Josia Schellenberg

This chapter is a tribute to Richard Swinburne’s pioneering work in _Faith and Reason_. It seeks to learn from his insights that what is most fundamental in the religious life are the purposes to which one becomes committed, and that belief is subservient to these. As is shown, when its conative and evaluative features are sufficiently developed, and the _value_ of certain religious states of affairs being realized is sufficiently emphasized, religious faith is able to flourish not only without religious beliefs, but also without the non-doxastic cognitive states most commonly discussed in this connection, and moreover without the epistemic beliefs Swinburne himself regards as necessary for it. A central conclusion is that when analyzing and evaluating religious faith, philosophers will gain at least as much enlightenment from the _ethics_ of religion as from the epistemology or metaphysics thereof.

This chapter shows that the logical problem of evil is far from dead. It does so by producing a new problem entirely distinct from the old problem of Epicurus, Hume, and Mackie, which was so influentially addressed by Plantinga. The theistic claims utilized by the new problem are claims about God's unsurpassable greatness, ontological independence from the world, and prior purity. What its two versions share is the idea that if there is no evil before creation, there can be no evil after. They are distinguished by the fact that one takes a modeling approach, arguing that the goods of a created world would necessarily model goods in God, while the other takes a motives approach, observing that if God is motivated to share the good as God knows it, which is good‐without‐evil, then no evil can arise when God does so.

Offered here is Part 2 of a two‐part critical survey of recent work in philosophy on divine hiddenness. Part 1 surveyed recent development of the discussion initiated by my 1993 book on the subject. Here, I examine some related work that expands the scope of the hiddenness discussion. Some of the enlargements take further the discussion of Stephen Maitzen's work on the demographics of theism. Others introduce new hiddenness problems and ways of dealing with them. A third category of new work urges theological constraints, of one sort or another, on hiddenness reasoning, thus raising new methodological issues.

For various reasons, traditional theism has dominated philosophical discussions of religion in the west, but things are starting to change. Some today are advocating a focus on alternative detailed conceptions of the Divine. Others, such as John Hick, say we need an understanding of God that takes us entirely beyond detailed conceptions. This chapter argues that the first approach does not go far enough and that the second goes too far. The mediating position it defends would have us focus instead on a claim the author calls _ultimism_, which is much more general than theism and other detailed religious claims though entailed by them and not without significant content of its own. The chapter brings to bear both scientific and religious considerations in a defense of this alternative approach.

This book is animated by a shared conviction that philosophy of religion needs to change: thirteen new essays suggest why and how. The first part of the volume explores possible changes to the focus of the field. The second part focuses on the standpoint from which philosophers of religion should approach their field. In the first part are chapters on how an emphasis on faith distorts attempts to engage non-western religious ideas; on how philosophers from different traditions might collaborate on common interests; on why the common presupposition of ultimacy leads to error; on how new religious movements feed a naturalistic philosophy of religion; on why a focus on belief and a focus on practice are both mistaken; on why philosophy's deep axiological concern should set much of the field's agenda; and on how the field might contribute to religious evolution. The second part includes a qualitative analysis of the standpoint of fifty-one philosophers of religion, and also addresses issues about humility needed in continental philosophy of religion; about the implausibility of claiming that one's own worldview is uniquely rational; about the Moorean approach to religious epistemology; about a Spinozan middle way between 'insider' and 'outsider' perspectives; and about the unorthodox lessons we could learn from scriptures like the book of Job if we could get past the confessional turn in recent philosophy of religion.The goal of the volume is to identify new paths for philosophers of religion that are distinct from those travelled by theologians and other scholars of religion.

In many places and times, and for many people, God's existence has been rather less than a clear fact. According to the hiddenness argument, this is actually a reason to suppose that it is not a fact at all. The hiddenness argument is a new argument for atheism that has come to prominence in philosophy over the past two decades. J. L. Schellenberg first developed the argument in 1993, and this book offers a short and vigorous statement of its central claims and ideas. Logically sharp but so clear that anyone can understand, the book addresses little-discussed issues such as why it took so long for hiddenness reasoning to emerge in philosophy, and how the hiddenness problem is distinct from the problem of evil. It concludes with the fascinating thought that retiring the last of the personal gods might leave us nearer the beginning of religion than the end.

The aim of this book, reflected in its title, is to clarify the theist's conception of God while supporting skepticism with respect to its instantiation. The first half of this task is carried out through an investigation of atheological arguments. These are arguments that seek to deduce a contradiction from properties traditionally ascribed to God--omnipotence, absoluteness, immutability, timelessness, benevolence, and so on--with the help of only necessarily true additional premises. Arguments of this sort, Gale claims, are "thought experiments that probe the internal consistency of the theist's conception of God, often with the result that the theist must go back to the drawing board and redesign the particular divine attribute that is the focus of the argument". This, however, is a good result, according to Gale, for, as he attempts to show, the traditional conception entails that God is a "nonperson" and is religiously unavailable.