David Manley's New Paper on God and the Bayesian Conception of Evidence

Manley, David. "God and the Bayesian Conception of Evidence", Religious Studies (forthcoming).

Abstract:

Contemporary arguments for and against the existence of God are often formulated within a broadly Bayesian framework. Arguments of this sort focus on a specific feature of the world that is taken to provide probabilistic evidence for or against the existence of God: the existence of life in a ‘fine-tuned’ universe, the magnitude of suffering, divine hiddenness, etc. In each case, the idea is that things were more likely to be this way if God existed than if God did not exist—or the other way around. Less attention, however, has been paid to the deeper question of what it takes for something to count as evidence for or against the existence of God. What exactly is being claimed when it is said that some feature of the world is more or less likely given the existence of God, and how should we go about assessing such a claim? This paper is about epistemological issues—and in particular, certain potential cognitive errors—that arise when we reason probabilistically about the existence of God. The moral is not that we should refrain from reasoning in this way, but that we should be mindful of potential errors when we do.

Beth Seacord's Excellent New Entry on the Problem of Evil

Seacord, Beth. "Evil as a Problem for Theism", Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion (forthcoming).

Recent Work by Graham Oppy

Graham Oppy continues to produce fantastic work in philosophy of religion at a blistering pace. Recent single-author books include books on ontological arguments, naturalism and religion, atheism and agnosticism, and a primer on atheism. Recent edited and co-edited work includes a new edition of the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Religion, the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, a massive series on Inter-Christian and Interreligious Philosophical Dialogues (with Nick Trakakis), a comprehensive History of Western Philosophy of Religion (with Nick Trakakis), and another massive volume (with Joseph Koterski), Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy. Finally, he has written a number of important and compellingly argued chapters and papers focusing on ultimate naturalistic causal explanations (also laid out here) that are absolutely required reading for anyone interested in the question of ultimate origins.

Wielenberg's New Paper on Divine Command Theory

Wielenberg, Erik. "Divine Command Theory and Psychopathy", Religious Studies (forthcoming).

Abstract:

I advance a novel challenge for Divine Command Theory based on the existence of psychopaths. The challenge, in a nutshell, is that Divine Command Theory has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible. After explaining this argument, I respond to three objections to it and then critically examine the prospect that Divine Command Theorists might bite the bullet and accept that psychopaths can do no wrong. I conclude that the Psychopathy Objection constitutes a serious and novel challenge for Divine Command Theory.

Review of Axtell's Problems of Religious Luck

Liz Jackson reviews the book for NDPR.