Sceptical theism is commonly deployed as a response to evidential arguments from evil by challenging our entitlement to infer, from the evils we observe, what God would or would not be likely to permit. Standard fine-tuning arguments, however, appear to require precisely the sort of expectation-guided reasoning that sceptical theism places under pressure: namely, the claim that a life-permitting universe is not too improbable given theism. Recent discussion has sharpened this tension: Donahue argues that sceptical-theist considerations undercut standard fine-tuning arguments, while Boyce argues that sceptical theists can nevertheless endorse a suitably revised version. I argue that Boyce’s proposal is philosophically important but dialectically costly. Boyce does not replace generic theism with a more specific hypothesis; rather, he keeps generic theism as the target hypothesis while allowing historically mediated background information, D, to generate the relevant theistic expectations. My objection is that once D is admitted for that positive purpose, it cannot be quarantined from adverse evidential assessment. The result is not merely that the problem of evil is formally reopened. Rather, enriched versions of evil, suffering, and divine hiddenness become serious enough to require independent theistic response. Boyce’s strategy therefore preserves coherence only by narrowing sceptical theism’s traditional broad anti-evil role.

This paper explores the mechanism and metaphysics of aesthetic experience according to the 10th–11th-century Sanskrit nondual Pratyabhijñā Śaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta. It contributes to the global history of aesthetics by showing how the same mechanism, apoha (exclusion), accounts for both art appreciation and artistic creation in Abhinavagupta’s work. Examining the technical elements of this mechanism from Abhinavagupta’s metaphysical works sheds notable light on the nature of commonization (sādhāraṇī+√kṛ/bhū), a key element of Abhinavagupta’s aesthetic theory. This paper also contributes to cross-cultural aesthetic theorizing by drawing on C. Thi Nguyen’s work on agency as an artistic medium to provide a framework for contemporary philosophers of aesthetics to approach Abhinavagupta’s theory.

This paper argues for the non-existence of God conceived as a perfectly just Supreme Lawgiver who holds all rational agents accountable for commands attributed through revelation. Unlike divine hiddenness arguments that appeal to God’s love, this argument examines the procedural requirements of perfect justice: just accountability requires that agents recognise the existence of the authority to which they are subject. If God justly holds all blameless, non-resistant agents accountable to revealed commands, such agents must believe they have adequate evidence that the Commander exists. Yet many conscientious agents, including canonised saints and sincere seekers, report lacking adequate evidence despite sustained, non-resistant effort. The resulting epistemic situation is incompatible with just accountability since no-one can be justly obligated to obey commands from an authority whose existence they cannot recognise. The argument concludes that no recognisably perfectly just Supreme Lawgiver exists who holds all accountable to revealed commands. The conclusion leaves open the possibility that a non-commanding deistic God exists, but argues that God as the revealed Commander whose justice is recognisably exercised does not exist. Abrahamic conceptions of revealed divine legislation, moral obligation, punishment, and forgiveness cannot be grounded in recognisably just divine authority.

In The Image of God (2022), Eleonore Stump seeks to address a residual problem that remains even after a successful theodicy, namely the problem of mourning. The problem of mourning concerns the appropriateness of certain evaluative responses (such as grief or disappointment) with respect to the world that contains suffering. To answer this problem, Stump seeks to demonstrate how lives with suffering are maximally great precisely because they contain suffering: some person S’s most glorious self is to be located in her participating in the sufferings of Christ and thereby magnifying God’s love in herself. This paper identifies a problem with Eleonore Stump’s solution to the problem of mourning, namely valorisation: Stump’s solution entails that there is a type of suffering that is constitutive of value and therefore a reason-giving end in it itself. Valorisation is something we should avoid. I therefore present a different solution to the problem of mourning that is based on the incommensurability of S’s best lives. After this I address one final issue – the problem of preference – that is in the neighbourhood of Stump’s problem of mourning. I argue that if S’s best lives are incommensurate, we can reject the preference problem as incoherent.

This paper explores the implications of Jīva Gosvāmī’s (sixteenth century) Bhedābheda Vedānta for the contemporary philosophical debate on consciousness, thereby contributing to the broader and growing interest in the insights that Indian traditions may bring to current discussions in the philosophy of mind. More specifically, I develop here a metaphysical, coarse-grained partial reconstruction of Jīva’s thought, arguing that it can be interpreted as a distinctive form of priority cosmopsychism, which I term śakti-based Vedānta cosmopsychism. Needless to say, this involves both a terminological and a taxonomical task, as I seek to clarify how key aspects of Jīva’s thought can be articulated through the conceptual framework and vocabulary of contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In the final part of the paper, I turn to a more fine-grained analysis, examining the implications of śakti-based Vedānta cosmopsychism for central issues in the philosophy of consciousness, including the causal exclusion problem and the explanatory gap problem, here framed as the individuation problem. I also address some few objections, among them a cosmopsychist formulation of the Vedāntic problem of imperfection.

A non-identity theodicy is any attempt to explain why an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and all-loving God might cause or permit the pain and suffering of his creatures that makes use of one or more claims about the identity conditions of those creatures. Most non-identity theodicies make use of one identity thesis in particular: origin essentialism, the thesis that the particular circumstances in which a person first comes into existence are essential to that person. In this paper, I argue that, despite some impressive upshots, origin essentialist non-identity theodicies fall short in at least two ways. I argue, furthermore, that both of these shortcomings can be rectified by building a non-identity theodicy on a stronger identity thesis: superessentialism, the thesis according to which every event in the life of a person, and not just the circumstances in which he or she first begins to exist, is essential to that person.

In a recent article, Michael Rea has argued that hope for universalism to be true is incompatible with a lack of belief in its truth, so that hopeful universalists should become believing universalists. His reasoning, in short, is that hope for universalism involves belief that universalism is good, and such belief conflicts with a recognition of what might be God’s perfect will – that universalism is false. In response, I defend hopeful universalism by arguing that at least in some cases, we should align our hopes (or what Eleonore Stump terms our ‘desires of the heart’) with what we take to be not God’s consequent will, but only God’s antecedent will – and it may be only God’s antecedent will, and not God’s consequent will, that universalism be true.

Traditional Christian theism maintains that God’s creative act is intentional and rational, which suggests God must have ideas or creative blueprints in mind when creating. We also have good reason to think that God’s creative act displays creativity or artistry. Tom Ward has recently argued that God gets his creative blueprints from knowing himself, a position he calls ‘Containment Exemplarism’. However, Paul Gould has recently argued that Containment Exemplarism undermines God’s status as paradigmatically artistic or creative. I argue that Gould’s argument is unsuccessful. As I will argue, the conception of creativity Gould employs as the basis for his argument, if understood permissively, can be reconciled to Containment Exemplarism. If understood in a manner to avoid this reconciliation, the conception of creativity Gould utilises is unduly restrictive and leads to unintuitive consequences. Containment Exemplarists would thus be entitled to reject it.

The idea that God must relate perfectly to our subjectivity is central to Linda Zagzebski’s work on omnisubjectivity. There is a hitherto undiagnosed tension, however, between different criteria one might use to judge what perfectly relating to our subjectivity consists in. God’s relationship to what Zagzebski calls ‘counteractuals’, individuals that do not exist but that could have, brings this tension into focus. On the one hand, if God does not know what the subjective experiences of counteractuals would be like, then God’s omnisubjectivity would appear to be unacceptably limited in scope. On the other hand, if God knows the subjectivity of actual creatures in the same way that God knows the subjectivity of counteractual creatures, then the motivation for omnisubjectivity ends up being undercut to a significant extent. This essay resolves this tension with a model that draws on interpersonal perception and divine introspection.

This paper argues for a revised approach to religious literacy that I call the interreligious attentiveness (IA) approach. I argue that this approach is better than those endorsed by other scholars in the academic study of religion – namely, knowledge, analysis, and skills approaches. I draw attention to the limitations of these approaches by virtue of three challenges: conversion (exclusivist groups), multiple religious belonging, and motivation. I then argue that the IA approach offers a more effective response to these challenges and should be regarded as the preferred approach.

I present a new ontological argument that rests on two evaluative theses, both inspired by Anselm’s Proslogion 2. First, for any F and Q, it is no better for there to be an F, given Q, than it is for there to be something perfect. Second, it is better for there to be something perfect if there is such a thing than if there isn’t. It follows that there is something perfect. I examine these premises, consider some parodies, and suggest possible atheistic replies.

Worldviews can serve as a resource or an obstacle when navigating intellectual and existential challenges encountered in life. My objective in this article is to identify and analyse the various ways in which people’s worldviews can shift, break down, evolve, or be strengthened by their life experiences. The proposed model of worldview formation identifies five outcomes that an encounter with what I refer to as existentially significant life events can have: worldview compartmentalisation, integration, revision, conversion, and confirmation. I will explain the content and function of these categories, provide concrete examples, and discuss their rationality.

Samuel Lebens argues that we may understand God’s act of creation by analogy with an author’s creation of fictional characters. I argue that, in the relevant sense of ‘fictional characters’, authors do not create such beings; rather, they invite us to imagine that such beings exist. I also argue that Lebens’s view would make authorship morally problematic in implausible ways. Along the way I briefly offer an account of the being of fictional characters and consider the relations between truth-in-fiction and truth.

This paper examines Ballard’s narrow pro-theistic argument for the claim that a world created by God would possess more bestowed worth than a world not created by God. I argue that not only could the world have just as much bestowed worth were it not created by God, but it could possibly have more.

This article reinterprets John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a contribution to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Milton offers a novel free-will defence, similar to Alvin Plantinga’s, grounded in original philosophical accounts of God, creation, freedom, and meta-ethics. Milton’s monist God creates worlds and creatures ex deo out of God-self. God – and everything else – is animated matter: one substance both material and spiritual. Milton rejects materialism, dualism, and idealism. Only animist monism delivers the libertarian freedom that Milton’s free-will defence demands. God has agent-causal libertarian freedom. God’s reasons don’t necessitate God’s choices. God freely chooses which worlds to create, which commands to issue, which hierarchies to institute. God radically transcends creatures – especially in relation to God’s meta-ethical power. Milton’s implicit meta-ethic, rejecting both voluntarism and intellectualism, resembles Robert Adams’s theist meta-ethic, where God’s nature determines excellence and God’s actual commands determine obligation. God also plays another meta-ethical role – instituting hierarchies where some creatures command others. Satan’s fall is epistemic and meta-ethical. He refuses to recognise God’s meta-ethical transcendence – to believe that God is God. Belief in God always requires a leap of faith beyond evidence and argument – because even perfect creatures cannot comprehend God’s transcendence. Creaturely epistemic freedom means there is no explanation why some angels fall while others stand.

Within the space of monotheistic options, trinitarian monotheism holds a puzzling place. It asserts that God is a single being who is, somehow, also three distinct persons. This form of monotheism has regularly been charged with being either inconsistent, unintelligible, or undermotivated – and possibly all three. While recent explorations of trinitarian monotheism have tended to rely on work in metaphysics, this paper turns to the philosophy of mind, showing that functionalist theories of mind prove to be surprisingly hospitable to trinitarian monotheism. This paper will address only the inconsistency and unintelligibility objections, showing that if role-functionalism (or something near enough) is both consistent and conceivable, then it is both consistent and conceivable that: God is a single being who is exactly three distinct persons because there is one primary divine person who interacts with exactly one system-sharing re-realisation of his own person-type.

Theists believe in a transcendent personal creator that is maximally perfect and intervenes in the creation. Deists believe in a transcendent personal creator that is maximally perfect and does not intervene in the creation. One alleged problem for deism is that its God cannot be maximally perfect. A God that intentionally and knowingly creates a world replete with suffering and anguish yet fails to intervene to ameliorate it is not morally perfect. Thus, theism is better off than deism. I argue that the God of theism is in just as much trouble vis-à-vis omnibenevolence as the God of deism. More specifically, theistic responses to why God answers some but not all petitionary prayers either (i) show theism’s God is less than morally perfect in the same way deism’s God is alleged to be, or (ii) are likewise open to deists.