Purdue University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2022
Bloomington, Illinois, United States
  •  115
    Perfect Freedom and God's Hard Choices
    Faith and Philosophy 39 (2): 291-312. 2022.
    Rationalist models of divine agency typically ascribe perfect freedom to God, where this is understood as a freedom from external causal influences and non-rational influences, including desires or preferences not derived from reason alone. Paul Draper has recently developed a rationalist model of God’s agency on which God faces “hard choices” between options differing in moral and non-moral value. He argues that this model is preferable to rival rationalist models because it is compatible with …Read more
  •  22
    Murphy's Anselmian theism and the problem of evil
    Religious Studies 1-15. forthcoming.
    Mark Murphy has recently defended a novel account of divine agency on which God would have very minimal requiring reasons and a wide range of merely justified reasons. This account grounds his response to the problem of evil. If God would not have requiring reasons to promote the well-being of creatures, Murphy argues, then the evil we observe would not count as evidence against theism. I argue that Murphy's conclusion, if successful in undermining the problem of evil, also undermines probabilis…Read more
  •  35
    Fundamentality and the prior probability of theism
    Religious Studies 56 (2): 169-180. 2020.
    Paul Draper has recently developed an account of intrinsic probability according to which a theory's intrinsic probability is determined by its modesty and coherence. He employs this account in an argument that Source Physicalism (SP) and Source Idealism (SI) are equally intrinsically probable. Since SP and SI are not exhaustive, and Theism is one very specific version of SI, it follows that the intrinsic probability of Theism is very low. I argue here that considerations of fundamentality show …Read more
  •  50
    Moral motivation and the evil-god challenge
    Religious Studies 57 (4): 703-716. 2021.
    The evil-god challenge holds that theism is highly symmetrical to the evil-god hypothesis and thus it is not more reasonable to accept one rather than the other. But, since it is not reasonable to accept the evil-god hypothesis, it is not reasonable to accept theism. This article will primarily focus on defending the challenge from two recent objections which hold that it follows from the nature of moral motivation that theism is intrinsically much more likely to be true than the evil-god hypoth…Read more