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.

I argue that Social Trinitarians can and should conceive of God as a group person. They can by drawing on recent theories of group agency realism that show how groups can be not just agents but persons distinct from their members – albeit, I argue, persons of a different kind. They should because the resultant novel view of the Trinity – that God is three ‘intrinsicist’ persons in one ‘functional’ person – is theologically sound, effectively counters the most trenchant criticisms of Social Trinitarianism, and enjoys independent theological support from the biblical notion of ‘corporate personality’.

Eleonore Stump develops and defends a theodicy of redemptive suffering. In particular, God's permission of suffering (at least some classes, if not instances, of serious undeserved, involuntary suffering due to natural or free causes) is justified just in case it benefits those who suffer, it is the best possible means in the circumstances for their benefit, and God knows this is the case. The main aim of this paper is to show that for Stump's theodicy to have a good chance of working, it is reasonable to think that it requires the Molinist claim that God has middle knowledge.

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.

Both Thomas Talbott and Friedrich Schleiermacher have argued, in somewhat different ways, that in the context of Christian theism the damnation of anyone would render it impossible to extend genuine blessedness to anyone else. I examine both Schleiermacher's and Talbott's version of this argument, which I call the ‘incompatibility argument', and respond to criticisms levelled by Jerry Walls and William Lane Craig. I argue that the argument is more powerful than its critics admit, and that it poses a potentially devastating challenge to what Thomas Talbott calls ‘moderately conservative theism', according to which the damned autonomously choose their own damnation by forever rejecting God's offer of salvation.

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 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.

Responding to key questions raised by the other three, this article discusses the factors which led to the development of Christian fideism and why Christians were seen as a threat to wider society. It considers whether early Christian discourses always represent (of characters in narratives), or demand, belief alongside trust and other relational aspects of pistis, and argues that it is sometimes possible to have effective pistis without having right beliefs. It discusses the variable relationship between belief and doubt in New Testament texts, and suggests how the faith of St Teresa of Calcutta might have been viewed by early Christians.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before beginning my response, let me express the honour I feel in having these three friends and distinguished philosophical colleagues comment so thoughtfully on my ideas in Divine Discourse. I warmly thank them for their ‘labours’.

I propose mirroring the general structure of the book itself in my response. First, I'll consider what Helm says about my delineation of the topic, second, what Quinn says about my discussion of God speaking; third, what Westphal says about my discussion of interpreting for God's speech; and last, what Quinn says about my discussion of the epistemology of believing that God speaks.

Many philosophers ardently subscribe to what can be called the doctrine of public-world fallibilism (DPWF), i.e. the doctrine that human persons can never have infallible awareness of the truth of propositions such as that expressed by the sentence ‘There is an olive on the kitchen floor’. It has, of course, been standard to contrast such claims with epistemically tentative first-person phenomenological reports, e.g. ‘It seems to me that there is olive on the kitchen floor’. According to the DPWF, for any public-world proposition p and person N who accepts that p, there is always some epistemic possibility (it may, of course, be quite small) that N is mistaken about p. I hope to establish – in something of a Cartesian spirit – that there is eminently respectable warrant for maintaining that theism requires the falsity of the DPWF. Further, I believe that this thesis can be seen to have far more epistemological significance than might initially be supposed.

William Alston uniquely offers the divine-command theorist his ‘evaluative particularism’ – the idea that God Himself, the concrete individual, uniquely serves as the supreme standard of (moral) goodness. This allegedly retains God's sovereignty over the moral realm without subverting His goodness or entailing that there are moral principles, the truth of which does not depend on God. However, it is argued that Alston's view faces three initial challenges: justificatory analogies with the two most viable particularist programmes fail; disanalogies between scientific and scriptural data jeopardize the prospect of determining God's relevant essential properties a posteriori; and it harbours problematic entailments regarding (human) moral goodness even if the first two challenges are met.