The Muʿtazilī theologians, particularly the later Imāmī ones, developed numerous interesting arguments against divine command theory. The arguments, however, have not received the attention they deserve. Some of the arguments have been discussed in passing, and some have not been discussed at all. In this article, I aim to present and analyse the arguments. To that end, I first distinguish between different semantic, ontological, epistemological, and theological theses that were often conflated in the debate, and examine the logical relation among them. Then I go over the Muʿtazila's arguments determining, among other things, which of the theses was targeted by each argument. In presenting the arguments, I focus mainly on the late kalām period, the period falling roughly between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries of the common era, as the arguments were at their most sophisticated level by this time.

Justin Mooney (2018) advances what he calls The Problem of Triunity: each divine person is God, God is triune, and yet, each of the divine persons is apparently not triune. In response, I suggest that we ought to accept that each of the divine persons is in fact triune. First, I offer a plausible analysis of the claim that God is triune; second, I show that, given that analysis, there is nothing untoward about embracing the conclusion that each divine person is triune. I suggest that, once we take care to clarify what affirming the triunity of each divine person does and does not commit us to, we will see that we are not thereby committed to anything that contravenes orthodoxy – contrary, perhaps, to initial expectations. Third, I argue that this view sits particularly well with the claim that triunity is essential to divinity, whereas other views falter on this score. After considering and responding to an alternative analysis of triunity, I consider an objection to my analysis based on the salutary nature of communities. Finally, I conclude by noting an important lesson we can glean from the problem of triunity vis-à-vis trinitarian theorizing.

Over the past century, divine passibility has become the majority view within Christian theology and philosophy of religion. Yet it faces a serious objection from proponents of impassibility that I shall call the Problem of Creepy Emotions. In this article, I shall develop the objection in detail, and explore two ways for divine passibilists to answer this objection. I shall do this in several steps. First, I will offer some brief historical remarks to help readers understand that divine empathy is the watershed issue in the debate over impassibility and passibility. In particular, impassibility denies that God has empathy, whereas passibility affirms that God has empathy. Second, I provide definitions of important concepts for this debate such as impassibility, passibility, emotions, and empathy. I shall articulate Linda Zagzebski's recent account of passibility called omnisubjectivity, or perfect empathy. Third, I shall examine the Problem of Creepy Emotions that arises from the affirmation that God has perfect empathy. Fourth, I shall explore two different strategies that divine passibility can employ to avoid the Problem of Creepy Emotions.

I present an argument for God's existence based on the idea that the possibility of God requires the existence of God as a ground. After setting this argument out, I compare it to other arguments for God, concentrating on an argument from Descartes's Third Meditation. I then address various objections and conclude by setting out a non-theistic version of the argument.

It may be possible, now or in the future, for humans to technologically intervene to reduce the amount of suffering experienced by wild animals. There is a debate about whether, if humans can do this, they should. Here, I consider the implications for this debate of the theological claim that humans have been granted dominion over the other animals. I argue that it's more plausible to interpret the dominion claim as granting humans (i) the responsibility to care for the well-being of individual animals than to interpret it as giving humans either (ii) the right to do whatever they want to other animals or (iii) the responsibility to care only for the well-being of aggregates of animals (such as whole species). I then show how this understanding of dominion undermines a range of arguments against intervening to reduce wild animal suffering. These arguments claim that humans do not stand in the right sort of relationship for intervention to be obligatory (or perhaps even permissible). But if we possess such dominion, we do stand in the right sort of relationship for it to be obligatory.

What are faith and faithfulness, and how are they related? We consider two views that express very different answers to these questions. On our view, faith and faithfulness are distinct and yet complement each other. Faith is resilient reliance and faithfulness is resilient reliability, both of which involve conative and/or affective elements. In contrast, while Jonathan Kvanvig also holds that faith involves conative and/or affective elements, he identifies faith with a disposition to act in service of an ideal in the face of difficulty. However, this view of faith leads to some puzzling claims about how faith relates to faithfulness. We evaluate several claims suggested by what Kvanvig says, arguing both that his view loses sight of the distinctness of faith and faithfulness and that the inferences he wants to draw from faithfulness or faithful behaviour to faith are unjustified. Instead, we aim to show how the insights he calls to our attention can be better accommodated and explained by a more comprehensive, unified theory of faith and faithfulness and their relations.

In presenting his theory of religious pluralism, John Hick discussed the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā, emptiness, which he regarded as functionally equivalent to his postulated noumenal Real. This article introduces Hick's pluralistic hypothesis and reviews the major criticisms of his theory. It then investigates Hick's understanding of śūnyatā, before arguing that a Madhyamaka interpretation of śūnyatā, within the context of the Buddhist theory of ‘two truths’, differs considerably from Hick's understanding. The article suggests that the Madhyamaka interpretation of śūnyatā can be used to reconfigure Hick's pluralistic hypothesis, thereby avoiding the major criticisms Hickian pluralism faces, for it provides a new way of thinking about the relation between ultimate reality and the reality that we experience.

The foundation of W. Matthews Grant's project in Free Will and God's Universal Causality is his Non-Occasionalist version of Divine Universal Causality (NODUC), which affirms the traditional concurrentist idea that God and secondary causes cooperate non-superfluously in such a way that they both produce the entire effect. Grant defends NODUC's concurrentist account by responding to ‘The Metaphysical Objection’, which alleges that concurrentism places an inconsistent set of demands upon secondary causes. I argue that Grant's responses to that objection are unconvincing, and thus, he fails to demonstrate that NODUC is a stable foundation for the rest of his project.

This article develops an account of some of the central features involved on the human side in adopting a richly accepting orientation towards God's love. It then builds a conceptual and empirical argument for the conclusion that accepting God's love can enhance a person's mental health and can indirectly enable a person to cultivate or maintain moral virtues – whether or not God exists. Importantly, the article contends that these transformative benefits are available to both believers and agnostics, and an original secondary data analysis is offered to support this conclusion in the case of agnostics. The article explains how this transformative value of accepting God's love may serve as the basis for a novel pragmatic argument for theistic religious commitment.

This article accomplishes two things. First, it explores and defends Kierkegaard's distinctive solution to the Problem of Total Devotion, a problem which has been helpfully identified by Robert Adams. Second, it extends that solution by advancing an interpretation of the command to do all things to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31) according to which we are being commanded to intentionally make every one of our actions such that it simultaneously counts as a divine action: in other words, to act intentionally in all things such that it is God who acts through us.

I argue that classical theism has a significant advantage as a theory of the First Cause over Graham Oppy's naturalistic account. This is because classical theism not only gives us a clear answer to the question of how many first causes there are but also because it explains why there is that number and not another. In comparison, Oppy's ‘initial physical state’ account seemingly leaves these questions hopelessly open, and so does his ‘metaphysical simples’ proposal for a foundational layer of reality. I end by exploring two arguments from omnipotence and perfection that could be of use also to non-classical theists.

In the literature on toleration, epistemic arguments are commonly equated with John Stuart Mill's fallibilism according to which toleration of opinions is a necessary means to the attainment of truth. This conflation does not capture the variety of those arguments and it results from the fact that a proper analysis of epistemic arguments for religious toleration and a systematic account of their different types are still lacking. The purpose of this article is to provide such an analysis and to argue that those arguments come in four different types, which I name fallibilism, religious belief-forming process, epistemic parity, and differentiated access to religious truth or divine message. I also offer a mapping of those different types of arguments using the standard epistemic notions of justification, truth, and belief coupled with a distinction of focus in the epistemological approach – whether individually or socially focused.

Many philosophers have appealed to the PSR in arguments for a being that exists a se, a being whose explanation is in itself. But what does it mean, exactly, for something to have its explanation ‘in itself’? Contemporary philosophers have said next to nothing about this, relying instead on phrases plucked from the accounts of various historical figures. In this article, I analyse five such accounts – those of Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz – and argue that none are satisfactory. Should we abandon or restrict the PSR, then? I think that would be hasty, for many reasons. I therefore consider the prospects of explaining everything, including God, given the constraints of certain features of good explanations, and conclude with several observations about future approaches.

Does God trust human persons? Very little in philosophy of religion has been written about God's trust, which seems striking for two joint considerations. First, many of the Abrahamic faith traditions posit that union and close personal relationship with God is the telos of human life. Second, trust seems to be an essential element in ideal, close relationships between persons. While there is much in the faith literature that emphasizes the role of trust on the human side of the divine–human relationship, there is very little on divine trust. To fill this lacuna, this article addresses the conceptual issue of how divine trust could be understood within the Abrahamic faith traditions (particularly in Christianity and Judaism). I begin by examining whether an account of divine trust can be developed alongside divine attributes like divine foreknowledge. After identifying some plausible conditions of trust within the philosophical literature, I present a couple of trust scenarios as a means of demonstrating that divine trust is not only conceptually plausible (i.e. compatible with divine foreknowledge), but that divine trust is best construed as a particular trust type – therapeutic trust. That is, I argue that divine trust aims at inspiring humanity's trustworthiness.