Josia Schellenberg

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.

In this paper I explore and defend the idea that those who struggle intellectually in theistic religious practice can be given a good reason to persist in it by treating their continuing practice as a way of paying tribute to people and projects and personal relationships and indeed to the whole moral dimension of human life, expressing how important and profoundly significant these things are to them. This ‘tribute of faith’ is a gesture that one makes with one’s life—a moral gesture. The key thought is that the sayings and other doings of a religious life allow one to treat the world as one in which the things, such as projects and people, that are, for one, most deeply imbued with moral value will achieve fulfilment—a fulfillment that without the truth of religious claims they would often be denied.

In this paper I distinguish two levels of intellectual importance, derived and underived, showing how the former can be species-based. Then I do four things: first, identify a neglected way, stemming from perceived human intellectual maturity, in which many of us are vulnerable to a sense of species-based importance; second, show—in part by appealing to facts about deep time—that we have no right to this sense and so evince a failure of intellectual humility if we acquiesce in it; third, defend the view that the claims of intellectual humility on those who would be overall rational are not in this regard overridden; and then, finally, gesture at some of the consequences of this result for inquiry.

The problem of Divine hiddenness, or the hiddenness problem, is more and more commonly being treated as independent of the problem of evil, and as rivalling the latter in significance. Are we in error if we acquiesce in these tendencies? Only a careful investigation into relations between the hiddenness problem and the problem of evil can help us see. Such an investigation is undertaken here. What we will find is that when certain knots threatening to hamper intellectual movement are unravelled, the hiddenness problem emerges as a contender in its own right—one that may generate serious difficulties for theism regardless of conclusions drawn concerning the force of the problem of evil.

In this second of two essays responding to critical discussion of my " Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason," I show how an ' accommodationist ' strategy can be used to defuse objections that were not exposed as irrelevant by the first essay. This strategy involves showing that the dominant concern of reasons for divine withdrawal can be met or accommodated within the framework of divine - human relationship envisaged by the hiddenness argument. I conclude that critical discussion leaves the argument very much alive and kicking, and indeed strengthened as it moves into its second decade of life

This paper criticizes the assumption, omnipresent in contemporary philosophy of religion, that a perfectly good and loving God would wish to confer on finite persons free will. An alternative mode of Divine-human relationship is introduced and shown to be as conducive to the realization of value as one involving free will. Certain implications of this result are then revealed, to wit, that the theist's free will defence against the problem of evil is unsuccessful, and what is more, that free will, if it exists, provides positive support for atheism.

In this brief reply I argue that criticisms of the hiddenness argument recently published in this journal by Imran Aijaz and Markus Weidler are without force. As will be shown, their critique of my conceptual version of the argument misses the mark by missing crucial distinctions. Their critique of my analogical version of the argument misunderstands that argument and also misapplies the work of W. H. Vanstone. And their critique of my view that belief is necessary for a certain kind of relationship with God overlooks both some central features of that kind of relationship and some good reasons for not accepting acceptance or anything similarly nonbelieving as a substitute for belief in this context.

William Alston's Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience is a most significant contribution to the philosophy of religion. The product of 50 years' reflection on its topic , this work provides a very thorough explication and defence of what Alston calls the ‘mystical perceptual practice’ – the practice of forming beliefs about the Ultimate on the basis of putative ‘direct experiential awareness’ thereof . Alston argues, in particular, for the rationality of engaging in the Christian form of MP . On his view, those who participate in CMP are justified in forming beliefs as they do because their practice is ‘socially established’, has a ‘functioning overrider system’ and a ‘significant degree of self-support’; and because of the ‘lack of sufficient reasons to take the practice as unreliable’