Bruce Reichenbach

I explore various ways in which the karma we create is believed to affect our environment, which in turn is instrumental in rewarding or punishing us according to our just deserts. I argue that the problem of explaining naturalistically the causal operation of the law of karma and of accounting for the precise moral calculation it requires point to the necessity of a theistic administrator. But this option faces a serious dilemma when attempting to specify the relation of God to the law of karma.

I critique one recent argument for theological fatalism as confusing bringing about with altering the past. Questions remain concerning the basis for God's beliefs about the future. I evaluate two. One, which appeals to middle knowledge, faces several problems, including specifying how propositions of middle knowledge are true and how God can have this knowledge. The other, which contends that one can in certain cases bring about the past, I clarify and defend. Finally, I explore the implications of both views for the theological claims that God's goodness is compatible with evil and that foreknowledge can provide the basis for God's own actions.

In his recent book on revelation, Jorge Gracia rejects the authorial intention view of textual interpretation, arguing that the only interpretation that makes sense for texts regarded as divinely revealed is theological interpretation. Both his position and the authorial view face the problem of the Hermeneutical Circle. I contend that the arguments he provides in his own defense do not successfully avoid the circularity present in his own view. His thesis about expected behavior might provide resources for a solution, but this thesis in turn can be used to respond to his own objections against the authorial intention view of interpreting divinely revealed texts.

Treatments of God's goodness almost always appeal to the traditional Christian doctrine that God is necessarily good, but this introduces the question whether God's goodness properly can be understood as necessary. After considering an ontological conception of God's goodness, I propose that God's goodness is better understood as satisfying six criteria involving moral virtue, intellectual virtue, right actions, right motives, freedom of choice, and freedom of choice with respect to the rightness of the action. I defend the result -- that God's goodness must be understood contingently, not necessarily -- against recent critics of this view.

William Alston proposed an understanding of religious experience modeled after the triadic structure of sense perception. However, a perceptual model falters because of the unobservability of God as the object of religious experience. To reshape Alston’s model of religious experience as an observational practice we utilize Dudley Shapere’s distinction between the philosophical use of ‘observe’ in terms of sensory perception and scientists’ epistemic use of ‘observe’ as being evidential by providing information or justification leading to knowledge. This distinction helps us to understand how religious experience of an unobservable God can be an epistemic practice that satisfies our epistemic obligations and justifies religious belief

Generally the theist's defense against the argument from evil invokes the libertarian ideal. But this route is not open to compatibilist Reformed theologians. They must show either that God's possibly creating humans with a more perfect nature is either an impossibility or that his doing so violates some fundamental principle of value. I argue that the compatibilist Reformed theologian is unsuccessful in both. Specifically, in the latter case, there is no ground for thinking that redemption and its associated evil (as found in the concept of a fortunate fall) are superior to persistent innocence.