What is faith? Lara Buchak has done as much as anyone recently to answer this question in a sensible and instructive fashion. As it turns out, her writings reveal two theories of faith, an early one and a later one – or two versions of the same one if you like. In what follows, we aim to assess those theories with an eye to highlighting both their good- and bad-making features, marking choice points for theorizing about faith along the way, and defending the choices we make. The result is an alternative theory of faith, one that we hope extends our common pursuit of understanding what faith is.

The Christian and Islamic doctrine of the virgin birth claim God asexually impregnated the Virgin Mary with Jesus, Mary's impregnation was fully consensual (virgin consent), and God never acts immorally (divine goodness). First, I show that God's actions and Mary's background beliefs undermine her consent by virtue of coercive incentives, Mary's comparative powerlessness, and the generation of moral conflicts. Second, I show that God's non-disclosure of certain reasonably relevant facts undermines Mary's informed consent. Third, I show that a recent attempt by Jack Mulder to rescue virgin consent fails. As divine goodness and virgin consent are more central to orthodoxy, Christians and Muslims have powerful reason to reject virgin birth.

Myths, or sacred narratives, have been underexplored in mainstream philosophy of religion, which has also had little to say about African indigenous religions. These lacunae impoverish the philosophy of religion by diminishing its coverage both of the range of human religious possibilities and of the diverse modes through which religious ideas and world-views are conveyed. With particular attention to Yorùbá religion, this article promotes and exemplifies a pluralistic narrative approach that draws upon mythology to facilitate philosophical reflection upon a wider array of religious traditions, for the dual purpose of doing conceptual justice to those traditions while also furthering the discipline's conceptual enrichment.

Philosophers commonly assume that worship is a universal attitude. Two major approaches see worship as a sui generis attitude or as the specific attitude of respect. This article criticizes the universal assumption and defines worship as a ritual that shapes a person in acquiring the attitude considered appropriate in relating to a superior such as God. Religions differ in their rituals of worship because they disagree on what this appropriate attitude is. This claim is demonstrated by distinguishing the Hebrew Bible's form of worship as bowing down. Biblical worship is shown to be political, forming the worshipper into a loyal servant of God as king. This form of worship is argued to be fundamentally ethical because it teaches that the individual's relationship with God supervenes on human relationships.

Affirming that divine knowledge of occurrent changes among particulars is incompatible with the doctrine of divine immutability, this article seeks to resolve this tension by denying the latter. Reviewing this long-running debate, I first formalize the exchange between al-Ghazālī and Avicenna on this topic, and then set out the ways in which contemporary Sadrāean philosophers have tried to resolve the incompatibility. I argue that none of the cited Sadrāean attempts to resolve the incompatibility between divine omniscience and immutability is successful. Then, by reference to certain principles drawn from Shia theology, I indicate how one might seek to reject the dogma of divine immutability. I conclude that by emancipating ourselves from that dogma, new horizons could be opened for Islamic philosophy, free from traditional Hellenistic constraints.

Nagasawa has argued that the suffering associated with evolution presents a greater challenge to atheism than to theism because that evil is incompatible with ‘existential optimism’ about the world – with seeing the world as an overall good place, and being thankful that we exist. I argue that even if atheism was incompatible with existential optimism in this way, this presents no threat to atheism. Moreover, it is unclear how the suffering associated with evolution could on its own undermine existential optimism. Links between Nagasawa's argument and the current debate about the axiology of (a)theism are also explored.

In ‘God, evil, and occasionalism’ Matthew Shea and C.P. Ragland appeal to the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing to argue against Alvin Plantinga that occasionalism is morally worse than conservationism. In this article I critically examine their argument and conclude that it fails because it contains an equivocation or is unwarranted. I also offer a case against their position by, first, arguing that on none of three prominent accounts of doing and allowing God merely allows suffering.

Second, I develop the ‘Epistemological-Equivalence Argument’ in order to show that even if we grant such a distinction for God's acts, they would be morally on a par.

The Hindu Divine Mother is revered by millions of religious practitioners in India and elsewhere, yet this goddess rarely receives attention in Western philosophy of religion. Focusing especially (though not exclusively) on her form as Kālī, this article utilizes sources from Hindu goddess traditions to explicate her contrasting characteristics, which include benign maternality and martial aggression. By adapting an embodied theological (or thealogical) approach derived from feminist discourse, the intelligibility of worshipping such a goddess is expounded; connections are delineated between the conceptualizing of divinity as radically ambivalent or multivalent and the lived experience of inhabiting an often hostile world.

William Lane Craig's defence of the so-called ‘Hilbert's Hotel Argument’ for the beginning of the universe seems to be in conflict with his own presentist views, as I argued in my earlier article ‘Heartbreak at Hilbert's Hotel’ (2014). In response, Andrew Loke (2014) has defended a modified version of the argument which avoids this problem, and this defence has been endorsed by Craig (2018). After clarifying the dialectic, I argue in this article that Loke's modification is not as straightforwardly successful as he and Craig seem to think, and that it in fact requires a controversial independent assumption – namely, that creation ex nihilo is possible. I show that some of the more obvious ways of supporting this assumption are either unsuccessful or unavailable to the proponent of the Hilbert's Hotel Argument. Moreover, I show that accepting this assumption conflicts with a key premise in the Hilbert's Hotel Argument. Hence, Loke's modified argument has not successfully established that the universe – including time itself – began to exist.

The opening chapters of Anselm's Monologion contain a ‘proof’ of a perfect being, which has received far less attention than the more famous Proslogion proof, and the ontological arguments derived from it. I wish to rectify this by developing an argument in defence of a crucial premise of the Monologion proof. This premise states that ‘the Good’, i.e. that in virtue of which numerically distinct things may all be good, must itself be a supremely good thing (if it exists). I motivate the argument before considering objections to both premises, as well as putative ‘parodies’ of my argument. Part of the motivation of my argument will involve the claim that the Good, if it is good at all, must be a paradigm good thing. I conclude that theists have a second kind of ontological argument at their disposal.

Classical Indian thought contains a number of arguments for monism that reject the cogency of metaphysical pluralism's account of change, development, and causation in the world. They do this on the basis of (a) the coherence of changes that we see in the world, (b) the difficulty of limning absolute distinctions between individuals, and (c) the prerequisite need for some medium explaining causal interactions. This article provides some background to Indian philosophical thought about a basic fabric of reality that grounds changing forms, containing the telos of their evolution in potentia. It then sets out Coherence, Complexity, and Connection Arguments for monism as employed by the Vedāntic scholastic philosopher Śaṃkara. Along the way, we clarify the Vedāntic conception of a single material, efficient, and formal cause that provides a medium for connection and combination, is naturally replete with generative order and impetus, and in which the teloi of all forms are embedded. We will briefly consider what the argument shows, if it succeeds – comparing with current philosophical approaches to monism. Finally, we observe that this rich monism, describing a single vertiginous reality of many levels and powers, is central to classical Hindu conceptions of what makes something ‘divine’.

Disputes over the nature of faith, as understood in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, sometimes focus on whether it is to be identified exclusively with trust in God or with loyalty/fidelity to God. Drawing on recent work on the semantic range of the Hebrew ʾĕmûnâ and Greek pistis lexicons, we argue for a multidimensional account of what it is to be a person of faith that includes trust and loyalty in combination. The Trust-Loyalty account, we maintain, makes better sense of the faith of exemplars, including Abraham, and fits well with the biblical language of faith. Further, a normatively appropriate combination of trust and loyalty towards others is a recognizable social virtue, aimed at promoting flourishing relationships. Finally, we consider how to make sense of ancient and modern exemplars of faith who protest against God, such as Job and Elie Wiesel, and argue that the Trust-Loyalty view is uniquely well suited to accommodate them.

Anti-theism is the view that God's existence would (or does) detract from the value of the world. A distinctive argument for anti-theism says that the very best atheist worlds are better than the best theist worlds. The reason for this is that it's possible to gain most or all of the benefits associated with theism in Godless worlds. For instance, worlds with a lesser god or several lesser gods can provide many of the benefits of theism without the associated disadvantages. While some work has been done to show that the advantages of theism can be had in atheist worlds, very little has been said regarding whether the disadvantages can simultaneously be avoided in such worlds. I aim to show that it is difficult to describe a possible atheist world where the benefits of theism obtain but the harms do not. I thus problematize this particular argument for anti-theism.

This article applies Paul Tillich's existentialist analysis of the human predicament, particularly what it means to exist and to be fallen, to social media. I argue that social media heightens feelings of alienation and estrangement, supporting this claim with evidence from empirical research in psychiatry and communication studies. Thus, I offer an application of a Tillichian approach to an area of culture previously unexamined in this way. I identify three primary ways in which social media exacerbates existentialist emotional states: (1) social media allows us to construct artificial versions of ourselves through the use of filters and photo editing software; (2) it provides the means to quantify social approval in groups the size of which the human brain has not evolved for; (3) it extends the size of our social networks but decreases the quality of interactions. Social media is yet to receive significant philosophical or theological engagement despite its prevalence, particularly within younger generations. I argue that this is a mistake – philosophy has a duty to engage with such a ubiquitous feature of modern life.

Traditional theism says that the goodness of everything comes from God. Moreover, the goodness of something intrinsically valuable can only come from what has it. Many conclude from these two claims that no creatures have intrinsic value if traditional theism is true. I argue that the exemplarist theory of the divine ideas gives the theist a way out. According to exemplarism, God creates everything according to ideas that are about himself, and so everything resembles God. Since God is wholly good in every way, and since ethical supervenience is true, it follows that creatures have intrinsic value.

I argue that liturgy is primary to the Christian faith. By ‘liturgy’, however, I do not mean merely what happens on Sunday morning. Instead, I distinguish between ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ liturgies, those that occur when the body of Christ meets together and when that body disperses. All of this together constitutes Christian liturgy. My thesis is not that practice is more primary than theory, for that presupposes the possibility of drawing a sharp line between them – an impossible task. Rather, liturgy is a variety of embodied cognition through which we know God and our neighbours. Theology is something that arises from our liturgies and is itself liturgical in nature. We may believe the Nicene Creed, but saying it aloud is performative in nature. I end by examining the relation of phronēsis and theōria in Aristotle and then consider the way Heidegger uses this distinction to argue that ‘know-how’ (Verstehen) is the most basic kind of human knowledge.

Recently, Erik Baldwin and Tyler McNabb have brought Madhva's epistemological framework into active dialogue with Alvin Plantinga's religious epistemology and have argued that individuals within Madhva's tradition cannot make full use of Plantinga's epistemology, according to which, Christian belief resists de jure objections and can also have warrant. While I do not contest this specific claim, I demonstrate that an analysis of Madhva's epistemological framework reveals that this framework has its own resources through which it can resist de jure objections. I address various objections to the rationality of Mādhvic belief and conclude that there are no de jure objections to Mādhvic belief that are independent of de facto objections.

Drawing from multiple generations of Jewish philosophy (from Maimonides until today), this article argues for the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that God is both fully, and not at all, a person. The apparent contradiction in this conclusion is resolved by appeal to a two-layered ontology.

This article defends the claim that firm belief in divine testimony (‘Catholic Faith’) is morally valuable, if the broad claims of Christian orthodoxy hold. I discuss Jonathan Kvanvig's recent argument that Christians should not hold that salvific faith necessarily involves belief in revelation or God's existence, because such faith is not much ‘worth having’, suggesting that this argument is dubious from Catholic and Protestant theological perspectives. I then examine some extant accounts of Catholic Faith's value, conceding that Kvanvig successfully highlights their flaws. I therefore offer a novel explanation of Catholic Faith's value, drawing on Miranda Fricker's account of testimonial justice.