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718BonJour’s ‘Basic Antifoundationalist Argument’ and the Doctrine of the GivenSouthern Journal of Philosophy 36 (2): 163-177. 1998.Laurence BonJour observes that critics of foundationalism tend to argue against it by objecting to "relatively idiosyncratic" versions of it, a strategy which has "proven in the main to be superficial and ultimately ineffective" since answers immune to the objections emerge quickly (1985: 17). He aims to rectify this deficiency. Specifically, he argues that the very soul of foundationalism, "the concept of a basic empirical belief," is incoherent (1985: 30). This is a bold strategy from which we…Read more
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714God, Knowledge, and Mystery (review)Faith and Philosophy 16 (1): 126-134. 1999.This is a review of Peter van Inwagen's collection of essays. It corrects a typesetter’s deletion of 75% of the review originally published in _Faith and Philosophy_15, 1998: 397-399.
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694Agnosticism, the Moral Skepticism Objection, and Commonsense MoralityIn Justin McBrayer Trent Dougherty (ed.), Skeptical Theism: New Essays, Oxford University Press. 2014.According to Agnosticism with a capital A, even if we don’t see how any reason we know of would justify God in permitting all the evil in the world and even if we lack evidential and non-evidential warrant for theism, we should not infer that there probably is no reason that would justify God. That’s because, under those conditions, we should be in doubt about whether the goods we know of constitute a representative sample of all the goods there are, among relevantly similar things. In my "Epist…Read more
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655Who or What is God, According to John Hick?Topoi 36 (4): 571-586. 2017.I summarize John Hick’s pluralistic theory of the world’s great religions, largely in his own voice. I then focus on the core posit of his theory, what he calls “the Real,” but which I less tendentiously call “Godhick”. Godhick is supposed to be the ultimate religious reality. As such, it must be both possible and capable of explanatory and religious significance. Unfortunately, Godhick is, by definition, transcategorial, i.e. necessarily, for any creaturely conceivable substantial property F, i…Read more
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646Theism, the Hypothesis of Indifference, and the Biological Role of Pain and PleasureFaith and Philosophy 11 (3): 452-466. 1994.Following Hume’s lead, Paul Draper argues that, given the biological role played by both pain and pleasure in goal-directed organic systems, the observed facts about pain and pleasure in the world are antecedently much more likely on the Hypothesis of Indifference than on theism. I examine one by one Draper’s arguments for this claim and show how they miss the mark.
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627The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA), whose leaders govern well over half of the 80 million Anglicans worldwide, have put forward ‘a contemporary rule,’ called The Jerusalem Declaration, to guide the Anglican realignment movement. The FCA and its affiliates, e.g. the newly-formed Anglican Church in North America, require assent to the Declaration. To date, there has been little serious appraisal of the Declaration and the status accorded to it. I aim to correct that omission. Unlike ap-p…Read more
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625Markan FaithInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (1-2): 31-60. 2017.According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament may seem to favor doxasticism o…Read more
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625Theorizing about faith with Lara BuchakReligious Studies 59 297-326. 2022.What is faith? Lara Buchak has done as much as anyone recently to answer our question in a sensible and instructive fashion. As it turns out, her writings reveal two theories of faith, an early one and a later one (or, if you like, two versions of the same theory). In what follows, we aim to do three things. First, we will state and assess Buchak’s early theory, highlighting both its good-making and bad-making features. Second, we will do the same for her later theory, noting improvements on the…Read more
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621The Fellowship of the Ninth Hour: Christian Reflections on the Nature and Value of FaithIn James Arcadi & James T. Turner (eds.), The T&T Clark Handbook of Analytic Theology, T&t Clark/bloomsbury. pp. 69-82. 2021.It is common for young Christians to go off to college assured in their beliefs but, in the course of their first year or two, they meet what appears to them to be powerful defenses of scientific naturalism and crushing critiques of the basic Christian story (BCS), and many are thrown into doubt. They think to themselves something like this: "To be honest, I am troubled about the BCS. While the problem of evil, the apparent cultural basis for the diversity of religions, the explanatory breadth o…Read more
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620The epistemology of religious experience (review)International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. 1997.This is a review of Keith Yandell's book.
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615In Defense of Naïve UniversalismFaith and Philosophy 20 (3): 345-363. 2003.Michael J. Murray defends the traditional doctrine of hell by arguing directly against its chief competitor, universalism. Universalism, says Murray, comes in “naïve” and “sophisticated” forms. Murray poses two arguments against naïve universalism before focusing on sophisticated universalism, which is his real target. He proceeds in this fashion because he thinks that his arguments against sophisticated universalism are more easily motivated against naïve universalism, and once their force is c…Read more
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570Does Faith Entail Belief?Faith and Philosophy 33 (2): 142-162. 2016.Does faith that p entail belief that p? If faith that p is identical with belief that p, it does. But it isn’t. Even so, faith that p might be necessarily partly constituted by belief that p, or at least entail it. Of course, even if faith that p entails belief that p, it does not follow that faith that p is necessarily partly constituted by belief that p. Still, showing that faith that p entails belief that p would be a significant step in that direction. Can we take that step? In this essay, I…Read more
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568Seeing through CORNEAInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 32 (1). 1992.This essays assesses Steve Wykstra's original CORNEA.
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544Review of David O'Connor, God and Inscrutable Evil (review)Philosophical Review. 2001.This is a critical review of David O'Connor's book, God and Inscrutable Evil.
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538John Hick on whether God could be an Infinite PersonJournal of Analytic Theology 4 171-179. 2016."Who or what is God?," asks John Hick. A theist might answer: God is an infinite person, or at least an infinite personal being. Hick disagrees: "God cannot be both a person and infinite." Moreover, he says, the distinction between being a person and being a personal being "is a distinction without a difference." Thus, God cannot be an infinite personal being either. In this essay, I assess Hick's reasons for drawing these conclusions. I argue that, even if some other reasons for drawing these c…Read more
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528The Problem of Evil (review)The Christian Scholar's Review. 1996.This is a review of Michael Peterson's The Problem of Evil
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513FaithIn Robert Audi (ed.), Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 3rd Edition, Cambridge University Press. 2015.A brief article on faith as a psychological attitude.
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509FoundationalismIn Andrew Cullison (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Epistemology, Continuum. pp. 37. 2012.Foundationalists distinguish basic from nonbasic beliefs. At a first approximation, to say that a belief of a person is basic is to say that it is epistemically justified and it owes its justification to something other than her other beliefs, where “belief” refers to the mental state that goes by that name. To say that a belief of a person is nonbasic is to say that it is epistemically justified and not basic. Two theses constitute Foundationalism: (a) Minimality: There are some basic beliefs,…Read more
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474Is Theism Compatible with Gratuitous Evil?American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (2). 1999.We argue that Michael Peterson's and William Hasker's attempts to show that God and gratuitous evil are compatible constitute miserable failures. We then sketch Peter van Inwagen's attempt to do the same and conclude that, to date, no one has shown his attempt a failure.
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456Faith and Humility: Conflict or Concord?In Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility, Routledge. pp. 212-224. 2021.In some circles, faith is said to be one of three theological virtues, along with hope and agape. But not everyone thinks faith is a virtue, theological or otherwise. Indeed, depending on how we understand it, faith may well conflict with the virtues. In this chapter we will focus on the virtue of humility. Does faith conflict with humility, or are they in concord? In what follows, we will do five things. First, we will sketch a theory of the virtue of humility. Second, we will summarize a commo…Read more
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453The puzzle of prayers of Thanksgiving and praiseIn Yujin Nagasawa & Erik J. Wielenberg (eds.), New waves in philosophy of religion, Palgrave-macmillan. 2008.in eds. Yujin Nagasawa and Erik Wielenberg, New Waves in Philosophy of Religion (Palgrave MacMillan 2008).
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439Divine hiddenness and human reason (review)Mind. 1995.This is a review of John Schellenberg's book.
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424On the a priori rejection of evidential arguments from evilSophia 33-47. 1994.Recent work on the evidential argument from evil offers us sundry considerations which are intended to weigh against this form of atheological arguments. By far the most provocative is that on a priori grounds alone, evil can be shown to be evidentially impotent. This astonishing thesis has been given a vigorous defense by Keith Yandell. In this paper, we shall measure the prospects for an a priori dismissal of evidential arguments from evil.
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423The problem of faith and reasonIn The Cambridge Companion to Religious Epistemology, . forthcoming.Faith in God conflicts with reason—or so we’re told. We focus on two arguments for this conclusion. After evaluating three criticisms of them, we identify an assumption they share, namely that faith in God requires belief that God exists. Whether the assumption is true depends on what faith is. We sketch a theory of faith that allows for both faith in God without belief that God exists, and faith in God while in belief-cancelling doubt God’s existence. We then argue that our theory, unlike the t…Read more
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422PanmetaphoricismReligious Studies 53 25-49. 2017.Panmetaphoricism is the view that our speech about God can only be metaphorical. In this essay, I do not assess the reasons that have been given for the view. Rather, I assess the view itself. My aim is to develop the most plausible version of panmetaphoricism in order to gain a clear view of the God it offers for our consideration.
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394Faith and resilienceInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion (3). 2022.In this short essay, we sketch a theory of faith that features resilience in the face of challenges to relying on those in whom you have faith. We argue that it handles a variety of both religious and secular faith-data, e.g., the value of faith in relationships of mutual faith and faithfulness, how the Christian and Hebrew scriptures portray pístis and ʾĕmûnāh, and the character of faith as it is often expressed in popular secular venues.
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377Beliefs can be justified by experienceIn Steven B. Cowan (ed.), Problems in Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2020.This brief article intended for undergraduates argues for Experiential Foundationalism, the view that there are basic beliefs and they can be justified by experience.
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352God without the Supernatural: A Defense of Scientific Theism (review)Journal of Religion. 1996.This is a review of Peter Forrest's book.
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346Lehrer's case against foundationalismErkenntnis 60 (1): 51-73. 2004.In this essay, I assess Keith Lehrer's case against Foundationalism, which consists of variations on three objections: The Independent Information or Belief Objection, The Risk of Error Objection, and the Hidden Argument Objection. I conclude that each objection fails for reasons that can be endorsed – indeed, I would say for reasons that should be endorsed – by antifoundationalists and foundationalists alike.
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345Faith, Freedom, and Rationality: Philosophy of Religion Today (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield. 1996.This collection of essays is dedicated to William Rowe, with great affection, respect, and admiration. The philosophy of religion, once considered a deviation from an otherwise analytically rigorous discipline, has flourished over the past two decades. This collection of new essays by twelve distinguished philosophers of religion explores three broad themes: religious attitudes of faith, belief, acceptance, and love; human and divine freedom; and the rationality of religious belief. Contributors…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Moral Psychology |