Divine Hiddenness and Divine Humility

If God exists, and if our ultimate well-being depends on having a positive relationship with Him (which requires as a first step that we believe He exists), why doesn't He make sure that we all believe in Him? Why doesn't He make His existence obvious? This traditional theological question is today much-used as an argument for atheism. In this paper I argue that the answer may have something to do with God's character, specifically God's humility.     

Divine Nature and Divine Will

This paper examines the relationship between God and those universals that characterize his nature. It is argued that God has sovereignty over his nature, even though he is not self-creating, and does not give rise to the universals that characterize his nature by any act of intellection. Rather, God is himself an act of rational willing in which all that is has its existence. Because the act that is God is one of free will, he has sovereignty over the features it displays, which include all that characterizes his nature.     

Divine Encounter

“Divine Encounter” is a poem depicting a place-based religious experience.     

Divine Omnipotence and Divine Omniscience: A Reply to Michael Martin

In Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, Michael Martin argues that to posit a God that is both omnipotent and omniscient is philosophically incoherent. I challenge this argument by proposing that a God who is necessarily omniscient is more powerful than a God who is contingently omniscient. I then argue that being omnipotent entails being omniscient by showing that for an all-powerful being to be all-powerful in any meaningful way, it must possess complete knowledge about all states of affairs and thus must be understood to be omniscient.

Divine timelessness and personhood

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Divine Unsurpassability

One historically significant model of God holds that God is a perfect being. Analytic philosophers of religion have typically understood this to mean that God is essentially unsurpassable in power, knowledge, goodness, and wisdom. Recently, however, several philosophers have argued that this is inconsistent with another common theistic position: the view that for any world that God can create, there is a better world that God could have created instead. The argument runs (roughly) as follows: if, no matter which world God creates, there’s a better creatable one, then God’s action in creating a world is necessarily surpassable. And if God’s action in creating a world is necessarily surpassable, then God is necessarily surpassable. If this argument is sound, it reveals a serious flaw in an important model of God. In what follows, I set out this argument, and I then distinguish and evaluate four replies. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.     

Divine simplicity

According to a doctrine widely held by most medieval philosophers and theologians, whether in the Muslim or Christian world, there are no metaphysical distinctions in God whatsoever. As a result of the compendious theorizing that has been done on this issue, the doctrine, usually called the doctrine of divine simplicity, has been bestowed a prominent status in both Islamic and Christian philosophical theology. In Islamic philosophy some well-known philosophers, such as Ibn Sina (980–1037) and Mulla Sadra (1571–1640), developed this doctrine through a metaphysical approach. In this paper, considering the historical order, I shall first concentrate on Ibn Sina’s view. Then I shall turn to the theory of divine simplicity of Thomas Aquinas (1225?–1274), as the most developed and comprehensive version of the medieval theories in Christian world. Finally, I will return to Islamic philosophy and explore the more complicated and mature account of the doctrine as it was introduced by Mulla Sadra according to his own philosophical principles.     

Divine Incoherence

In this note I show that Noreen Johnson misunderstands my argument and consequently fails to refute my thesis that God’s omnipotence conflicts with his omniscience.