Does God have qualia, does He know the ‘what it is like’ character of experiences? The questions run deep into the metaphysics of God as they concern concepts that most traditional theists accept with regard to God: that He is personal, loving, omniscient, omnipotent, and created the world ex nihilo. Building upon these concepts, I present four arguments in favour of the existence of divine qualia. Positing divine qualia may seem incompatible with divine simplicity, a tenet of classical theism, and the problem of emotions unworthy of God also may arise. I argue that the difficulties regarding simplicity do not stem from the existence of divine qualia per se but are related to difficulties already established in relation to simplicity. As for emotions unworthy of God, I try to show how a careful distinction between personal perspectives can offer a solution.

What we do with the dead remains a universal issue because, as the major premise of that classic syllogism reminds us, all humans are mortal (even Socrates!). Since our bodies age, wither and expire, corpse disposal is a grave matter (excuse the pun) for many worldviews. From aquamation to human space junk, the creative options for disposing of bodies continue to expand. This article explores body disposal choices and describes spiritually appropriate burial methods for the pantheist, who believes that the world is God.

Traditional philosophy of religion has been put under pressure to reform from different theoretical camps in the last few decades. One of the most salient charges is that the focus on belief as the mark of religion fails to capture a wide variety of religious phenomena and practices, particularly those outside of the Abrahamitic traditions. As a response to this challenge, this article proposes and develops the notion of religious alief as an additional analytical tool to conceptualize religious phenomena that elude characterization in terms of belief. This article first introduces religious aliefs as largely automatic, habitual mental states that influence behavior, feelings, and attitudes, even when a person does not hold an overt or tacit belief in the supernatural content involved. Subsequently, this article argues that religious phenomena such as apotropaic rituals, purification rituals, spontaneous prayer in crisis, jinx (and other folk-religious notions), certain taboos, and the recently coined Somethingism can be explained in terms of religious aliefs.

In this paper, I draw on feminist resources to argue that Christian analytic philosophers of religion have good reason not only to focus more thoroughly on the topic of love in their treatments of the divine nature but also to give it a substantial and transformative role in the divine nature. The way forward, I propose, involves three moves: (1) designate a place for love in the divine nature, (2) attend to feminist insights on love when doing so, and (3) consider how these interventions transform our understanding of God overall. I then begin this work. Starting with the first task, I consider two ways we might conceptualize love within the divine nature. On the first (which I call ‘the mutually conditioning approach’), love is assigned equal shaping power and, on the second (which I call ‘the orienting trait approach’), love is given enlarged shaping power in the divine nature. In comparing the two, I conclude that both have the good outcome of resulting in a transformed view of God. However, though the second option is more radical and metaphysically complex, we have good reason to prefer it to the first both from philosophical reflection on love’s nature and for its coherence with the Christian tradition. After clarifying how my argument relates to divine simplicity, I begin working towards accomplishing the second and third tasks by considering how the orienting trait approach applies to the topic of divine violence.

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.

This is a brief introduction to a special issue highlighting the relevance of philosophy of science to many core topics in theology and philosophy of religion. Several points of intersection between knowledge production in the sciences and knowledge production in philosophy and theology are discussed.

Comparative scholarship on David Hume and Charles Darwin narrowly focuses on the irreligious implications of their thought for intelligent design metaphysics. I frame their contributions to a perennial system of godless naturalism, exposited in antiquity by Epicurean philosophy, which is not reducible to intellectual influence but stems from shared commitments to the naturalist horizon of inquiry itself. From Epicurus and Lucretius to Hume and Darwin, this system is rediscovered and progressively refined, advancing at each stage a materialist metaphysics and evolutionary anthropology of morals that, together, obviate the explanatory need for and practical value of God in nature and human conduct.

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.

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.

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?

James Dominic argues in response to a previous article by me that the view according to which God is the formal cause of creatures is unorthodox and ultimately incoherent. This is because it involves either making God a part of creatures, or dividing God into finite parts, both of which, he claims, lead to contradictions with traditional Christian claims. However, Rooney both misunderstands central parts of my presentation, and fails to make his case.