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Divine psychology and cosmic fine-tuning Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Miles K. Donahue
After briefly outlining the fine-tuning argument (FTA), I explain how it relies crucially on the claim that it is not improbable that God would design a fine-tuned universe. Against this premise stands the divine psychology objection: the contention that the probability that God would design a fine-tuned universe is inscrutable. I explore three strategies for meeting this objection: (i) denying that
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Non-belief as self-deception? Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Lari Launonen
The suppression thesis is the theological claim that theistic non-belief results from culpable mistreatment of one's knowledge of God or one's evidence for God. The thesis is a traditional one but unpopular today. This article examines whether it can gain new credibility from the philosophy of self-deception and from the cognitive science of religion. The thesis is analysed in terms of the intentionalist
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A defence of merit transfer: Aquinas's interpretation and desert theory Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Ethan Leong Yee
According to Joel Feinberg and most modern scholars of desert, the basis of desert must be a fact about the deserving person, and not about someone else. This widely accepted notion seems self-evident. However according to some religious traditions, such as Buddhism and Roman Catholicism, merit can be transferred from one person to another. That is, someone can deserve something based on some fact
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Glutty and simple? Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Anna Marmodoro
Beall's original understanding of the nature of the divine allows for contradictory statements to be true of God, by assuming that parts of reality, such as the Trinity, are ‘glutty’ (namely, what we can say about them is both true and false). Is the divine is the only glutty part of reality, and if so, why? Furthermore, does the glutty nature of the divine undermine its simplicity? Beall argues that
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Axé as the cornerstone of Candomblé philosophy and its significance for an understanding of well-being (bem estar) Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-15 Bettina E. Schmidt
According to Candomblé, axé is present in every living being and is necessary to life. To develop and maintain a sense of well-being, one must maintain a balanced level of axé which is linked to a reciprocal relationship between human beings and orixás (African deities). This article will explore the link between the spiritual force axé and well-being (bem estar) within Candomblé philosophy. Starting
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An argument for the perspectival account of faith Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Chris Tweedt
Faith, I argue, is a value-oriented perspective, where the subject has a pro-attitude towards the object of the perspective. After summarizing the perspectival account of faith and its upshots that are relevant to the proceeding argument, I give an extended explanatory, cumulative case argument for the account by showing that the perspectival account of faith explains the data that alternative accounts
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Causal and non-causal explanations in theology: the case of Aquinas's primary–secondary causation distinction Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Ignacio Silva
The basic question of this article is whether Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of divine providence through his understanding of primary and secondary causation can be understood as a theological causal or non-causal explanation. To answer this question, I will consider some contemporary discussions about the nature of causal and non-causal explanations in philosophy of science and metaphysics, in order to
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‘Not so much thought out as danced out’: expanding philosophy of religion in the light of Candomblé Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Mikel Burley
When the anthropologist R. R. Marett affirmed that certain forms of religion are ‘not so much thought out as danced out’ (1914, xxxi), he was, in effect, anticipating a criticism that has been levelled at philosophy of religion in recent decades – namely, the criticism that this branch of philosophy has frequently underplayed the extent to which religions often prioritize ritual activities (including
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Evil and responsibility in the Quran Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-24 Bakinaz Abdalla
The Quran contains numerous references to evil and some of these indicate that the responsibility of some instances of evil, which I call self-inflicted evil, lies with human beings rather than God. This idea of evil leads to an exploration of two interconnected issues in philosophical and theological discussions, moral responsibility and desert, along with the related tension between freedom of action
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Evil and embodiment: towards a Latter-day Saint non-identity theodicy Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Derek Christian Haderlie, Taylor-Grey Edward Miller
We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day Saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God's soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even
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The mythic narratives of Candomblé Nagô and what they imply about its Supreme Being Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-15 José Eduardo Porcher
In this article, I explore the mythic narratives of the Yoruba-derived tradition of Candomblé Nagô to discern the attributes of its Supreme Being. I introduce Candomblé, offering an overview of its central beliefs and practices, and then present theological perspectives on the Supreme Being in African Traditional Religion as a basis for comparison with the myths I will examine. I consider the primary
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In defence of qua-Christology Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Daniel Rubio
Recent analytic theology has seen a wave of excellent work on the fundamental problem of Christology, the question of how one and the same person can be human full stop and divine full stop. Along the way, new objections have been raised for a venerable family of Christological views, whose distinctive is the employment of qua-devices to dissolve the difficulties stemming from the dual nature doctrine
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A Harrean perspective of theology Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Gonzalo L. Recio
The object of this article is to present Christian theology as a case of a Harrean theory, as a mapping which links the members of one set of entities to those of another in a systematic way. I will divide the article into four parts. The first one will be devoted to a brief presentation of the main characteristics of Harré's proposal. Once the fundamentals of the Harrean perspective are presented
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Minding Creation: response to critics Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Joanna Leidenhag
In this article, I reply to four responses published in this journal to my book Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation. Two of these responses, by Christa L. McKirland and Eugene Fuimaono, and by Tim Miller and Thomas Jay Oord, are largely appreciative and propose future engagement with theological anthropology, indigenous perspectives, process metaphysics, and the doctrine
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Original sin, control, and divine blame: some critical reflections on the moderate doctrine of original sin Religious Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Aku Visala, Olli-Pekka Vainio
This article examines a construal of the doctrine of original sin which affirms the cognitive corruption of human faculties but denies that humans carry original guilt for Adam's fall or for cognitive corruption. All humans require Christ's atonement, because they either inevitably commit at least one sin or are rejected by God for other reasons. We go on to identify three problems with this account
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Minding Creation: an overview Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Joanna Leidenhag
The doctrine of creation is a teaching shared across many faith traditions that requires urgent interdisciplinary attention today. Joanna Leidenhag's book Minding Creation considers how the philosophy of panpsychism might be beneficial to the Christian articulation of creation. This article is an overview of the book, in order to contextualize the four responses and author's reply that follows.
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A cross-cultural perspective on God's personhood Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Akshay Gupta
Debates about God's personhood, or lack thereof, are central to philosophy of religion. This article aims to advance these debates by presenting the ‘greatness of personhood argument’ for God's personhood and a dilemma for those who deny God's personhood. I also consider various objections to this argument and this dilemma and argue that they fail. Notably, my reasoning in defence of personal theism
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What doesn't kill me makes me stronger? Post-traumatic growth and the problem of suffering Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Michelle Panchuk
This article argues that the Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) literature does not support the claim, made most notably by Eleonore Stump, that suffering tends to promote psychic integration that allows for interpersonal closeness with God (or others). Two strains of argument support this conclusion. First, there are problems internal to PTG research, identified by psychologists and bioethicists in the field
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Faith as skill: an essay on faith in the Abrahamic tradition Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-29 M. Hosein M. A. Khalaj
What is the nature of religious faith as understood in the Abrahamic tradition? This article suggests a novel answer to this question. To this end, I first outline five desiderata, characterized by appealing to conceptions of faith in both the Islamic and Christian traditions, which I think every adequate account of faith should satisfy. These five desiderata are: (1) explaining the principle of the
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Exemplars in ‘science and religion’: a theological dialogue with Thomas Kuhn Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Josh A. Reeves
This article argues that Thomas Kuhn's landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has not been adequately explored by theologians and scholars in the field of science and religion. While many cite Kuhn to suggest that science and religion share structural similarities, I contend that his work is crucial in addressing current debates about the definitions of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ and
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A Christian ethics of blame: or, God says, ‘vengeance is mine’ Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-23 Robert J. Hartman
There is an ethics of blaming the person who deserves blame. The Christian scriptures imply the following no-vengeance condition: a person should not vengefully overtly blame a wrongdoer even if she gives the wrongdoer the exact negative treatment that he deserves. I explicate and defend this novel condition and argue that it demands a revolution in our blaming practices. First, I explain the no-vengeance
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On sin-based responses to divine hiddenness Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Max Baker-Hytch
While sin-based responses to divine hiddenness arguments are a road less travelled, they do nonetheless have a number of defenders in the contemporary divine hiddenness literature. I begin this article by exploring the various strategies that have been employed to attempt to motivate such accounts. What none of these strategies seem to take into account, however, is a cluster of facts about the correlation
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Evil and evidence: a reply to Bass Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Mike Almeida
In ‘Evil is Still Evidence: Comments on Almeida’ Robert Bass presents three objections to the central argument (ENE) in my ‘Evil is Not Evidence’. The first objection is that ENE is invalid. According to the second objection, it is a consequence of ENE that there can be no evidence for or against a posteriori necessities. The third objection is that, contrary to ENE, the likelihood of certain necessary
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My religion preaches ‘p’, but I don't believe that p: Moore's Paradox in religious assertions Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Maciej Tarnowski
In this article, I consider the cases of religious Moorean propositions of the form ‘d, but I don't believe that d’ and ‘d, but I believe that ~d’, where d is a religious dogma, proposition, or part of a creed. I argue that such propositions can be genuinely and rationally asserted and that this fact poses a problem for traditional analysis of religious assertion as an expression of faith and of religious
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Aquinas's science-engaged theology Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Ignacio Silva, Gonzalo Recio
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
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Divine hiddenness, the demographics of theism, and mutual epistemic dependence: a response to Max Baker-Hytch Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Andrew Blanton
In his article ‘Divine Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism’ Stephen Maitzen (2006) develops a permutation of the argument from divine hiddenness which focuses on the uneven distribution of theistic belief around the globe. Max Baker-Hytch (2016) responds to this argument by providing a theodicy which appeals to the fact that humans are epistemically interdependent. In this article I argue that
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Psychic immunity and uncomprehended pain: what Maimonides can tell us about the problem of suffering Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Ben Conroy
Using Moses Maimonides’ theodicy to respond to contemporary formulations of the problem of evil initially seems unpromising. Maimonides is committed to claims that make the task harder rather than easier. Chief among them is his belief that all suffering is deserved by the sufferer. But Maimonides is often misinterpreted: he does not hold that innocent people are never subject to bodily harm, but that
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Schelling and the problem of evil Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Nahum Brown
This article contributes to discussions about the problem of evil and Schelling studies by analysing Schelling's conception of the problem in his 1809 Freiheitsschrift essay. I explicate Schelling's critical response to four classic solutions to the problem (embodiment, degree, dualism, and divine forms) and outline his positive solution. My thesis is that Schelling offers a unique theodicy by arguing
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By what measure? A signpost theory of the truth of doctrine Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Edward DeLaquil
This article proposes a novel theory of the truth of doctrine. A signpost theory of the truth of doctrine is informed by practice-based philosophy of science. I argue that a theory of the truth of doctrine needs to explain the construction, use, and judgement of doctrine. So, I raise questions about the truth of doctrine in reference to the relation between a theory of the truth of doctrine and the
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Counting hiddenness: cognitive science and the distribution of belief in God Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Adam Green
Establishing the distribution of belief in something, especially something that spans cultures and times, requires close attention to empirical evidence and to certain inadequacies in our concept of belief. Arguments from divine hiddenness have quickly become one of the most important argument types in the philosophy of religion. These arguments and responses to them typically rely on robust but relatively
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What if God was all of us? Why the definition of ‘God’ matters in analytic discussions of meaning in life Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Asheel Singh
Contemporary analytic treatments of meaning in life in the English-speaking Anglo-American-Australasian tradition have largely proceeded from the atheistic and naturalistic assumptions common to the sciences. With the recent publication of Seachris and Goetz's God and Meaning (2016), T. J. Mawson's God and the Meanings of Life (2016), and Thaddeus Metz's God, Soul and the Meaning of Life (2019), more
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God, the laws of nature, and occasionalism Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Jeffrey Koperski
Occasionalism is often seen as a peculiarity of early modern philosophy. The idea that God is the sole source of efficient causation in the world strikes many as at best implausible. It was, however, a natural inference based on the seventeenth-century view that the laws of nature are simply God's decrees. The question here is whether such a view and its more recent descendants entail occasionalism
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‘Orthodox panentheism’ is neither orthodox nor coherent Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-02 James Dominic Rooney
Jeremiah Carey presents a version of panentheism which he attributes to Gregory Palamas, as well as other Greek patristic thinkers. The Greek tradition, he alleges, is more open to panentheistic metaphysics than the Latin. Palamas, for instance, hold that God's energies are participable, even if God's essence is not. Carey uses Palamas' metaphysics to sketch an account on which divine energies are
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Human rights and divine holiness Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-28 Kevin Vallier
Theists commonly hold that God endows humans with rights. Standard explanations draw on natural law theory or divine command theory. However, the natural law account does not give God a central role in explaining our rights, and the divine command account does not assign human nature a significant explanatory role. A successful theistic explanation of human rights must meet three conditions: (1) God
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Scientism and the value of scientific evidence for religious belief Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Jack Warman, Leandro De Brasi
This article presents a novel argument against an application of evidential scientism to religious belief. In particular, our target is those arguments at whose core lies the claim that it ought to be the case that, if one holds religious beliefs, then those beliefs are based on the best scientific evidence. Moreover, rather than focussing on the philosophical puzzles that usually fall within the purview
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Nagasawa's Maximal God and the Ontological Argument Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Peter Millican
Yujin Nagasawa has recently defended two reformulated Ontological Arguments, one adapted from Anselm's ‘Classical’ version and one from Plantinga's ‘Modal’ version. This article explains in detail why both of them fail, and then goes on to present general objections to any Ontological Argument.
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Embracing the mystery: David Hume's playful religion of wonder Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Hannah Lingier
In this article I show how David Hume's works provide the ingredients for a conception of religiosity understood as a feeling of wonder concerning nature or existence, accompanied by a playful attitude regarding the imaginative shapes that can be given to this emotion. Hume serves as an inspiration rather than an object of study: I respect the spirit and values of his work, while going beyond his own
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Communal sin, atonement, and group non-agential moral responsibility Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Harvey Cawdron
In analytic theology, corporate and/or communal accounts of moral responsibility are gaining recognition as a useful resource in numerous debates. One of the areas to which they have been applied is the atonement. It is thought that when Christ is atoning for the human community, one evades concerns about justice because it seems permissible for a member of a group to suffer punishment for the group's
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Newman on emotion and cognition in the Grammar of Assent Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Emma Emrich
This article considers the role of emotion in John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent by distinguishing five different ways (or ‘models’) in which the emotions play a positive epistemic role in relation to cognition. The most important of these, the Cognitive-Emotion Model, offers a new account of Newman's crucial idea of real assent, one that stresses the primary role of the emotions in real assent
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You could be immaterial (or not) Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Andrew M. Bailey
Materialists about human persons say that we are, and must be, wholly material beings. Substance dualists say that we are, and must be, wholly immaterial. In this article, I take issue with the ‘and must be’ bits. Both materialists and substance dualists would do well to reject modal extensions of their views and instead opt for contingent doctrines, or doctrines that are silent about those modal extensions
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Consubstantial dualism: a Zoroastrian perspective on the soul Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-02 Ted Good
This article describes the group of ninth-century Zoroastrian philosophers I call the ‘Dēnkard School’ and sketches the way they do philosophy. It presents their argument against substance dualism, which the Zoroastrians argue is in tension with the belief in repentance. From an analysis of this polemic, there follows a reconstruction of the Dēnkard School's own doctrine of the consubstantiality of
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When to give weight to weighty religious disagreement Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-02 Jennifer Jensen
When we encounter a disagreeing interlocutor in the weighty domains of religion, philosophy, and politics, what is the rational response to the disagreement? I argue that the rational response is to proportion the degree to which you give weight to the opinion of a disagreeing interlocutor to the degree to which you and your interlocutor share relevant beliefs. I begin with Richard Fumerton's three
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God's creativity and religious diversity: a theistic argument for a transformative pluralism Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Marciano Adilio Spica
In this article, my objective is to argue for the compatibility between religious diversity and Christian theism by invoking the concept of divine creativity. I propose that, if God is a being of infinite powers and infinite creativity, He is such that it is possible for Him to create different and varied realities in a continuous process of creation. More than that, given His infinite creativity,
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God, Über-God, and Unter-God Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Noah Gordon
I examine two related arguments for the claim that if God is omnipotent, God cannot lack abilities such as the ability to do evil or to act irrationally. Both arguments concern the idea that omnipotence is inconsistent with being dominated with respect to abilities. I raise new issues in the formulation of such dominance principles about ability, and attempt to solve them. I also discuss and reject
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The functions of natural theology in Thomas Aquinas: A presumption of atheism? Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Clemente Huneeus
Antony Flew argued for a ‘presumption of atheism’ that intended to put the philosophical debate about God under a light which demands setting the meaningfulness and logical coherence of the theistic notion of ‘God’ before any arguments for His existence are suggested. This way of proceeding, discussing divine attributes before considering the arguments for the existence of God, became dominant in analytic
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Darwin's doubt or Plantinga's conviction? Some failures in Plantinga's attempt to debunk naturalistic evolution Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-12 L. H. Marques Segundo
Darwin's Doubt (DD) – a thesis according to which the probability of the human cognitive mechanism's reliability given non-guided evolution is low – is central to Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism and his suggestion that the adoption of guided evolution thesis is preferable from a theory choice point of view. In this article I'll argue that there are three fundamental failures in
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Death, deathless states, and time-consciousness in Sikh philosophy Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Arvind-Pal S. Mandair
This article examines Sikh conceptualizations about death and immortality, focusing on several thematic lines of inquiry drawn from the utterances of the Sikh Gurus (gurbāṇī): (i) ordinary or empirical death; (ii) deathless states; (iii) after death? (iv) this life; (v) personhood and the (non-)existence of God. These themes address philosophical issues related to concerns about fear of death, belief
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Murphy's Anselmian theism and the problem of evil Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Luke Wilson
Mark Murphy has recently defended a novel account of divine agency on which God would have very minimal requiring reasons and a wide range of merely justified reasons. This account grounds his response to the problem of evil. If God would not have requiring reasons to promote the well-being of creatures, Murphy argues, then the evil we observe would not count as evidence against theism. I argue that
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Truth without truths: Grim's Cantorian paradox and the ontology of the objects of omniscience Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Troy T. Catterson
I argue that Grim's diagonalization argument against the possibility of omniscience is not sound by arguing that the properties of being a proposition or a truth are not legitimate sortal properties. Thus, the fact that there can be no set corresponding to the extension of these properties does not imply that there is no completed totality of the things possessing it. First, I demonstrate that a correspondence
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The doing/allowing distinction in the divine context Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Ryan Kulesa
The theist needs a conception of the distinction between doing and allowing because much of the literature focused on the problem of evil attempts to justify (via theodicy) or defend (via defence) God's allowing evil to occur. I present a counterfactual account of the doing/allowing distinction in the divine context and argue that, even if there are compelling objections to counterfactual accounts
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Should panpsychists be Christians? Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Philip Goff
In this article, I offer a response to Joanna Leidenhag's book Mind Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation. Whereas Leidenhag argues that the panpsychist's demands for explanation of the mind lead naturally to demands for an explanation of the whole universe, I counter that (i) the panpsychist's explanatory demands are not necessarily quite as general as Leidenhag presumes,
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Engaging and developing Ada Agada's philosophy: moral responsibility, creation, and the problem of evil Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues
In a recent article in Religious Studies, Ada Agada argues that the problem of evil is relevant not only to those who consider God to hold the Omni-properties but also to those who understand God as a limited deity. He rightly points out that the limited-God literature in the African philosophy of religion has neglected to address the problem of evil by too quickly dismissing it. Agada then argues
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How much horrific suffering is enough? Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Bryan Frances
Isn't there something like an amount and density of horrific suffering whose discovery would make it irrational to think God exists? Use your imagination to think of worlds that are much, much, much worse than you think Earth is when it comes to horrific suffering. Isn't there some conceivable scenario which, if you were in it, would make you say ‘Okay, okay. God doesn't exist, at least in the way
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Modal-epistemic arguments for the existence of God based on the possibility of the omniscience and/or refutation of the strong agnosticism Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Fábio Maia Bertato
In this article I present some modal-epistemic arguments for the existence of God, based on the possibility of omniscience. For this, I provide modal formal systems that allow obtaining the existence of God as a theorem. Moreover, based on what I assume as reasonable premises, they show that the strong agnostic position is contradictory, since it allows the conclusion both that God exists and that
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Non-personal immortality Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-06 Sebastian Gäb
This article explores the concept of non-personal immortality. Non-personal theories of immortality claim that even though there is no personal or individual survival of death, it is still possible to continue to exist in a non-personal state. The most important challenge for non-personal conceptions of immortality is solving the apparent contradiction between on the one hand accepting that individual
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The hard problem of ‘pure’ consciousness: Sāṃkhya dualist ontology Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-26 Karen O'Brien-Kop
This article addresses the theme of ‘death and immortality’ from the perspective of consciousness, and takes as its starting point a root text of Hindu philosophy, the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. fourth century ce). The text posits a dualist ontology in which consciousness is separate and autonomous from a material reality that includes body and mind. The goal is to be ontologically situated in
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The wisdom of ghosts Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-26 Beverley Clack
According to Carolyne Larrington, legends of the past ‘offer particular kinds of answers – beautiful and mysterious answers. . . – to very large questions through a kind of metaphorical thinking . . . which, in their stripped-down clarity, show us what's really important in an unfamiliar light’. The claim that ‘what is really important [is disclosed] by casting it in an unfamiliar light’ I take into
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Evil is still evidence: comment on Almeida Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Robert Bass
Michael Almeida has recently tried to show that if S5 correctly represents metaphysical necessity, there can be no non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God. Evidence would thus be irrelevant to the reasonability of traditional theistic belief. Almeida's argument has implications beyond its announced target: it amounts to a new argument for sweeping scepticism. Almeida's
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Conceptual plausibility and the rationality of theistic belief Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Ricardo Sousa Silvestre
In this article, I present a defence of conceptual plausibility, understood as an epistemic way to qualify concepts that situates them between the merely possible and the actual. To show that there is such a thing as conceptual plausibility, I rely on what seems to lie at the heart of many uses of the phrase ‘plausible concept’: explanatory fruitfulness. To make an effective case for the claim that
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Theorizing about Christian faith in God with John Bishop Religious Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Daniel J. McKaughan, Daniel Howard-Snyder
We assess John Bishop's theory of the nature of Christian faith in God, as most recently expressed in ‘Reasonable Faith and Reasonable Fideism’, although we dip into other writings as well. We explain several concerns we have about it. However, in the end, our reflections lead us to propose a modified theory, one that avoids our concerns while remaining consonant with some of his guiding thoughts about