If believing P will result in epistemically good outcomes, does this generate an epistemic reason to believe P, or just a pragmatic reason? Conceiving of such reasons as epistemic reasons seems to lead to absurdity, e.g. by allowing that someone can rationally hold beliefs that conflict with her assessment of her evidence's probative force. We explain how this and other intuitively unwelcome results can be avoided. We also suggest a positive case for conceiving of such reasons as epistemic reasons, namely, that they exhibit a form of interpersonal normative parity that's typical of epistemic reasons but not pragmatic reasons. We then link this discussion to religious belief, suggesting that there are sometimes indirect epistemic reasons for religious belief, and that certain characterizations of religious belief are instructive in thinking about how to take account of indirect epistemic reasons.

This article expounds and defends a compositional view of the incarnation, in which the eternal divine Son assumes a human body and soul as parts of himself. Objections to the view are answered, and it is argued that it is superior to other metaphysical accounts of the incarnation.

Substance dualism is on the move. Though the view remains unfashionable, a growing and diverse group of philosophers endorse it on impressive empirical, religious, and purely metaphysical grounds. In this note, I develop and evaluate one conceptual argument for substance dualism. According to that argument, we may derive a conclusion about our nature from the mere fact that we have the concept of a spirit. The argument is intriguing and fruitful; but I shall contend that it is, nonetheless, unsound.

Various contemporary philosophers, with Richard Swinburne prominent amongst them, have abandoned the traditional philosophical conception of God, according to which He is absolutely simple and eternal (as opposed to sempiternal). These contemporary philosophers conceive of Him as a ‘perfect person’, immaterial, but with human-type virtues in a superhuman degree. I argue that, whilst this development is probably mistaken, nevertheless the traditionalist critics perhaps sometimes exaggerate the differences between these conceptions – except on the crucial issue of God's eternity.

What is it to lead a Christian life? At least part of the answer, from St Paul to Thomas à Kempis, to makers of WWJD bracelets, is to imitate Christ. But while there is a lot of practical advice in the spiritual literature for imitating Christ, there is little by way of philosophical analysis of what it is to imitate Christ. In this article, I aim to fill this lacuna. I argue that the imitation of Christ, as conceived of by St Paul, Thomas à Kempis, and others, requires a radical transformation of character, which, in turn, I argue, based on considerations from developmental psychology, requires direct engagement with Christ. This conclusion may be surprising, since Christ does not seem to be directly present to contemporary believers in the same way as, say, a mother is directly present to her infant child. I deal with this objection, and conclude with some applications of this approach to the philosophy of Christian spirituality.

This article explores the beauty of religious exemplars – those special persons whose conduct and comportment marks their life out as one that exemplifies a religious life. Such exemplars are consistently described as beautiful, but it is not clear how or why. I suggest that we can make sense of the aesthetic aspect of religious exemplarity by adopting a ‘virtue-centric’ theory of beauty that understands the beautiful in terms of the expression or manifestation of virtues. Religious exemplars are those who have cultivated their virtues to an advanced degree and are beautiful for that reason. Attending to the beauty of religious exemplars can enrich exemplarist virtue theory, the aesthetics of character, and our understanding of the nature of a religious life.

In this article, I classify Richard Swinburne's apologetic strategy for theism, and raise eight structural problems with regard to his Bayesian approach. For example, is theism really a meaningful theory? Does it have any predictive power? If so, isn't theism a degenerating research programme? Furthermore, is it legitimate to immunize theism against empirical refutations? Is Swinburne's tactic of doing so successful?

Buddhist meditation seems to involve giving attention to one's thoughts and feelings, to one's ‘inner world’. In this article I explore what is involved in such talk of one's inner world, with special reference to Wittgenstein's claim that ‘the inner’ is a delusion. The article explores the nature of thoughts and feelings, and suggests that we cannot fully understand what is involved in meditation without some consideration of its ethical and religious context. I conclude with some reflections on how the pictures we naturally employ in thinking about meditation can lead us into a misleading metaphysical view of ‘the inner’.

Panmetaphoricism is the view that our speech about God can only be metaphorical. In this article, I do not assess the reasons that have been given for it; rather, I aim to understand what it says and, thereby, to gain a clearer view of the God it offers.

In ‘Undermining the case for evidential atheism’, Religious Studies, 48 (2012), 83–93, I challenged positive evidential atheism on the basis of some considerations from divine hiding, if God exists. Scott Aikin, in ‘Does divine hiding undermine Positive Evidential Atheism?’, Religious Studies, 52 (2016), 205–212, attempts to rehabilitate positive evidential atheism in the face of my challenge. I contend that his attempt fails, owing not only to his misunderstanding of my challenge from divine hiding but to also his defective positive case for atheism. The main defect is in his portrait of how evidence would count against God's reality. I explain how a serious epistemic problem for evidential atheism persists, relative to available relevant evidence, despite Aikin's proposed defence.

I rebut a ‘naturalist’ counter to Swinburne's Bayesian cosmological argument, based on the supposedly superior simplicity of naturalism.

Islamic ‘Traditionalists’ and ‘Rationalists’ have much in common. They agree that the Qur'an is divine revelation and acknowledge the authority of the Sunna, accept the value of logical reasoning and argumentation, recognizing the validity of basic logical principles and laws, and affirm that basic empirical and historical facts ought to be taken into consideration when interpreting the Qur'an. They disagree in that Rationalists accept but Traditionalists deny that human reason can discern objective moral truths independent of divine revelation. I present an argument for Rationalism that makes use of premises that are equally acceptable to Traditionalists and Rationalists alike.

God is thought to be eternal. Does this mean that he is timeless? Or is he, rather, omnitemporal? In this article we argue that God cannot be omnitemporal. Our starting point, which we take from Bernard Williams's article on the Makropulos Case, is the intuition that it is inappropriate for persons not to become bored after a sufficiently long sequence of time has passed. If Williams is right, then it follows that, if God were omnitemporal, he would suffer from boredom. But God is the greatest possible being and therefore cannot be bored. God, hence, is not omnitemporal. After the presentation of our argument, we address several objections by examining possible differences between human and divine persons.

Is it possible to prepare oneself to become a Christian? For Kierkegaard, there is no straightforward answer to this question, especially since such a transition depends upon a divine activity that is outside the realm of human control. Despite the challenge that this question poses, Kierkegaard's writings do provide us with a way to respond, and this response will be the subject matter of this article. Following an analysis of his position, this article will conclude that, although Kierkegaard recognizes that there are precedent ways of existing that are more conducive to becoming a Christian, it is not helpful to describe them as preparatory.

Theists such as Swinburne who seek to use natural theological arguments to move from observations about the world to conclusions about the existence (or probable existence) of God seem to need premises concerning what the world would have been like were Theism to have been false, viz. premises to the effect that it would have been (or would probably have been) different from the way we observe the actual world to be. Surely only that way could observations of the actual world be taken to be evidence that Theism is true.1 And surely for such arguments to be dialectically powerful in discussions with Atheists, these premises need to be acceptable to Theists and Atheists alike.2 In this article, I call these claims into question.

Martin Heidegger argues against the possibility of Christian philosophy in his Introduction to Metaphysics. Christians, Heidegger tells us, cannot authentically ask the fundamental question of philosophy – ‘Why are there beings at all rather than nothing?’ – because they already suppose that they have an answer to this question in their Creator-God. Moreover, Christianity, says Heidegger, takes philosophy to be foolishness and, thus, would never try to answer its questions in the first place. Finally, Heidegger insists that any thoughtful questioning in a Christian context is theology and not philosophy. I argue that none of these reasons for rejecting Christian philosophy ultimately holds up. I also criticize an interpretation of Heidegger on this topic proposed by Walter Kaufmann.

This article develops a new argument – The Argument from Atonement – that commonplace Christian assumptions about heaven imply the existence of purgatory. According to this argument, many Christians will die with residual moral guilt due to possessing unfulfilled moral debts towards fellow non-divine humans. Some of these debts cannot be fulfilled immediately after death and are not completely fulfilled or cancelled by Jesus's atoning work. Christians with such debts are fit neither for heaven nor for hell and thus must occupy purgatory until their moral debts are fulfilled.

This article brings mathematical realism and theological realism into conversation. It outlines a realist ontology that characterizes abstract mathematical objects as inaccessible to the senses, non-spatiotemporal, and acausal. Mathematical realists are challenged to explain how we can know such objects. The article reviews some promising responses to this challenge before considering the view that the object of theology also possesses the three characteristic features of abstract objects, and consequently may be known through the same methods that yield knowledge of mathematical objects.