Søren Kierkegaard (in the Climacus writings) and John Henry Newman have starkly opposed formulations of the relation between faith and reason. In this essay I focus on a possible convergence in their respective understandings of the transition to religious belief or faith, as embodied in metaphors they use for a qualitative transition. I explore the ways in which attention to the legitimate dimension of discontinuity highlighted by the Climacan metaphor of the ‘leap’ can illuminate Newman's use of the metaphor of a ‘polygon inscribed in a circle’, as well as the ways in which Newman's metaphor can illuminate the dimension of continuity operative in the Climacan appreciation of qualitative transition.

In his autobiographical-biographical study, Father and Son, Edmund Gosse describes how one evening, during his childhood, while his father was praying at - or, rather, over - his bed, a rather large insect dark and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting insect ought to need, appeared at the bottom of the counterpane, and slowly advanced… I bore it in silent fascination till it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed ‘Papa! Papa!’. My Father rose in great dudgeon, removed the insect (what were insects to him!) and then gave me a tremendous lecture.1

Christian theists have not normally wished to deny either of the following tenets:

T1 God creates human agents such that they are free with respect to certain actions and, therefore, morally responsible for them.

T2 God is an omniscient, wholly good being who is omnipotent in the sense that he has (sovereign, providential) control over all existent states of affairs.

What is the relationship between the concept of sin and that of freedom? There is a powerful tradition in European thought linking the idea of moral evil with human freedom. Only with a broadening of consciousness, with the awareness of alternative possibilities, did man become able to choose between good and evil, and was responsible for that choice. The myth of the Fall, it seems, shows that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil gave man the ability to sin, because the awareness of alternatives allowed man to pursue one rather than the other. Without that freedom thus acquired man was innocent and incapable of moral evil.

In his powerful anti-Christian polemic, The Misery of Christianity, J. Kahl charges Christianity with suffering from a rock-bottom lack of identity. ‘Theologians…have been looking for a continuous thread which will lead them out of the maze of contradictory forms of Christianity…into the open. They would like to be able to say with binding force what Christianity really is.’1 But, he urges, they cannot. P. van Buren agrees, but sees in this no cause for concern. ‘Christianity has been changing since its beginning, the religion of the past constantly being adapted to the conditions of each new present. Once we see this character of Christianity, we are released from the misconceived task of trying to identify its unchanging essence.’2 Again more recently J. Hick has urged, in effect half agreeing with van Buren, that although there is an unchanging element in Christianity, it is restricted to ‘the originating events from which the moving stream of christian history has flowed’. ‘Christianity is an ongoing movement of life and thought, defined by its origin in the Christ-event and by its consciousness of that origin. It cannot be defined in terms of adherence to any doctrinal standard, for its doctrines are historically and culturally conditioned and have changed as the church has entered new historical and cultural situations.’3

As the title suggests, the thesis of this essay is that any view which would affirm the orthodox concept of a theistic God and yet deny the existence of a devil is inherently untenable; or, alternatively put, that ‘fundamentalism’ (if it may be so called), which affirms the existence of both God and a devil, and atheism, which denies the existence of both, are the only viable options with respect to the question of the theistic God. The support for this conclusion comes from the problem of evil, together with considerations drawn from common sense.

Can there be a moral philosophy which combines Christianity and consequentialism? John Stuart Mill himself claimed that these positions were, at the least, not mutually exclusive, and quite possibly even congenial to one another; and some recent work by Christian philosophers in America has resurrected this claim. But there is a simple argument to show that consequentialism and orthodox Christianity are not so much as jointly assertible.

In ‘Undermining the case for evidential atheism’, Religious Studies, 48 (2012), 83–93, I challenged positive evidential atheism on the basis of some considerations from divine hiding, if God exists. Scott Aikin, in ‘Does divine hiding undermine Positive Evidential Atheism?’, Religious Studies, 52 (2016), 205–212, attempts to rehabilitate positive evidential atheism in the face of my challenge. I contend that his attempt fails, owing not only to his misunderstanding of my challenge from divine hiding but to also his defective positive case for atheism. The main defect is in his portrait of how evidence would count against God's reality. I explain how a serious epistemic problem for evidential atheism persists, relative to available relevant evidence, despite Aikin's proposed defence.

Is it possible for God both to create a deterministic world and to act specially, to realize his particular purposes within it? And if there can be such ‘particular providence’ or ‘special divine action’ (SDA) in a deterministic world, what form can it take? In this article I consider these questions, exploring a number of different models of SDA and discussing their consistency with the proposition that the world is deterministic; I also consider how the various consequences of each model accord with traditional theistic assumptions about God's action in the world. I argue that, although SDA is possible in a deterministic world, none of the models that have been offered are entirely unproblematic, but accepting any of them commits one to certain consequences that may be found objectionable; thus the potential benefits of each model of SDA must be weighed against the costs of accepting such consequences.

The article begins with the journey towards knowledge of the infinite that is traced out in Descartes's Meditations. Drawing on Levinas's construal of the argument in the Third Meditation, I argue that Descartes's reflections on God as infinite can be a starting point for deepening our understanding of the religious quest – the paradoxical human search for that which, by its very nature, is incomprehensible to the human mind. The second half of the article argues that this search is from first to last structured by desire and longing, and that something prima facie non-cognitive and non-epistemic, namely the desire for God, has a cognitive and epistemic role to play. Perhaps desire can be our human way, or a human way, whereby we can (in Descartes's words) ‘in a certain manner attain to’ the infinite perfection that is God.

Sometimes theists wonder how God's beliefs track particular portions of reality, e.g. contingent states of affairs, or facts regarding future free actions. In this article I sketch a general model for how God's beliefs track reality. God's beliefs track reality in much the same way that propositions track reality, namely via grounding. Just as the truth values of true propositions are generally or always grounded in their truthmakers, so too God's true beliefs are grounded in the subject matters of those beliefs (i.e. God believes that p in virtue of the fact that p). This is not idle speculation, since my proposal allows the theist to account for God's true beliefs regarding causally inert portions of reality.

This article explores Heidegger's later philosophy with regard to the problem of a philosophical interpretation of religious language. In what follows, I will draw upon the work of Wittgenstein and refer to the cosmological argument to read Heidegger in terms of a post-theistic understanding of religious language that avoids the shortcomings of both theistic realism and non-cognitivism. At the same time, I am proposing a new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy against this background. I will show that, in spite of its hermeticism, Heidegger's later philosophy has a specific relevance to philosophy of religion that still needs to be explored.

In her impressive Atonement, Eleonore Stump claims that her novel Marian theory of the atonement meets a desideratum for a successful theory that Aquinas's theory does not, namely, showing that Christ's passion and death are essential to the solution to the problem of human sin. Here I suggest reasons to side with Aquinas, who says that Christ's suffering and death are not necessary, but merely a fitting way of solving the problem. If the fittingness of Christ's passion and death is a good enough justification for it, we lose a motivation for adopting the Marian theory over the Thomistic one.

In the debate over the theology of the soul's origin, there have traditionally been three broad views on origins. These include creationism, traducianism, and Origen's pre-existence view. In the recent philosophy of religion and mind literature, William Hasker posits an alternative view of origins called emergent substance dualism. As a contribution to this discussion, I put forward one novel option as a via media between simple creationism and Hasker's emergent substance dualism, wherein it has relevant overlapping features found in the two contrary positions. I suggest that this view is a variation of creationism like emergentism where the material part (i.e. the brain) has some positive causal role in the soul's coming to be as a discrete effect of one divine cause. I argue that emergent creationism (as I call it) is a viable option deserving the attention of philosophers and theologians.

‘An understanding with the reader’ which appears as an appendix to Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript has puzzled readers by apparently ‘taking back’ everything that the pseudonymous author Climacus has said in the text that precedes it. I agree with John Lippitt that this ‘revocation’ should be read as a humorous statement; however, I disagree with Lippitt's assessment that the tone of the revocation is essentially ‘non-urgent’ and ‘modest’. I propose that a fuller picture of Climacus's character is needed to understand the spirit of the revocation and its relationship to the rest of the text.

You don't know that p unless it's on account of your cognitive abilities that you believe truly that p. Virtue epistemologists think there's some such ability constraint on knowledge. This looks to be in considerable tension, though, with putative faith-based knowledge. For at least on a popular Christian conception, when you believe something truly on the basis of faith this isn't because of anything you're naturally competent to do. Rather, faith-based beliefs are entirely a product of divine agency. Appearances to the contrary, I argue in this article that there's no deep tension between faith-based knowledge and virtue epistemology. Not if we learn to conceive of faith as a kind of extended knowledge.

This article is a response to Tyler Wunder's ‘The modality of theism and probabilistic natural theology: a tension in Alvin Plantinga's philosophy’ (this journal). In his article, Wunder argues that if the proponent of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) holds theism to be non-contingent and frames the argument in terms of objective probability, then the EAAN is either unsound or theism is necessarily false. I argue that a modest revision of the EAAN renders Wunder's objection irrelevant, and that this revision actually widens the scope of the argument.