Eleonore Stump's solution to the problem of suffering fails to show how God could be justified in permitting persons to suffer the dark night of the soul. In this article, I explain why and offer an amendment. I contend that a person who responds to the dark night in the right way experiences positive feedback between suffering and charity. This feedback not only enables the sufferer ultimately to attain his heart's desire but also explains why God is justified in permitting persons to suffer the dark night.

In a recent article (Kraay 2013), I argued that some prominent responses to two important arguments for atheism invoke divine satisficing – and that the coherence and propriety of this notion have not been established. Chris Tucker (2016) agrees with my evaluation of divine satisficing, but disagrees with my exegesis of these responses. He argues that they should be understood as invoking motivated submaximization instead. After reviewing the dialectical situation to date, I assess whether motivated submaximization can be deployed in such a way as to defeat these arguments for atheism. I argue that it's far from clear that it can.

I greatly appreciate the kind words from Gale, Tilley, and Schellenberg, and I appreciate even more the care with which they have read and reacted to my book. But my task here is to give my reactions to their reactions.

In that ‘Cock and Bull’ story, Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne satirises philosophic disputation. Since the subject is a nose, the philosophers, divided already along Catholic and Lutheran lines, become Nosarians and Anti-nosarians. The doctors belong to the two universities of Strasburg. On ‘which side of the nose [would] the two universities split’?

'Tis above reason, cried the doctors on one side.

'Tis below reason, cried the others.

'Tis faith, we cried.

'Tis a fiddle-stick, said the other.

'Tis possible, cried the one.

'Tis impossible, said the other.

God's power is infinite, cried the Nosarians, he can do anything.

He can do nothing, cried the Antinosarians, which implies contradictions.

He can make matter think, said the Nosarians.

As certainly as you can make a velvet cap out of a sow's ear, replied the Antinosarians.

According to orthodox Christianity, salvation depends on faith in Christ. If, however, God eternally punishes those who die ignorant of Christ, it appears that we have special instance of the problem of evil: the punishment of the religiously innocent. This is called the soteriological problem of evil. Using Molina's concept of middle knowledge, William Lane Craig develops a solution to this problem which he considers a theodicy. As developed by Craig, the Molinist theodicy rests on the problematic assumption that all informed persons who would freely reject Christ are culpable. Using an informed Muslim as a counter-example, I try to show that Craig's Molinist solution begs the question.

Discussions of the evidential import of religious experiences have tended to focus on the intra-cultural variety: that is, experiences the content of which accord with the religious/cultural background of the experiencer (eg. someone raised in a Buddhist culture might experience the oneness of all, whereas someone from a Christian background might have a vision of Jesus). But what of counter-cultural experiences? That is, experiences which fall outside of the individual's religious/cultural background? Little attention has been paid to these, though such experiences are far from unheard of in the case study literature. In this paper I explore some preliminary questions surrounding the evidential import of counter-cultural religious experiences.

In the past few years philosophers of religion and theologians have devoted much attention to the status of religious statements. There are three main positions: (1) The statements as generally understood are (false) empirical statements. The people who make them have either made honest mistakes (they are unaware of the counter evidence) or they are irrational. This view may be coupled with the claim that religious language can be reconstructed in such a way that we may continue to use it and yet avoid making false assertions. (The position Braithwaite outlines in An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief seems to be close to this.) (2) The statements are not empirical and are therefore not significant. (3) The statements are not empirical— common sense and science are irrelevant to the truth and falsity of religious claims—and yet they are significant.

The main purpose of this paper is to bring out some significant humanistic characteristics of Chinese religious thought. My account is limited to what is originally and typically Chinese. That is to say, it will exclude what has been influenced by Buddhism from India or Christianity from the Western world. Some of the theses of this paper are based on scholarly works, while others are drawn from the author's primary experience.

The challenge was originally put nearly twenty years ago in the concluding sentences of my initial contribution to a discussion in the now defunct journal University; a contribution reprinted in 1955 in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, and in several other places since then. Those sentences read: ‘We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God's (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?”’

Tan Tei Wei in ‘Mr Young on Miracles’ (Religious Studies, X (1974), 333–7) takes me to task over certain contentions of mine regarding the best understanding of ‘the miraculous’. I claim that the notion of a miracle as a violation of a law of nature by a particular interposition of a god, founders on the difficulty of rendering such a notion coherent. I offer instead the following account which is not subject to such a difficulty. Namely, that a miraculous event would be one brought about by God acting as a factor in the causally operative set of factors (out of the perhaps several possible sets sufficient for the event in question's occurrence), such that his activity alters the outcome from what it perhaps would have been if, contrary to fact, he had not been actively involved. It is open to a theist employing this account to say as well that had God not thus actively involved himself as a (specifically rather than just generally) active agent-factor, the (miraculous) effect would not have come about.

Some people do not find much sense in talk about meaning in life. Some people think that such talk cannot have or express any sense, that those who find sense in it must be under an illusion. Some others think that if one is inclined to think that such talk cannot have any sense that is because one misconstrues its logic. So they set off to show us how it is to be construed if what is said here is to make sense. However, there may not really be anything wrong with what they thus set themselves the task of putting right. Their idea that the logic of discourse on meaning in life has been misconstrued may itself come from limitations in their view of logic and its relation to language, from ‘misunderstandings about the logic of our language’. Therefore, as Professor Hepburn rightly points out, such philosophers, in their attempt to ‘prune and rationalise and redefine the vocabulary’ in question, will merely succeed in misleading themselves in their appreciation of its logic and, worse still, in their understanding of life. In his article (‘Questions about the Meaning of Life’, Religious Studies, vol. I, 1965–66) Hepburn opposes such simplifications and distortions of logic which may confine our understanding of life. I am in sympathy with his programme, with his desire to fight superficiality, his caution in rejecting brashness. What I want to do is to remark on some of its limitations and to open up some new questions—though it is not my intention here to pursue any of them.

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 (or lack thereof) between a person's propositional attitudes about God and the degree to which that person displays the relevant moral and intellectual virtues. This article aims to fill this lacuna by mapping out the options available to defenders of sin-based responses in trying to cope with this cluster of facts. I argue that there may be resources available for preserving some aspects of the sin-based approach, but that taking stock of the aforementioned facts will ultimately require the positing of causal factors besides sin in order to generate a sufficient explanation of the phenomenon of non-belief.

In her recent book Atonement, Eleonore Stump objects to the Anselmian theory of atonement, claiming it is not consistent with God's love. I argue that her objection mischaracterizes Anselmian theories. First, Stump equivocates on the concept of forgiveness, conflating personal forgiveness with divine pardon, and second, Stump misrepresents the God of Anselm as unwilling to reconcile with sinners prior to receiving satisfaction. I suggest that Stump's real objection should be to the Anselmian view of divine justice as retributive, not to his conception of divine love. I suggest a model of an all-loving God acting as a retributive judge.

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 the nature of Christian faith in God. We also briefly examine three normative issues Bishop's views present.

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 creation myths of Candomblé, emphasizing references to the tradition's Supreme Being and, analysing these myths, I argue that Candomblé's Supreme Being, as depicted in these narratives, amounts to a limited god. This portrayal accounts for the absence of a problem of evil within the tradition. It suggests the moral ambivalence of Candomblé's Supreme Being and other high deities, as well as the world itself. This exploration sheds light on a lesser-explored tradition and its unique approach to philosophical dilemmas, distinct from the predominantly theistic framework of most philosophy of religion, and evinces that philosophizing through immersion in myths should involve appreciating the complexities and richness inherent in these forms of life, free from the imposition of external assumptions or biases.

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, and (ii) demands for an explanation of the whole universe can in any case be satisfying via the postulation of a self-explaining universe. I agree with Leidenhag that panpsychism is potentially a helpful way for Christians to think about the relationship between God and the universe, while disagreeing concerning how well suited process theism is to making sense of such a relationship. Finally, in terms of eco-philosophy, I agree with Leidenhag that panpsychism is conducive to a healthier relationship between humans and the natural world, while expressing reservations that a specifically Christian form of panpsychist eco-philosophy is preferable.