If panpsychism is true then consciousness pervades the cosmos, and there exist many more conscious subjects than other worldviews contemplate. Panpsychism’s explanatory story about how human material composition and complexity grounds human consciousness seems to entail that there exist, notably, various conscious subjects within human organisms. Given the plausibility of the thesis that consciousness confers moral status – a thesis many panpsychists endorse – questions thus arise about the wellbeing of these inner subjects. In this article I raise the possibility that the lives of our inner subjects may not be morally suitable to a sophisticated centre of consciousness of the sort that likely exists, for example, inside various of our brain areas. Panpsychism, indeed, seems on the face of it to generate a good deal more suffering, in this way, than other worldviews. If that is correct, panpsychists who would embrace theism, and theists who would embrace panpsychism – for example pantheists – should be given serious pause. If panpsychism positively compounds the problem of evil, then one may have to choose between panpsychism and theism.

This article is part of Religious Studies’ new initiative to publish a series of interviews with distinguished philosophers of religion. Each interview explores the personal and academic background of the interviewee and discusses their core philosophical views. The aim is to inspire students and scholars and to provide an overview of some of the most important works developed by contemporary philosophers of religion. In this interview, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin interviews Graham Oppy, covering topics such as his entry into philosophy, his views on naturalism and atheism, and why there is no successful argument for or against the existence of God, as well as his advice for those interested in pursuing a career in professional academic philosophy.

This article defends the compatibility of evolutionary theory and religious belief against the objection that God could not have intentionally brought humans into existence given that the evolutionary process by which humans came into existence crucially involves random genetic mutation. The thought behind the objection is that a process cannot be both random and intended by God to unfold as it does.

The dominance of the Abrahamic tradition in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion has led some to call for greater exploration of alternatives to the traditional conception of God, such as Pantheism, Ultimism, and Axiarchism. While we think this call for alternatives is important, we go in a different direction. Rather than explore and defend alternative conceptions of God, we defend a range of fairly traditional but non-religious conceptions of God. This range of views, from deism to philosophical theism, enjoys a variety of benefits over its religious competitors and deserves greater attention.

While Kant’s position concerning human freedom and divine foreknowledge is perhaps the least Molinist element of his multifaceted take on free will, Kant’s Molinism (minimally defined) is undeniable when it comes to the threat ensuing from the idea of creation. In line with incompatibilism and with careful qualifications in place, he ultimately suggests regarding free agents as uncreated. Given the limitations of our rational insight, this assumption is indispensable for granting that finite free agents can acquire their intelligible characters by themselves. Nonetheless, Kant concedes that creation may, as a matter of fact, be compatible with what for Molina is the pre-volitionality of the counterfactuals of freedom.

Theists commonly hold that God endows humans with rights. Standard explanations draw on natural law theory or divine command theory. However, the natural law account does not give God a central role in explaining our rights, and the divine command account does not assign human nature a significant explanatory role. A successful theistic explanation of human rights must meet three conditions: (1) God must directly explain human rights; (2) human nature must also directly explain human rights; (3) this dual contribution must explain why morality forbids rights violations by grounding the deontic reasons associated with rights. I propose a holiness account of rights. On this view, God endows human nature with rights by making human nature holy, and God does so by fashioning humans with one of God's essential properties: the capacity to love. This theory satisfies all three conditions and explains the deontological character of rights.

In this article, my objective is to argue for the compatibility between religious diversity and Christian theism by invoking the concept of divine creativity. I propose that, if God is a being of infinite powers and infinite creativity, He is such that it is possible for Him to create different and varied realities in a continuous process of creation. More than that, given His infinite creativity, God can reveal Himself in the most creative and diverse ways possible. There is no need for Him to reveal Himself as one and in a unique way, as some scholars of Christian theism argue. Basing my discussion on these ideas, I suggest that from the infinite creativity of God, it is possible to develop an argument in favour of a transformative pluralist view in face of religious diversity.

I examine two related arguments for the claim that if God is omnipotent, God cannot lack abilities such as the ability to do evil or to act irrationally. Both arguments concern the idea that omnipotence is inconsistent with being dominated with respect to abilities. I raise new issues in the formulation of such dominance principles about ability, and attempt to solve them. I also discuss and reject existing objections to these arguments. I conclude that these arguments are promising but not conclusive, and that important work remains to be done in formulating the relevant dominance principles.

We assess John Bishop's theory of the nature of Christian faith in God, as most recently expressed in ‘Reasonable Faith and Reasonable Fideism’, although we dip into other writings as well. We explain several concerns we have about it. However, in the end, our reflections lead us to propose a modified theory, one that avoids our concerns while remaining consonant with some of his guiding thoughts about the nature of Christian faith in God. We also briefly examine three normative issues Bishop's views present.

Panentheism is the position that the world is in some sense ‘in’ God, and God ‘in’ the world, without the world being identical to God. Thus, it tries, like what I call mainstream theism and against pantheism, to protect the transcendence of God, while giving greater emphasis to his immanence in creation than the former. I aim to explicate an approach that I call Orthodox Panentheism. The word ‘orthodox’ is to be read in two ways. First, the picture is derived from the writings of some of the most important figures in Eastern Christian thought, so that it is Orthodox in the ‘big “O” sense’. Second, I hope to show that it is a legitimate Christian picture of the God–world relation which is both distinctive and worthy of being called ‘panentheism’ – an orthodox panentheism in the ‘little “o” sense’.

A common argument put forth by naturalists (including the prominent philosopher Graham Oppy) in support of naturalism as a worldview over theism, is to claim that naturalism is a simpler hypothesis. Theism posits the existence of everything that naturalism does, plus the existence of a theistic realm. Thus, all things being equal, via Ockham's Razor, naturalism should be preferred to theism. In this essay, we argue that the Classical Theist need not worry about the naturalist's Simplicity argument. Specifically, we argue that, the one holding to a scholastic metaphysics (i.e., potency-act distinction, participatory metaphysics, and existence-in-degree), in the end, will be the one with the simpler worldview.

The question of the meaning of life has long been thought to be closely intertwined with that of the existence of God. I offer a new theistic, anti-naturalist argument from the meaning of life. It is argued that the desire for life is irrational on naturalism, since there would be no good reason to believe that life is worthwhile on the whole if naturalism were true. As I show, the same cannot be argued of theism. Since it is clear that the desire for life is not irrational, it is concluded that we have strong reason to prefer theism over naturalism.