein's view of magic and ritual, I counter Phillips's claim that I have misrepresented the Wittgensteinian view of ritual, consider the instrumentalist dimension of the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, offer some objections to Phillips's expressivist view that a ritual ‘says itself’, and detect obscurantism in his approach to the study of religion.

In this article I discuss two interrelated problems found in Richard Swinburne's cumulative case argument for the existence of God. First, I argue that the probabilistic proof apparatus introduced by Swinburne in The Existence of God (1979; 2004) would require him to provide a normalized preference order of God's intentions based on a measure of the ‘relative moral goodness’ of possible-world states. However, the approach offered in the second edition of The Existence of God (2004) fails to do so for various reasons. Second, a slightly different version of the argument briefly indicated by Swinburne might avoid the problems of normalizability but falls apart when meeting the criteria of relevant confirmation.

Paul Helm's discussion of my book is a clear illustration of some of my central claims about Anglo-American philosophy of religion: he instantiates its undue preoccupation with beliefs, and its erasure of gender. In my reply I show how Helm conflates my objection to such preoccupation with the absurd claim that beliefs are unnecessary, and how he conflates philosophy of religion – even rationality itself – with its Anglo-American variants. He refuses to engage with the masculinism implicit both in his selectivity and in the boundaries he seeks to maintain around the discipline; boundaries which, I argue, need to be opened up for philosophy of religion to flourish.

Michael Tooley has recently advanced a novel formulation of the problem of evil. The argument primarily intends to address sceptical theist responses to the problem of evil by giving a theoretical argument that prima facie evils are probably ultima facie evils. He thus argues from a single prima facie evil to the conclusion that God probably does not exist, before extending his argument to encompass many prima facie evils using Carnapian inductive logic. In this article I respond to Tooley's two arguments. I improve the first by clearing up some ambiguities, before noting a variety of problems. In particular, the fatal problem is that, contra Tooley, the occurrence of some event is in fact evidence that such an event is not in fact impermissible for God to allow. I then challenge Tooley's extension using Carnapian induction, offering a parody which suggests that Carnapian induction of this variety leads to manifestly absurd results.

This article develops a new argument – The Argument from Atonement – that commonplace Christian assumptions about heaven imply the existence of purgatory. According to this argument, many Christians will die with residual moral guilt due to possessing unfulfilled moral debts towards fellow non-divine humans. Some of these debts cannot be fulfilled immediately after death and are not completely fulfilled or cancelled by Jesus's atoning work. Christians with such debts are fit neither for heaven nor for hell and thus must occupy purgatory until their moral debts are fulfilled.

That natural evils are plentiful in our world is impossible (plausibly) to deny. Why would a benevolent and all-powerful God allow such an obviously imperfect world to be created? I argue that the problem of evil in this form only seems serious and intractable because our science and technology are currently at comparatively primitive levels. Civilizations whose technological capabilities are significantly more advanced than our own will be able to create artificial worlds of their own in a variety of different ways. Given the very real possibility of world-makers who are non-divine, the problem posed by natural evil is very much diminished.