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Recently, we co-edited a volume of essays (Draper & Schellenberg 2017) dedicated to the proposition that our field, the philosophy of religion, is not all that it could be. The new set of essays we’re joining here shows that this sentiment is, at the least, not going away. That’s encouraging, but how can we get beyond sentiment? In this our own essay we hope to do so by focusing very precisely and persuasively on problems and solutions: on why our field needs renewal and how to achieve it. More specifically, we hope to get every reader to recognize and accept at least one problem from the range of problems in the field as it exists today that we propose to identify, and to select for special thought and supportive effort at least one solution from the range of solutions we’ll be promoting. Let’s adjust that slightly: one extra problem and one extra solution – for we’re going to start by setting the right mood with some thoughts about a very basic problem/solution pair that we should all be able to recognize/support.

In this essay, I reply to the comments of Joanna Leidenhag and Nick Trakakis on my book Religion After Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity.

Here I explain the concept of evolutionary religion and consider its relations to what in previous work I have called sceptical religion. I also interact with five articles recently published in Religious Studies that respond to my work and address related themes – articles by William A. Rottschaefer, James Elliott, Travis Dumsday, and Carl-Johan Palmqvist.

This article describes a new type of religious commitment that is activated only if the associated religious propositions are true. The notion of a conditional intention provides the mechanism for understanding how it works, and the justification for forming such an intention in the religious case comes from an awareness of human immaturity combined with a more fundamental and unconditional commitment to truth, goodness, and beauty. The article's argument promises to contribute widely and to supersede certain older arguments, including Pascal's Wager.

Distinguishing between the old atheism, the new atheism, and modest atheism, and also between belief and acceptance, and belief and acceptance tokens and types, I defend the disjunctive view that either modest atheistic belief or modest atheistic acceptance, construed as type, is today epistemically justified in the context of philosophical inquiry. Central to my defence is a deductive version of the hiddenness argument and an emphasis on the early stage of philosophical inquiry that we presently occupy.

This is an invited response to Peter Forrest’s review of my trilogy on the philosophy of religion, which appeared in a previous issue of this journal.

Mark McCreary has argued that I cannot consistently advance both the hiddenness argument and certain arguments for religious scepticism found in my book The Wisdom to Doubt (WD). This reaction was expected, and in WD I explained its shortsightedness in that context. First, I noted how in Part III of WD, where theism is addressed, my principal aim is not to prove atheism but to show theists that they are not immune from the scepticism defended in Parts I and II. To the success of this aim, McCreary's arguments are not so much as relevant, for a thoroughgoing scepticism embracing even the hiddenness argument is quite compatible with its success. But I also explained how someone convinced that the hiddenness argument does prove atheism escapes the grip of religious scepticism because of that argument's reliance on apparent conceptual truths. McCreary's critique obscures this point but does not defuse it.

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.

Abstract: This is the inaugural Jay Newman Memorial Lecture in Philosophy of Religion, as delivered to the Canadian Theological Society in May 2009. Its themes are four: (1) the influence of conservative Christian theology in the shaping of contemporary (broadly analytical) philosophy of religion; (2) the resulting difficulty of demarcating philosophy of religion from theology or theological apologetics; (3) the possibility of a new, more progressive evolutionary approach to philosophy of religion, and how not just theological assumptions but certain philosophical assumptions too are standing in its way; and (4) the interesting parallel between where an imaginative, evolutionary philosophy of religion might take us and certain features of non-conservative Christian theology.

Chris Tucker's paper on the hiddenness argument seeks to turn aside a way of defending the latter which he calls the value argument. But the value argument can withstand Tucker's criticisms. In any case, an alternative argument capable of doing the same job is suggested by his own emphasis on free will. The many ways in which creatures might choose and the little we know about their likely choices are central themes in Chris Tucker's paper. His argu ment can be summarized as follows. For all we know, there is in some world including God a spiritually capable and non-resistant creature S who likely would at some time t fail to relate herself to God despite having the opportunity to do so, and God knows this before t. Now God is provided with little reason to act by value that will likely not be realized. Thus if God knows before t that the value of relationship with S will likely not be realized at t, and knows also that keeping S in the 'relating position' anyway would not improve anyone else's spiritual state, God is provided with little reason to keep S in the relating position at t by relationship-related value. Furthermore, in such circumstances even relatively weak competing con siderations would override what little reason God has to keep S in the relating position. Now, as Tucker notes, I have sought to deal with various purported competing considerations by means of an accommodationist strategy. Do we know that this countermove works? We do not, says Tucker, for the free choices of various individuals affected by any attempted accommodation need to be made in certain particular ways in order for it to work. And we do not know or, at least, we do not know without appeal to arguments other than those concerned with the value of divine-creature relationship that they would likely be made thus. Hence, he concludes, for all we know, the value of divine-creature relationship provides no reason at all to keep S in the relating position at ty and the argument that we are justified in supposing it necessarily provides sufficient reason to do so always and for all creatures like S is shown to be without force.1 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:18:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 290 J. L. SCHELLENBERG Tucker's aim in all of this is to assess the prospects of the latter argument, which he calls the value argument. As is evident, he construes this argument as an independent defence of the hiddenness argument's universal claim. I do not myself have a horse in this race, having emphasized in my work on the hidden ness argument not only the benevolence here at issue but also certain important features of divine love distinct from benevolence.2 But let us begin by considering how the independent force of the value argument can be defended against Tucker's criticisms.3 I agree, of course, with the idea that if God knows that some relationship that would be valuable cannot be realized, God will not pursue the relationship for the sake of its value. But in trying to press this idea into philosophical service in connection with the hiddenness problem, Tucker overlooks some pretty import ant contextual facts. For example, even before we decide how much reason the value of possible divine-creature relationship gives God to perform the specific action of keeping someone in the relating position, we need to think about certain other actions it gives God reason to perform. Tucker himself allows that God needs to be in a situation where an especially good thing cannot be got' no matter what He does' before the good thing provides no reason for its pursuit (274). Well then, what might God do to make it more likely that when S is kept in the relating position at ty S's response is the desired one which realizes the value of divine-creature relationship at f? Surely there is a lot that can be done. After all, we are talking about God here. (Tucker's God, I'm afraid, sometimes sounds like one finite, limited actor among others.) Just for example, God might ahead of time make experientially accessible for S more of the achingly beautiful divine nature (this can always be done, no matter how susceptible to distraction the subject may be, because there must always be more beauty to be revealed in a divine reality). Thinking about such facilitating actions which God might do, it becomes less and less plausible that, for all we know, there are spiritually capable and also non-resistant creatures who likely would yet at some time be so indifferent to divine overtures as to fail to respond positively to God.4 Assuming, as Tucker does, that judgments of likelihood are possible here, we must surely say that the varying degrees and possible contents of religious experience are such that a free positive response on the part of such individuals is not at all unlikely, if God does everything God can do to assure this result. How can we suppose otherwise without either seriously and in appropriately downgrading our conception of divine greatness and beauty or neglecting the import of that phrase ' spiritually capable and non-resistant' ? On these grounds, I suggest, Tucker's criticisms of the value argument must be held to fail. Whatever plausibility they may seem to have comes from giving such points insufficient attention. But let us suppose, for the sake of further argument, that I am mistaken about this. What I want to do next is to show how even if the value argument is unsuccessful, by looking more closely at the very free will This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:18:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

I argue that Poston and Dougherty are mistaken in supposing that the hiddenness argument contains ambiguities about the nature of belief. And the attempt to extract from their mistaken account some reasons for favouring a broad, disjunctive view of divine – creature relationship that will be convincing for individuals not in the grip of theological assumptions comes up dry.

More than a few philosophers have sought to answer the atheistic argument from reasonable non-belief (a.k.a. the argument from divine hiddenness or the hiddenness argument) presented in my 1993 book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. In this first of two essays in response, I focus on objections sharing the defect – sometimes well-hidden – of irrelevance, using their shortcomings to highlight important features of the argument that are commonly overlooked.

This paper begins by surveying some of the problems facing Swinburne's general approach, finding unfortunate the absence from his tetralogy of a strategy (suggested at the end of the previous trilogy) that might have helped to alleviate them, namely an attempt to show that a traditional Christian creed is more probable than the creed of any other religion. It then discusses certain particular arguments of the tetralogy arguments offered in defence of the traditional Christian doctrine of the Atonement which are central to the detailed working out of the approach, concluding that they are unacceptable. Richard Swinburne is an unusually disciplined and single-minded philos opher. As a recent autobiographical statement reveals, the articles and books he has produced over the last forty years, though many and varied, are all most fundamentally motivated by one aim an apologetic aim. They all fall within what he calls his 'programme', which has been 'to use the criteria of modern natural science, analysed with the careful rigour of modern philosophy, to show the meaningfulness and justification of Christian theology'.' It is therefore not inap propriate to view Swinburne's recently completed tetralogy, in which Christian doctrine is for the first time front and centre, as the culmination of all the work for which he is known and admired in philosophy.2 Everything else, in one way or another, has been leading up to this. (All that philosophy of science, for example, was done with an eye to the confirmation of Christianity; and his The Coherence of Theism was just stage one, awaiting fulfilment in The Christian God.) And, for the most part anyway, here it all ends. As he has expressed it: 'When that last book [of the tetralogy] is completed, I do not see myself as having anything further to say at book length on the philosophy of religion. I shall have said what I have to say. '3 But if Swinburne is now able to relax (does anyone think he really will?), his assessors are just getting geared up. And what they will naturally want to know

In this paper I discuss a neglected form of argument against religious belief-generically, 'the probabilistic argument from pluralism'. If the denial of a belief is equivalent to the disjunction of its alternatives, and if we may gain some idea as to the probabilities of such disjunctions by adding the separate probabilities of their mutually exclusive disjuncts, and if, moreover, the denials of many religious beliefs are disjunctions known to have two or more mutually exclusive members each possessing a significant degree or probability, then at any rate in many such cases, the denial of a religious belief can be shown to be more probable than it is - which is to say that the belief can be shown to be improbable. I consider a large number of responses to arguments of this form, concluding that none suffices to overthrow it altogether. Indeed, the argument remains as a significant threat to any religious belief confronted by a plurality of alternatives.

William Alston's Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) is a most significant contribution to the philosophy of religion. The product of 50 years' reflection on its topic (xi), this work provides a very thorough explication and defence of what Alston calls the ‘mystical perceptual practice’ (MP) – the practice of forming beliefs about the Ultimate on the basis of putative ‘direct experiential awareness’ thereof (pp. 103, 258). Alston argues, in particular, for the (epistemic) rationality of engaging in the Christian form of MP (CMP). On his view, those who participate in CMP are (in the absence of specific overriding considerations from within CMP) 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’ (p. 224).

L'A. aborde le probleme du mal d'une maniere logique pour arriver a une conclusion contraire a celle qui est traditionnellement assumee par la philosophie de la religion. Il y a selon lui, une forme hybride de l'argument du mal qui trouve son origine dans des considerations de probabilite, mais qui d'autre part, procede de maniere deductive