I draw on the literature on skeptical theism to develop an argument against Christian theism based on the widespread existence of suffering that appears to its sufferer to be gratuitous and is combined with the sense that God has abandoned one or never existed in the first place. While the core idea of the argument is hardly novel, key elements of the argument are importantly different from other influential arguments against Christian theism. After explaining that argument, I make the case (...) that the argument is untouched by traditional skeptical theism. I then consider positive skeptical theism, arguing that while DePoe’s view might provide a response to my argument, it entangles the theist in worries about divine deception. Because traditional skeptical theism and DePoe’s positive skeptical theism constitute the most promising extant strategies for answering my argument, the argument constitutes a serious challenge for the Christian theist. My overall aim, then, is to draw on various strands of the skeptical theism literature to present a challenge for all Christian theists, not just those in the skeptical theist camp, while at the same time revealing some important limitations of skeptical theism. (shrink)

The author argues that the key to a fulfilled life is to pursue what one cares about, that love is the most authoritative form of caring, and that the purest form of love is, in a complicated way, self-love.

It is widely thought that God must love each and every human to the same depth and degree. This proposition plays a prominent role in influential versionsof the problem of evil, and in theistic attempts to answer the problem of evil. A common reason cited in support of the idea of God’s loving equally every human is that a perfect being would possess every great-making property and loving equally every human would be a great-making property. It is the argument of (...) this essay, however, that a perfect being cannot in principle equally love every human. This argument is erected upon an unnoticed principle of perfect being theology: for all properties F, if F is a deficiency when had by a human, then F cannot be great-making when had by God. (shrink)

In many places and times, and for many people, God's existence has been rather less than a clear fact. According to the hiddenness argument, this is actually a reason to suppose that it is not a fact at all. The hiddenness argument is a new argument for atheism that has come to prominence in philosophy over the past two decades. J. L. Schellenberg first developed the argument in 1993, and this book offers a short and vigorous statement of its central (...) claims and ideas. Logically sharp but so clear that anyone can understand, the book addresses little-discussed issues such as why it took so long for hiddenness reasoning to emerge in philosophy, and how the hiddenness problem is distinct from the problem of evil. It concludes with the fascinating thought that retiring the last of the personal gods might leave us nearer the beginning of religion than the end. (shrink)

Does God love every human equally and to the deepest degree possible? In an earlier article I argued that no one could, in principle, love every human equally and to the deepest degree possible. Thomas Talbott has objected and argues that a model of the divine love extended equally to all best captures the idea of God as loving parent. I contend that Talbott’s argument fails, in part, as it implies that the divine love treats the interests of humans as (...) fungible. (shrink)