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.