Atheists feel there is no reason for religious beliefs and that they should only believe things that can be proven logically or by experiments, while theists believe they have enough reason to believe. At some point, the arguments and counterargument...
In this article, I seek to assess the extent to which a ‘trope-theoretic’ version of Theism is a better theory than that of a theory of Atheism, as posited by Graham Oppy. This end will be achieved by utilising the systemisation of the th...
This paper proposes to reconsider agnosticism by taking a step onto a meta-level, investigating agnosticism not as an epistemic stance regarding the choice between theism and atheism, but as a stance toward the question concerning the cognitive meani...
Paul Draper argues that the central issue in the debate over the problem of suffering is not whether the theist can offer a probable explanation of suffering, but whether theism or naturalism can give a better explanation for the facts regarding the...
Both theism and atheism assume that God permits evil. But neither theism nor atheism make this assumption with due attention to what I call, following Wittgenstein, the grammar of the term ‘permission’. When this grammar is examined, it becomes clear...
James Sterba recently presented arguments against theories which ground morality in God and attempted “to provide an account of the norms on which an ethics without God can be appropriately grounded ….” In particular, Sterba noted...
Ronald Dworkin and Philip Kitcher recognize that traditional, religious faith—especially in Christian theistic tradition—has virtues that seem to be missing in a secular worldview. To remedy this apparent deficit, they both propose that a secular wo...
A prominent contemporary cultural trope is the use of humour by the critics of theism against their opponents, in the form of satire, sarcasm, ‘zingers,’ whimsy, and ridicule. The journalist Christopher Hitchens and the philosophers Danie...
The question of whether ethics is possible without God is a non-issue. While many believe that without God, morality collapses, I contend that the existence or non-existence of God has no bearing on whether ethics is possible, whether moral truths ex...
Recent work in analytic philosophy of religion has seen increased interest in nontheistic, but still non-naturalist (indeed, broadly religious) worldview options. J.L. Schellenberg’s Ultimism has been among the most prominent of these. Another...
Agnosticism is often understood as being in opposition to religious faith. This article examines the two concepts “agnosticism” and “Christian faith” and their interrelated character. We argue that agnosticism and Christian faith are compatible, alth...
The concept of the highest good plays a vital role in Kant’s moral theism. However, as many scholars suggest, Kant’s own texts about the very concept can be interpreted in different ways, some of which may imply that the practical postula...
In this paper, I provide a defence of theism against James Sterba’s version of the logical problem of evil, at least where the focus is on moral evil (I do not have much to say about natural evil in this paper). After giving my own account of t...
Jack Warman and Joshua Cockayne have recently claimed that the arguments that William James provides in his famous lecture ‘The Will to Believe’ to justify passional theism would equally justify passional atheism. They are correct in this...
The problem of evil seems to have been the patent of theism for a long time. However, some philosophers notice that this is not necessarily the case and raise arguments from evil against atheism. In this paper, I follow this insight and raise the evi...
This essay explores the question: can we have an objective ethics without God? This question is raised by James Sterba, who argues in the affirmative. As an atheistic ethicist, Sterba is motivated to maintain an objective morality that is not based i...
In seeking a path to mediating feminist and anti-feminist narratives, one must begin with a framework of the method of narrative analysis being used. Using the works of such thinkers as Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney, I argue that human self-unders...
With regard to the assertion of the nature of the world, primitive Buddhism advocates “all phenomena that arise from causes” and opposes the existence of “God” or “Creator”, who created everything in the universe,...
In a recent book and article, James Sterba has argued that there is no free will defense. It is the purpose of this article to show that, in the most technical sense, he is wrong. There is a version of the free will defense that can solve what Sterba...
This article brings Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity, or sovereign decisionism, into conversation with the work of contemporary political theorist Giorgio Agamben, who argues that sovereign decisionism is the repressed theological foundati...
Kant marks a fundamental break in the history of philosophy of religion and the concept of God. God is no longer interpreted as a being necessary to understand the existence of a rational universe, but as an idea that makes sense of our morality. Coh...
This essay reflects on the concept of the death of God as part and parcel of modern philosophical theology: a genre of thinking that came into existence with Hegel’s announcement of the “speculative Good Friday” as the most natural...
Sterba’s Is a Good God Logically Possible? (2019) draws attention to the importance of ethical assumptions in ‘logical’ arguments from evil (LAfEs) to the effect that the existence of (certain types) of evil is incompatible with the existence of a Go...
Contrary to the majority of contemporary analytic philosophers of religion, James Sterba argues in his book Is a Good God Logically Possible? (2019) that Alvin Plantinga with his famous free will defense has not succeeded in solving the logical probl...