In her recent book The Image of God: The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Mourning (2022), Eleonore Stump takes up a question she thinks has been unduly neglected by contemporary philosophers of religion: Is the world as good as it would have been had original sin, and all subsequent sin and suffering, not occurred? Stump contends that if we do not answer this question in the affirmative, we are left with a problem – a picture of a world which is a disappointment to God; and this picture could in turn undermine belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good Creator. In response to this problem, Stump sets out to defend the felix culpa view, according to which the world is even better with the Fall than it would have been without. However, I argue in this article that the felix culpa view has unacceptable consequences regarding God’s desires and will, that we can live with the problem of mourning unresolved, and that we need not affirm the felix culpa view to resolve the problem of mourning anyway.

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 for a dialectical conception of the infinite omnipotence of God. In contrast to traditional notions of the infinite as the opposite of the finite, Schelling claims that God is only truly infinite if also embodied in the finite, an embodiment enacted through the human freedom to do evil. To explore Schelling's project, I draw parallels between his account of God's omnipotence and Hegel's ‘good infinite’ and situate Schelling's thesis within Mackie's discussion of the problem of evil in ‘Evil and Omnipotence’.

A brief introduction to this special issue on theme of experimental philosophy of religion—the project of taking the tools and resources of the human sciences and bringing them to bear on important issues within philosophy of religion, toward philosophical ends.

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 and the non-intentionalist model of self-deception. The first proposed model views non-belief as intentional suppression of one's implicit knowledge of God. It is less feasible psychologically but has a good theological fit with Paul's and Calvin's versions of the thesis. This model also helps the argument for the culpability of non-belief. The second model views suppression as a process of subconscious motivated reasoning driven by a desire to avoid an uncomfortable truth. It fits Pascal's view that one's desire for or against God determines whether one sees general revelation as providing sufficient evidence for God. There is some empirical and anecdotal evidence for both models, but obvious cases of non-resistant non-belief present a major problem for the suppression thesis. Also, it is hard to see what might motivate anyone to deceive oneself about God's existence.

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 relationship between faith and religious actions; (2) accounting for the maxim of the relationship between faith and moral virtues; (3) showing how the thesis of the priority of faith over knowledge can be the case; (4) providing a basis for the axiom of the gradability of faith; and (5) solving the dilemma of faith as a gift or an achievement. Then I make my case and develop a model of faith that satisfies all five desiderata. Following the accounts in the literature that describes faith as a kind of know-how, the central idea of my suggestion is that religious faith is partly constituted by intellectual, practical, and moral skills.

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 about someone else, such as the fact that someone else has carried out an action. This article examines the Catholic concept of merit transfer, first distinguishing it from other contemporary qualifications to the claim that a desert basis must be something about the deserving person. Then the article draws on Thomas Aquinas's explanation of the central role of relationship and love in merit and how it justifies merit transfer to address several objections made by modern scholars to such transfers. After addressing these objections, the article argues that literal understandings of merit transfer are preferable to metaphorical ones, and lastly some implications of merit transfer for Christian theology and the theory of desert more broadly are briefly discussed.

In this paper, I bring together several strands of criticism of experimental philosophy and draw out certain lessons for the nascent field of experimental philosophy of religion (XPoR). I argue that the negative/positive distinction conflates several underlying questions that conceptually come apart, thus undermining the framework such that XPoR need not try to accommodate the framework. I then argue that for certain topics of study in XPoR, the folk may actually be treated as a kind of ‘expert’ class, thus defending the utility of gauging folk beliefs on those issues. Lastly, I offer some reflections on the etic/emic distinction as it relates to the philosopher/folk divide with respect to topics in XPoR.

In the Islamic tradition, there’s a long standing controversy over the relationship between God’s attributes and His essence, giving rise to diverse theories with significant theological implications. In one respect, these views are broadly categorizable into three: A1, the doctrine of divine complexity (DDC), A2, the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), and B, the doctrine of divine anonymity (DDA). The entry focuses on DDS, specifically explaining the Avicennian version, and defends it against some objections from some recent DDC proponents.

The cosmological argument for the existence of God seems to have significant intuitive resonance. According to a familiar version of the cosmological argument, there must be some explanation for why the universe exists, and God provides the explanation. This argument seems to depend on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), according to which, if something exists, there must be an explanation for why it exists. As we detail, recent evidence indicates that people presuppose something like the PSR in their explanatory outlook. However, the other key part of the cosmological argument is that God is supposed to be self-explanatory – God’s existence is necessary. We examine this empirically and find that people do not generally think that the existence of God is necessary in the sense relevant for the cosmological argument.

Say theism is the view that an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly loving, and perfectly good being exists. And say pointless atheism occurs just in case there’s an atheist who isn’t resistant to belief in God, and no greater good comes about on account of this atheist’s non-belief. In this article, I show that if two prominent views about evil and divine hiddenness are accepted, theism is compatible with pointless atheism – a result hitherto unnoticed. Furthermore, not only is theism compatible with pointless atheism, it entails pointless atheism. This is significant because many objections to the argument from divine hiddenness have tried to show that all instances of non-resistant atheism are required for a greater good. But if I’m right, given theism, there need not be a point to non-resistant atheism. Indeed, we should expect there to be pointless atheism.

There are mainly two types of questions asked about religious language: those about identity (e.g., what is a religious language?) and those about meaning (e.g., what do its sentences say?). Most philosophers focus on the latter because while they disagree about meaning, they agree that some sentences are religious and that our understanding of them does not depend on us knowing what makes them religious. In this article, I provide two reasons why questions about identity should receive more attention. First, theories of identity and theories of meaning share a two-way relationship where the characteristics of one influence those of the other, and so overlooking identity overlooks important characteristics of meaning. Second, the study of religious language has been shaped by this relationship for some time and being aware of it improves our understanding of conventional trends and contemporary debates. If successful, this article will motivate philosophers to reconsider the role of identity in research and to dedicate more effort to its study.

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 is cross-cultural insofar as personal theists across various religious traditions can use it. Thus, this article defends personal theism in a manner that can bring Western and non-Western theists into closer dialogue regarding the topic of God's personhood.

Augustinian accounts of ‘primal sin’ face a dilemma: either ‘Lucifer’s’ fall is arbitrary, or it results from God creating a flawed creature. Augustine and others hold that an omnipotent God faces unavoidable limits in creating creatures. In particular, creatures cannot enjoy God’s own first-person awareness of God’s goods, but must experience them second-personally. The resulting qualitative phenomenological difference between (1) the first-person awareness Lucifer had of the goods of his own being, and (2) his second-person awareness of the goods of God means that self-regarding goods would ‘light up’ for Lucifer very differently than other-regarding goods. This opens a psychologically resonant and metaphysically potent account of how the pre-Fall Lucifer could have faced a genuine value conflict – a conflict for which God is not culpable – in which Lucifer might come to love the goods presented first-personally (his own) over the goods presented second-personally (God’s).

The problem of evil is an ideal topic for experimental philosophy. Suffering – which is at the heart of most prominent formulations of the problem of evil – is a universal human experience and has been the topic of careful reflection for millennia. However, interpretations of suffering and how it bears on the existence of God are tremendously diverse and nuanced. Why does suffering push some people toward atheism while pushing others toward deeper faith? What cultural, psychological, or sociological differences account for this diversity of responses? And, importantly, what light might this diversity of responses shed on the problem of evil and how it has been formulated by philosophers in recent years? The aim of this article is to highlight how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to the problem of evil. In the first section, we review some recent work in this area and describe the current state of this emergent body of literature. In the second section, we review the broader and more recent theoretical developments on the problem of evil. In the final section, we outline some potential areas of future empirical research that we see as especially promising given those developments.

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 and divine determinism. The article delves into this tension as it appears from the Quran and prevailing standpoints in Islamic theology. I propose that the tension between freedom of action and divine determinism resists a satisfactory reconciliation, which ultimately affects the plausibility of the idea of evil as self-inflicted. I further propose that embracing the contradictions arising from verses expressing freedom and responsibility, on the one hand, and those indicating divine determinism, on the other, could be a viable approach for the theologian.

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 analytic philosophers might be drawn to (re)examining what role, if any, God might play in life's meaning. But the focus tends to be on ‘God’ as understood in the Abrahamic faiths. Examining meaning in the light of another concept of God, familiar to billions of individuals in various Eastern religions and intellectual traditions, might offer useful insights. I have two principle aims in this article. First, I describe an ancient Indian concept of ‘God’, showing how it radically differs from the concept of God currently under examination by philosophers of meaning. Second, I offer a novel case for why and how this concept of ‘God’ could fruitfully contribute to analytic discussions on God's possible role in life's meaning.

A prominent challenge to analytic theology charges that its methodology leads to idolatry. This article explores a response to this challenge that draws upon the Eastern Orthodox apophatic tradition. Apophatic approaches, which emphasize how little we can truthfully say or know about God, are not exclusive to Orthodox Christianity. But these views take a unique form within the tradition insofar as they accord a prominent role to the distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies. The divine essence is what it is to be God, what God is as such, what God is at God’s core. In contrast, the divine energies are properties, modes, or activities of God not included in the divine essence but intimately related to it. Proponents of the distinction have claimed that it can help theorists to navigate the Christian tradition’s cataphatic and apophatic commitments, which don’t always sit comfortably together. This article argues that there are ways of crafting the essence/energy distinction that can also help to address the ‘Idolatry Argument’ against analytic theology.

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 undefended empirical commitments as to the distribution of belief in God. This article synthesizes results from psychology, anthropology, and the cognitive science of religion to show that the distribution of belief in God is much more messy and much more philosophically interesting than is currently appreciated. I then derive some implications for how one might reconceive the hiddenness debate in light of these findings.

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. The first problem is the ‘inevitability’ of sinning. Here, the defender is forced either to accept a compatibilist analysis of responsibility or provide a libertarian-friendly analysis of ‘inevitability’. The latter option contradicts the Augustinian contention that it is impossible for sinners to lead a life of virtue and holiness. The second problem has to do with the mechanics of the cognitive effects of sin. The cognitive effects of original sin make it very difficult or inevitable for humans to perform meritorious actions and very easy or inevitable for them to commit sinful actions. If the sinner's degree of control over her sinful actions is so low, it seems that she does not deserve divine blame and punishment for failing to commit meritorious actions. Finally, we raised some problems regarding the fate of the non-culpable sinners.

Reflective thinking often predicts less belief in God or less religiosity – so-called analytic atheism. However, those correlations involve limitations: widely used tests of reflection confound reflection with ancillary abilities such as numeracy; some studies do not detect analytic atheism in every country; experimentally encouraging reflection makes some non-believers more open to believing in God; and one of the most common online research participant pools seems to produce lower data quality. So analytic atheism may be less than universal or partially explained by confounding factors. To test this, we developed better measures, controlled for more confounds, and employed more recruitment methods. All four studies detected signs of analytic atheism above and beyond confounds (N > 70,000 people from five of six continental regions). We also discovered analytic apostasy: the better a person performed on reflection tests, the greater their odds of losing their religion since childhood – even when controlling for confounds. Analytic apostasy even seemed to explain analytic atheism: apostates were more reflective than others and analytic atheism was undetected after excluding apostates. Religious conversion was rare and unrelated to reflection, suggesting reflection’s relationships to conversion and deconversion are asymmetric. Detected relationships were usually small, indicating reflective thinking is a reliable albeit marginal predictor of apostasy.