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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article is part of Religious Studies’ new initiative to publish a series of interviews with distinguished philosophers of religion. Each interview explores the personal and academic background of the interviewee and discusses their core philosophical views. The aim is to inspire students and scholars and to provide an overview of some of the most important works developed by contemporary philosophers of religion. In this interview, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin interviews Graham Oppy, covering topics such as his entry into philosophy, his views on naturalism and atheism, and why there is no successful argument for or against the existence of God, as well as his advice for those interested in pursuing a career in professional academic philosophy.