‘Adams worlds’ are possible worlds that contain no creature whose life is not worth living or whose life is overall worse than in any other possible world in which it would have existed. Creating an Adams world involves no wrongdoing or unkindness towards creatures on the part of the creator. I argue that the notion of an Adams world is of little value in theodicy. Theists are not only committed to thinking that this world was created without wrongdoing or unkindness but also must rule out the possibility that the world might have been better had God not existed. Nor is there much reason, independent of the availability of a satisfactory theodicy, for believing that the actual world is an Adams world. The need for a theodicy constructed along Leibnizian lines, incorporating the claim that this world is the best possible, is thus reinforced.

If God exists, why isn't His existence more apparent? In recent analytic philosophy this longstanding question has been developed into an argument for atheism typically referred to as the ‘problem of divine hiddenness’. My goal here is to put forward a new reply. The basic idea is that there is some reason to think that for many of us, our moral conduct would not improve even if God's existence were not subject to doubt. However, immoral conduct in such a state of affairs would be even more immoral, and hence justly subject to greater punishment, than it is in a state of affairs in which God's existence is subject to doubt. As such, God mercifully remains ‘hidden’ in order to limit our moral culpability.

I argue that people do not and cannot have religious experiences that are perceptual experiences with theological content and that provide some justification for the belief in God. I discuss William Alston's resourceful defence of this idea. My strategy is to say that religious perception would either have to be by means of one of the ordinary five senses or else by means of some special sixth religious sense. In either case insoluble epistemological problems arise. The problem is with perceiving God as God, which we need to do if reasons to believe in God are to be generated. To do so, we would have to perceive the instantiation of His essential properties – being all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. But perceiving the instantiation of these properties of God, even by some special sixth religious sense, is impossible. Hence, God cannot be perceived either by the ordinary five senses or by a sixth religious sense. Religious perceptual experiences are a myth.

Theological incompatibility arguments suggest God's comprehensive foreknowledge is incompatible with human free will. Logical incompatibility arguments suggest a complete set of truths about the future is logically incompatible with human free will. Of the two, most think theological incompatibility is the more severe problem; but hardly anyone thinks either kind of argument presents a real threat to free will. I will argue, however, that sound theological and logical incompatibility arguments exist and that, in fact, logical incompatibly is the more severe problem. A deep analysis of the arguments will reveal that, to avoid a fatalist conclusion, we must reject bivalence and adopt a specific kind of temporal ontology (presentism), which also forces the theist to embrace open theism.

Does it make sense for non-theists to feel gratitude for their existence? The question arises because gratitude is typically thought to be directed towards a person to whom one is grateful. Hence the theist may be grateful to God for their existence, experienced as a gift. But can the non-believer feel something similar without being irrational? Can there be gratitude for existence but not to anyone? After analysing gratitude and how we can best understand the idea of non-directed gratitude, I discuss the conditions that need to apply for non-directed gratitude to be appropriate. I end by discussing whether theism provides a psychologically richer and more satisfying framework for understanding existential gratitude.

In this article, I show that: (1) There is a transcendence strain in African Traditional Religion (ATR) and traditional African thought that agrees perfectly with traditional monotheism and legitimizes the question of the relation of God with evil in the world. (2) There is incontrovertible evidence of the conception of God as a limited deity that subverts the categories of omnipotence and omniscience. (3) African philosophers of religion must show how a transcendent or, conversely, a limited God is related to the evil that exists in the world, since the overwhelming stance of ATR is that God is the creator of the world and wields effective power. I substitute the categories of omnipotence and omniscience with the novel categories of power and glory and argue that while a powerful and glorious God is not the author of evil and cannot eliminate evil in the world, such a God can be conceived as working to reduce the evil in the world through the instrumentality of human moral agency.

According to non-doxastic theories of propositional faith, belief that p is not necessary for faith that p. Rather, propositional faith merely requires a ‘positive cognitive attitude’. This broad condition, however, can be satisfied by several pragmatic approaches to a domain, including fictionalism. This article shows precisely how fictionalists can have faith given non-doxastic theory, and explains why this is problematic. It then explores one means of separating the two theories, in virtue of the fact that the truth of the propositions in a discourse is of little consequence for fictionalists, whereas their truth matters deeply for the faithful. Although promising, this approach incurs several theoretical costs, hence providing a compelling reason to favour a purely doxastic account of faith.

In his fine book The Wisdom to Doubt, J. L. Schellenberg builds a case for religious scepticism by advancing a version of the Hiddenness Argument. This argument rests on the claim that God could not love, in an admirable way, those who seek God while also remaining hidden from them. In this article, I distinguish two arguments for this claim. Neither argument succeeds, I contend, as each rests on an unsatisfactory understanding of the nature of admirable love, whether human or divine.

Do followers of different religions share common ground at the level of their morality, despite their disagreements over doctrine and metaphysical beliefs? A typical statement of this view was made recently by the Dalai Lama.

Orthodox Christian theists frequently petition God in the sense that they ask him to bring about some state of affairs which they believe may not occur without divine intervention. Such petitions basically fall into three categories: (i) requests in which the petitioner is asking God to influence significantly the natural environment – e.g. calm a hurricane, (2) requests in which the petitioner is asking God to influence significantly the lives ofother individuals – e.g. reconcile the broken marriage of friends, and (3) requests in which the petitioner is asking God to influence significantly his or her own life – e.g. soothe his or her troubled mind.

In his article, ‘Heartbreak at Hilbert's Hotel’, Landon Hedrick argues that the ‘Hilbert's Hotel Argument’ (HHA) proposed by William Lane Craig is ineffective against proponents of presentism, who include Craig himself. I show that there is no heartbreak if the Hotel and persons are constructed and generated in a certain way: there exists a ‘hotel room builder’ and a ‘customer generator’, they have been building hotel rooms and generating customers at regular time intervals as long as time exists, and the hotel rooms and customers have continued existing after they have been built and generated respectively.

The proofs for God's existence advanced in the most prominent theological work of Averroes (d. 1198), the Kitaˆb al-kashf, have been neglected, largely because the book has commonly – and correctly – been viewed as being meant for popular consumption. This article argues that although Averroes' arguments are non-technical, the Commentator nevertheless takes pains not to speak against his philosophical beliefs. Averroes distinguishes between inductive and deductive arguments, with conventional arguments from design falling into the former camp. Averroes also assigns a place for teleological argumentation when assigning a special role for the prime mover within the hierarchy of unmoved movers.

If Purgatory is given a role at all in modern conceptions of the after–life, it is likely to be at most of the kind found in Hick and Rahner, in providing a second chance for those of whom it might be argued that they have had no proper opportunity in this life. Apart from its intermediate character, however, this account has very little in common with the traditional conception, whereas it seems to me that philosophical reasons, partly conceptual and partly moral, compel assent to something very much more like the traditional view. This I take to have had two essential features: (a) that it was a place of moral preparation (not trial) for those whose lives and decisions had already destined them for Heaven and (b) that this moral preparation involved some kind of purgatorial (i.e. purifying) pain that was seen as a necessary consequence of the rectification of moral wrong–doing. Three arguments in defence of (a) are offered below. These will help to provide an appropriate framework for the brief defence of (b) which then follows. For convenience these three arguments may be labelled the temporal argument, the identity argument and the self–acceptance argument.

I do not agree with Professor M. M. Sharif in his book About Iqbal and His Thought that Allama Iqbal's concept of God passed through three stages, and that at one stage he identified him with ‘Beauty’. This may be said on the basis of his few earlier poems (included in Baang-i-Darā), but they never purported to give any idea about God; they were at best ghazals on nature and offered only stray reflections. Iqbal properly developed his concept of God in his lecture entitled ‘The Conception of God and The Meaning of Prayer’ (included in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam). I may mention at the outset that I am going to base my appraisal on the said lecture of Iqbal.

The Judaeo-Christian belief in the general resurrection has long been troubled by the issue of personal identity, but prior to the advent of such concerns there existed a cognate concern about the identity not of the resurrected person, but of the resurrected person's body. Although this latter issue has exercised scholars of various ages, concern with it was particularly keen in early modern times. In this paper I chart the various ways bodily identity was conceived by early modern thinkers in connection with the resurrection, as well as the key objections their contemporaries developed in response.

Is God's foreknowledge compatible with human freedom? One of the most attractive attempts to reconcile the two is the Ockhamistic view, which subscribes not only to human freedom and divine omniscience, but retains our most fundamental intuitions concerning God and time: that the past is immutable, that God exists and acts in time, and that there is no backward causation. In order to achieve all that, Ockhamists (I) distinguish ‘hard facts’ about the past which cannot possibly be altered from ‘soft facts’ about the past which are alterable, and (2) argue that God's prior beliefs about human actions are soft facts about the past.

‘Open-minded’, ‘detached’, ‘objective’, ‘disinterested’, ‘impartial’, ‘non-partisan’ and ‘independent’ are terms typically used when Religious Studies seeks to present itself as an academic discipline. Phrases like ‘methodological agnosticism’, ‘suspension of judgement’, and ‘procedural neutrality’ are also found, in attempts to formulate an appropriate methodology. Seldom are those terms and phrases precisely defined, or the differences between them examined. Yet a moment's reflection reveals that they are far from clear or unambiguous, and that if they are to be used at all effectively in this context, more work must be done by way of preliminary analysis and clarification.

This study focuses upon the heart of John Hick's pluralistic philosophy of religion – his neo-Kantian response to the problem of conflicting inter-religious conceptions of the divine. Hick attempts to root his proposal in two streams of tradition: (1) the inter-religious awareness of the distinction between the divine in itself vs. the divine as humanly experienced, and (2) a Kantian epistemology. In fact, these attempts are problematic in that his hypothesis introduces a radical subjectivizing element at both junctures. In the end, I contend that Hick's neo-Kantian proposal undermines his decades-long effort to defend some form of religious realism.

The most striking difference between Christian and Muslim theologies is that while, for Christians, God is a person, Muslims worship an impersonal deity. Despite the importance of this difference for a host of theological issues, it is a difference which has gone largely unnoticed by Christians and Muslims alike. Yet Christians everywhere will affirm that God is a person, while the average Muslim will readily deny this. Theism is often defined by philosophers of religion who work in the Christian tradition in such a manner as to require the belief that God is a person. Thus The Encyclopedia of Philosophy has it that, ‘THEISM signifies belief in one God (theos) who is (a) personal, (b) worthy of adoration, and (c) separate from the world but (d) continuously active in it”. John H. Hick admits that, ‘Theism…is strictly belief in a deity, but is generally used to mean belief in a personal deity”. Richard Swinburne states that a theist is one who believes that there is a God who is a ‘person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe”, and J. L. Mackie, while arguing the case of atheism, endorses Swinburne's definition of theism.

Apparently, relationships between God (if He exists) and His creatures would be very valuable. Appreciating this value raises the question of whether it can motivate a certain premise in John Schellenberg's argument from divine hiddenness, a premise which claims, roughly, that if some capable, non-resistant subject fails to believe in God, then God does not exist. In this paper, I argue that the value of divine–creature relationships can justify this premise only if we have reason to believe that the counterfactuals of freedom work out in certain ways. Unfortunately, we can't acquire such a reason, at least not without relying on other successful arguments (if there are any) for the relevant premise of Schellenberg's hiddenness argument.