It is often argued that religious experience should enjoy the epistemic presumption of innocence (EPI), analogous to the deliverances of perception, memory and other non-inferential basic beliefs. However, many religious belief systems incompatible with theism (theistic-unfriendly in my terminology) would also count as justified on this presumption. Awareness of the vast number of theistic-unfriendly beliefs that are epistemically on a par with theism can significantly undermine confidence in the latter. To counter this challenge, defenders of theism could resort to two core naturalistic claims: that the physical realm is causally closed, and that mental states supervene on physical states. Given naturalism, supernatural agents, including God, are not able to produce humans’ religious experience and beliefs by direct interventions. However, a theistic God could take an alternative route to provide people elected by Him with true religious beliefs through causal processes prearranged at the moment of creation of the physical world. By contrast, low-ranking spirits and polytheistic deities cannot act in this way, either because they do not participate in the process of creation or, if they do, because they lack full control over the initial conditions of the universe. It follows that theistic-unfriendly beliefs arise by chance rather than through reliable truth-aimed belief-producing processes. Under naturalism, therefore, such beliefs cannot be justified, even if, by unlikely coincidence, they are true. This naturalistic argument for theism serves to boost confidence in theistic belief by narrowing the range of rationally available religious options.

This article takes up a philosophical examination of the Latter-day Saint theological conception of the eternal significance of sex. I first argue that the straightforward way of interpreting the theological claims about the eternal significance of sex appear to be incoherent. The main worry has to do with certain commitments Latter-day Saints take up with respect to the nature of disembodied spirits. Disembodied spirits don’t have bodies. As such they lack the characteristic features of embodied things. And sex is as bodily a feature as any we confront in the course of our lives. I will argue that these conceptual obstacles can be overcome by attending to distinctive aspects of the Latter-day Saint conception of divine creation. Doing so offers an interesting alternative way of conceptualizing the essences of premortal (disembodied) spirits. In particular, it motivates explicating their essences in terms of what Plantinga calls world-indexed properties. With the explication in hand, I show that not only are charges of incoherence avoided, but the new perspective gives a unified account of a variety of apparently disparate aspects of Latter-day Saint theology.

Published in 1892, St. George Jackson Mivart’s remarkably original article ‘Happiness in Hell’ was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum almost immediately. In his article, Mivart proposed a solution to the problem of hell whose core contention is that hell is horrible only from a heavenly point of view. From a this-worldly point of view, by contrast, hell is a place of breathtaking felicity. In my opinion, this proposal has some striking merits, at least if it is updated and developed in certain respects. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct it, to reassess it, and to put it back on the table of eschatological ideas.

Human beings are a highly social species, and there are neural systems that have a role in enabling human beings to function as the social animals they are. They connect people into smaller or larger social groups; and at least some of these groups have a unity that lets the united human beings function as one. That this is so has implications for an array of philosophical and theological issues, including the notion of a people, the concomitant notions of a people’s communal guilt and communal shame, the notion of the church as the body of Christ, the understanding of human perfection as a likeness to a triune God, and many other such issues. What is required to elucidate these issues is a metaphysics that can explain the nature of a united something-or-other that includes human persons as constituents. This article explores these issues and outlines the nature of the needed metaphysics.

The editors of the special issue on panpsychism and pan(en)theism introduce the issue. This includes brief summaries of each of the articles.

Consider a simple argument that worshipping God is wrong. This world is not a nice place. Not only do humans persecute and inflict other evils on each other, but millions of people suffer and die every year from preventable poverty-related causes, and it seems that few, if any, deserve their plights. It is unclear that we should want to be associated with, never mind worship, a being with the capacity to make the world a much better place but whose beneficence (or knowledge) permits things to go on in the ways that they do. At first blush, contempt is a more fitting response to God than worship. But, assuming God exists, perhaps we have reason to accept, if not worship, him in any case. Humans are comparably limited. We do evil unto each other, and, insofar as millions of deaths are preventable, our failure to prevent them is a failure of humans as well as of God. If we could (and should) have saved many lives and have not, our moral failings present us with our own, human, problem of evil and suffering. So, if we should reject God because so many people suffer, then we should reject ourselves when we could avoid evil and help others too. However, this article argues that we have practical, moral, and epistemic reasons to accept rather than reject ourselves, and similarly we have reasons to accept God. And if we have reason to accept God, then we have some reason to worship God. Worship is a way of acknowledging our own limitations and can help us survive, flourish, and help others in the face of the problems of human evil and suffering.

With development understood as improving change, and working at the macroscale or species level, I sketch the conceptual background for a new, developmental form of scepticism. Then I use developmental scepticism to critique a proposition that functions as a presupposition of the popular contemporary rejection of unconventional metaphysical propositions (MUPs) and specifically of panpsychism: namely, that we have experienced enough relevant development as a species to make it reasonable for the community of enquiry to treat such ideas as obviously false. Finally, I briefly suggest a possible step beyond developmental scepticism toward a more general orientation in enquiry which might naturally follow such scepticism once its motivating ideas are absorbed.

Panentheists advocate for a unique and rival view of God and his relationship to the cosmos. A common panentheistic slogan says the cosmos is in God, but God is more than the cosmos. God is simultaneously transcendent and immanent. However, it’s unclear how we should interpret this slogan. Focusing on key passages in the Bhagavad-Gīta, I propose three desiderata that a minimal account of the panentheist’s God-world relation must adhere to and argue that the relation of metaphysical grounding meets all three. On my view, panentheism is the view that God’s existence grounds the existence of the cosmos. I develop this view in opposition to rival accounts and argue that we can plausibly demarcate panentheism from traditional theism in terms of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

Many traditional theists maintain that God is the ultimate explanation of the universe, for why anything exists at all. For the traditional theist, only a being who is fundamental and transcendent can provide an ultimate ground and explanation of the universe. This requirement that God transcend the universe in order to ultimately explain it poses a challenge for pantheism, the view that God is numerically identical with the universe. If God is identical with the universe, and God is supposed to be the ultimate explanation of the universe, the result is an instance of circular explanation. And circular explanations are allegedly illegitimate. In this article, I develop two explanatory models in an attempt to show that pantheism is consistent with non-circular explanations of the universe. All else being equal, I argue that pantheism is not explanatorily deficient in comparison to traditional theism.

Theodicies attempt to explain why evil and suffering might exist in a world governed by an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God. Some theodicies focus on pointing out benefits that suffering seems necessary for, though in many cases the benefits are primarily for someone other than the sufferer. Some philosophers find it morally objectionable for God to let one person suffer in order to benefit someone else, and this is thought to be a weakness of some otherwise promising theodicies. I discuss two moral concerns in this context: a mere-means-to-an-end concern and a concern about horrendous evils remaining undefeated. I argue that incorporating a doctrine of reincarnation may help some theodicies resolve both of these moral concerns, giving theodicists reason to turn towards such doctrines.

This article explores the implications of non-ideal theorising for the problem of evil. The critique of ideal theory – which has gained increased attention in several philosophical sub-disciplines during recent years – states that analytic philosophers tend to rely on overly idealised conditions, to the point of being completely unrealistic, in their theorising. To investigate if this charge holds merit in the philosophy of religion, I apply a non-ideal methodology to one traditional area of philosophy of religion – the problem of evil. Here, Richard Swinburne’s theodicy constitutes a sample of how the problem of evil is typically approached in mainstream philosophy of religion. Additionally, Swinburne’s Principle of Credulity will, in relation to his theodicy, be interrogated as well. Applying non-ideal theorising, I find that Swinburne’s theorisation relies on idealised cases and presupposes ideal conditions, while overlooking non-ideal realities. Turning to epistemic injustice and epistemology of ignorance, I find that Swinburne assumes ideal epistemological conditions in both inter-agent communication (testimony), and in collective cognition. After examining the implications of such idealisations, I find that Swinburne’s idealisations abstract away non-ideal factors which are relevant for his theories, concluding that Swinburne displays tendencies typical of ideal theorising.

In recent years, the question of naturalism in the study of religions has been increasingly debated. Primarily, these discussions converge in the widely held view that naturalism is the only way for religious studies as an academic enterprise to exclude supernaturalist assumptions from its methodology. While I fully agree with this view, I argue that naturalism is usually formulated with the help of metaphysical assumptions, which are problematically embodied in the location problem, that is, the problem of how to locate certain phenomena, such as meanings and values, in the order of nature. By unfolding the dynamic between the elements of the location problem, I show that the kind of naturalism based on Wittgenstein’s thought prevents the location problem from arising and can serve as a balanced version of naturalism for use in the study of religion. While metaphysical naturalism often leads to dilemmas, within Wittgenstein’s kind of naturalism, it seems possible both to maintain anti-supernaturalism in the study of religion and to resist the metaphysical temptations hidden in our assumptions about language. These two features make Wittgenstein’s naturalism truly methodological.

This articles reimagines Anselm’s claim that God is ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’ [Hereafter: ‘THAT’]. The article first explores a variety of Anselm-inspired of what THAT is like, and how THAT relates to whatever (if anything) is not-THAT (hereafter: ‘THIS’). THAT could be Anselm’s creator God, a polytheist pantheon, or a single undifferentiated One/Absolute/Brahman. THIS could be a single possible world or a pluriverse containing many different real possible worlds. The article defends a principle of cosmic humility. It argues that, to counter our natural tendency to over-estimate our own importance, we should pay particular attention to non-human-centred, non-anthropomorphic interpretations of THAT. Humility favours plenitude about worlds and plenitude about creatures. God (or THAT) will create many worlds that (together) contain all valuable creatures. Humility also suggests that, within this optimal pluriverse, we should not expect to find ourselves inhabiting either a world that is cosmically special or a world where we are special. The final part of the article argues that, within contemporary philosophy of mind, this commitment to cosmic humility supports panpsychism over its rivals – especially dualism and materialism. If THAT did create THIS, then we are (probably) insignificant creatures living in a panpsychist world. The article concludes with some speculations on how thinking about THAT and THIS might also influence the content of panpsychism as well as the case for panpsychism.

Perry Hendricks (2025) argues that theism is not only compatible with what he calls ‘pointless atheism’ (instances of non-resistant non-belief that do not serve a greater good) but also makes it expected. His case combines the Responsibility Objection (RO) – the view that God permits non-resistant non-belief because it’s required for theists to bear responsibility for bringing others into relationship with God – with a William Hasker-inspired argument concerning motivation and rationality. Hendricks’s core argument can be expressed in two distinct yet interrelated ways: a ‘motivation’ formulation and a ‘rationality’ formulation. I examine each in turn. I argue that, even granting (RO) and the rest of Hendricks’s assumptions, each formulation fails. (RO), together with a few further assumptions to which Hendricks also seems committed, leads to conclusions that undermine rather than support his argument. Thus, we have at least as much reason to reject as to accept his conclusion, and without further clarification and support, his case remains incomplete.

Being deeply embedded in the mythological framework of old-school Christian angelology, the theodicy presented in this article outlines a thoroughgoing and unexpectedly simple solution to the problem of evil. Unlike other Satan-oriented theodicies, whose central idea is that natural evil is reducible to moral evil by taking the malevolent actions of demons into consideration, it accounts for both natural and moral evil in perfectly familiar deal-making terms. Of particular interest is that it makes no appeal to the overriding importance of free will nor to the inscrutability of God’s ways. Instead it envisions a primordial agreement on which everything depends. If it stands up to scrutiny, it offers an intriguing explanation for why God permits such an awful lot of badness.

I begin with the intuition that there is something wrong with praying for the past, for example, praying for a basketball team to win after the game has ended. My aim is to find a philosophical explanation for why this is wrong. I explore three explanations for the wrongness in praying for the past, reject the first two, and offer a third. The first is based on the idea that prayer for the past is inefficacious. This assumption turns out to be mistaken. The second relies on religious considerations; I reject this explanation since it is too narrow and does not explain the initial intuition. I then argue that prayer for past events is wrong in virtue of being an unwarranted response, similar to how emotions can be unwarranted. I use concepts from the philosophy of fittingness to articulate my explanation.

The philosophical ‘problem of evil’ goes back at least as far as Epicurus and has remained a powerful argument against the existence of God in contemporary philosophy. The argument is rooted in apparent contradictions between God’s divine attributes and various conditions of human existence. But these contradictions arise only given certain assumptions of what we should expect both God and the world to be like given God’s existence. In this article, I argue that we can utilise the work of the twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil to craft a coherent metaphysical picture of God, creation, and suffering that rejects these common assumptions. Further, I contend that this picture very plausibly follows from commonly accepted tenets of traditional monotheism. Given this, I argue that this Weil-inspired framework provides serious reasons for reframing the problem of evil and its corresponding theodicies by presenting a radically different view of how God must relate to creation. Yet, this picture does not necessarily vindicate the theist. I argue that this picture may leave us with a new question about creation in the face of evil. Namely, is it possible to understand God’s initial creative act as Weil describes it – as an act of love?

At least some people want to be loved simply for being the particular individuals they are, as distinct from any properties they might possess. However, the most prominent theories in contemporary philosophical work on love are framed so as to exclude that possibility. In this article, I argue that Christians have the resources to say that one can be loved for oneself if they appeal to the love God has for his creatures in making them from nothing. This article comprises four sections. In the first two sections, I introduce and characterize the desire to be loved for oneself, distinguishing the relevant desideratum from other, similar phenomena. In the third section, I note that the appraisal and bestowal views exclude the possibility that one could be loved for oneself in the relevant sense and note some other possible, initial objections. Finally, in the fourth section, I attempt to show one way in which God can be said to love his creatures in creating them – despite the fact that they do not exist before their own creation. I do so by attempting to show that, plausibly, there is a sense in which, if God engages in the creative act for its own sake and the creature itself is that act seen under a certain aspect, God can plausibly be said to create the creature for its own sake – and so, plausibly, to create it in love.

Some philosophers and theologians argue that if God will save everyone, then earthly life is pointless. No matter how good earthly life is, heaven would be far better. So we would have been better off if God had started us off in heaven. I present and defend two objections to this argument. First, time on earth does not result in a deduction from time in heaven. Pick whatever amount of time you might wish to spend in heaven. You will spend that much time in heaven whether you are on earth first or not. Second, given origin essentialism, we could not start off in heaven rather than earth. Our very existence depends on our earthly origins.

Panpsychists commonly hang onto the ‘realist’ assumption that our world with its structures has an observer-independent, often spatial element to it, even while they claim that those structures are realized by the experiences of subjects. I argue that this assumption is the ‘worm in the apple’ that lurks behind two of panpsychism’s major problems: the subject (de)combination problem and what I call the ‘inner-outer gap problem’. Abandoning this assumption sidesteps those problems, but commits panpsychism to anti-realism.