Some of the brightest scientific minds of our time, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking, have made incredible insights into the earliest origins of the universe, but have failed to ultimately discover why there is something rather than nothing why we exist. In A Case for the Existence of God, Dean L. Overman examines the latest theories about the origins of the universe and explains why even the most sophisticated science can only take us so far. Ultimately we must make a leap of faith to understand the world, and Overman argues that a leap into theism provides the most satisfying conclusions. Overman explores fundamental questions about why our world exists and how it functions, using principles of logic, physics, and theology. In a time when religion and science are often portrayed as diametrically opposed, A Case for the Existence of God presents a refreshing view of the interplay between science and religion and makes a compelling case for the existence of God and his role in our world.

Is it possible to prove or disprove God's existence? Arguments for the existence of God have taken many different forms over the centuries: in The Non-Existence of God, Nicholas Everitt considers all of the arguments and examines the role that reason and knowledge play in the debate over God's existence. He draws on recent scientific disputes over neo-Darwinism, the implication of 'big bang' cosmology, and the temporal and spatial size of the universe; and discusses some of the most recent work on the subject, leading to a controversial conclusion.

In the Old Testament, God wrestles with a man (and loses). In the Talmud, God wriggles his toes to make thunder and takes human form to shave the king of Assyria. In the New Testament, God is made flesh and dwells among humans. For religious thinkers trained in Greek philosophy and its deep distaste for matter, sacred scripture can be distressing. A philosophically respectable God should be untainted by sensuality, yet the God of sacred texts is often embarrassingly sensual. Setting experts' minds at ease was neither easy nor simple, and often faith and logic were stretched to their limits. Focusing on examples from both Christian and Jewish sources, from the Bible to sources from the Late Middle Ages, Aviad Kleinberg examines the way Christian and Jewish philosophers, exegetes, and theologians attempted to reconcile God's supposed ineffability with numerous biblical and postbiblical accounts of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and even tasting the almighty. The conceptual entanglements ensnaring religious thinkers, and the strange, ingenious solutions they used to extricate themselves, tell us something profound about human needs and divine attributes, about faith, hope, and cognitive dissonance.

God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism is a defense of God's aseity and unique status as the Creator of all things apart from Himself in the face of the challenge posed by mathematical Platonism. After providing the biblical, theological, and philosophical basis for the traditional doctrine of divine aseity, William Lane Craig explains the challenge presented to that doctrine by the Indispensability Argument for Platonism, which postulates the existence of uncreated abstract objects. Craig provides detailed examination of a wide range of responses to that argument, both realist and anti-realist, with a view toward assessing the most promising options for the theist. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, this groundbreaking volume engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology.

This book offers a clear and constructive account of the nature and attributes of God. It addresses the doctrine of God from exegetical, historical, and constructive-theological perspectives, bringing the biblical portrayal of God in relationship to the world into dialogue with prominent philosophical and theological questions. The book engages questions such as: Does God change? Does God have emotions? Does God know the future? Is God entirely good and loving? How can God be one and three? Chapters correspond to the major metaphysical and moral attributes of God.

Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I lays the groundwork for a constructive contribution to the contemporary debate regarding divine action. Noted scholar, William J. Abraham argues that the concept of divine action is not a closed concept-like knowledge-but an open concept with a variety of context-dependent meanings. The volume charts the history of debate about divine action among key Anglophone philosophers of religion, and observes that they were largely committed to this erroneous understanding of divine action as a closed concept. After developing an argument that divine action should be understood as an open, fluid concept, Abraham engages the work of William Alston, Process metaphysics, quantum physics, analytic Thomist philosophy of religion, and the theology of Kathryn Tanner. Abraham argues that divine action as an open concept must be shaped by distinctly theological considerations, and thus all future work on divine action among philosophers of religion must change to accord with this vision. Only deep engagement with the Christian theological tradition will remedy the problems ailing contemporary discourse on divine action.

Yujin Nagasawa presents a new, stronger version of perfect being theism, the conception of God as the greatest possible being. Although perfect being theism is the most common form of monotheism in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition its truth has been disputed by philosophers and theologians for centuries. Nagasawa proposes a new, game-changing defence of perfect being theism by developing what he calls the 'maximal concept of God'. Perfect being theists typically maintain that God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being; according to Nagasawa, God should be understood rather as a being that has the maximal consistent set of knowledge, power, and benevolence. Nagasawa argues that once we accept the maximal concept we can establish perfect being theism on two grounds. First, we can refute nearly all existing arguments against perfect being theism simultaneously. Second, we can construct a novel, strengthened version of the modal ontological argument for perfect being theism. Nagasawa concludes that the maximal concept grants us a unified defence of perfect being theism that is highly effective and economical.

Marx, Nietzche, and Freud are among the most influential of modern atheists. The distinctive feature of their challenge to theistic and specifically Christian belief is expressed by Paul Ricoeur when he calls them the "masters of suspicion." While skepticism directs its critique to the truth or evidential basis of belief, suspicion asks two different, intimately intertwined questions: what are the motives that lead to this belief? and what function does it play, what work does it do for the individuals and communities that adopt it. What suspicion suspects is that the survival value of religious beliefs depends on satisfying desires and interests that the believing soul and the believing community are not eager to acknowledge because they violate the values they profess, as when, for example, talk about justice is a mask for deep-seated resentment and the desire for revenge. For this reason, the hermeneutics of suspicion is a theory, or group of theories, of self-deception: ideology critique in Marx, genealogy in Nietzsche, and psychoanalysis in Freud. Suspicion and Faith argues that the appropriate religious response ("the religious uses of modern atheism") to these critiques is not to try to refute or deflect them, but rather to acknowledge their force in a process of self-examination.

This is the first full-length study of the doctrine of the Trinity from the standpoint of analytic philosophical theology. William Hasker reviews the evidence concerning fourth-century pro-Nicene trinitarianism in the light of recent developments in the scholarship on this period, arguing for particular interpretations of crucial concepts. He then reviews and criticizes recent work on the issue of the divine three-in-oneness, including systematic theologians such as Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, and Zizioulas, and analytic philosophers of religion such as Leftow, van Inwagen, Craig, and Swinburne. In the final part of the book he develops a carefully articulated social doctrine of the Trinity which is coherent, intelligible, and faithful to scripture and tradition.

This volume explores the philosophical issues involved in the idea of petitionary prayer, where this is conceived as an activity designed to influence the action of the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God of traditional theism. Theists have always recognized various logical and moral limits to divine action in the world, but do these limits leave any space among God's reasons for petitionary prayer to make a difference? Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation develops a new account of the conditions required for a petitionary prayer to be answered by employing the notion of contrastive explanation. With careful attention to recent developments in metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory, Scott A. Davison surveys the contemporary literature on this question. He considers questions about human freedom and responsibility in relation to different views of divine providence, along with the puzzles inherent in Christian teachings concerning petitionary prayer. Davison develops new challenges to the coherence of the idea of answered petitionary prayer based upon the nature of divine freedom, the limits of human knowledge, and the nature of those good things that require a recipient's permission before they can be given. He proposes new defences, building upon careful analysis of the shortcomings of previous proposals and clarifying the issues for future debate.

Many philosophers believe that God has been put to rest. Naturalism is the default position, and the naturalist can explain what needs to be explained without recourse to God. This book agrees that we should be naturalists, but it rejects the more prevalent scientific naturalism in favour of an 'expansive' naturalism inspired by David Wiggins and John McDowell. It is argued that expansive naturalism can accommodate the idea of God, and that the expansive naturalist has unwittingly paved the way towards a form of naturalism which poses a genuine challenge to the atheist. It follows that the traditional naturalism versus theism debate must be reconfigured: naturalism and theism are no longer logically incompatible; rather, they can both be true. Fiona Ellis draws on a wide range of thinkers from theology and philosophy, and spans the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy. She tackles various philosophical problems including the limits of nature and the status of value; some theological problems surrounding the natural/supernatural relation, the Incarnation, and the concept of myth; and offers a model-inspired by the secular expansive naturalist's conception of philosophy-to comprehend the relation between philosophy and theology.

Contemporary Jews often find meaning in Judaism's family and communal orientation, its beautiful rituals, its enriching culture, its sense of ethnic rootedness, and its moral values. For the classical Jewish tradition, however, all of these features of Judaism depend on a belief in God. Since many modern Jews do not know what to make of that belief, it is often ignored. They may be inspired by Judaism's high regard for education and its passion for justice, but their belief in God rests on childhood images of the Almighty. They are often embarrassed and uneasy, for they sense that their attachment to Judaism may be based upon intellectual quicksand.

The Coherence of Theism investigates what it means, and whether it is coherent, to say that there is a God. Richard Swinburne concludes that despite philosophical objections, most traditional claims about God are coherent (that is, do not involve contradictions); and although some of the most important claims are coherent only if the words by which they are expressed are being used in analogical senses, this is the way in which theologians have usually claimed that they are being used. When the first edition of this book was published in 1977, it was the first book in the new 'analytic' tradition of philosophy of religion to discuss these issues. Since that time there have been very many books and discussions devoted to them, and this new, substantially rewritten, second edition takes account of these discussions and of new developments in philosophy generally over the past 40 years. These discussions have concerned how to analyse the claim that God is 'omnipotent', whether God can foreknow human free actions, whether God is everlasting or timeless, and what it is for God to be a 'necessary being'. On all these issues this new edition has new things to say.

Does God's existence make a difference to how we explain morality? Mark C. Murphy critiques the two dominant theistic accounts of morality-natural law theory and divine command theory-and presents a novel third view. He argues that we can value natural facts about humans and their good, while keeping God at the centre of our moral explanations. The characteristic methodology of theistic ethics is to proceed by asking whether there are features of moral norms that can be adequately explained only if we hold that such norms have some sort of theistic foundation. But this methodology, fruitful as it has been, is one-sided. God and Moral Law proceeds not from the side of the moral norms, so to speak, but from the God side of things: what sort of explanatory relationship should we expect between God and moral norms given the existence of the God of orthodox theism? Mark C. Murphy asks whether the conception of God in orthodox theism as an absolutely perfect being militates in favor of a particular view of the explanation of morality by appeal to theistic facts. He puts this methodology to work and shows that, surprisingly, natural law theory and divine command theory fail to offer the sort of explanation of morality that we would expect given the existence of the God of orthodox theism. Drawing on the discussion of a structurally similar problem-that of the relationship between God and the laws of nature-Murphy articulates his new account of the relationship between God and morality, one in which facts about God and facts about nature cooperate in the explanation of moral law.

Given that we meet evils in every quarter of the world, could it be governed by an all-good and all-powerful deity? Whilst some philosophers argue that the problem of evil is strong evidence for atheism, others claim that all of the evils in our world can be explained as requirements for deeper goods. On the other hand, skeptical theists believe in God, but struggle with the task of explaining the role of evils in our world. Skeptical theism tackles the problem of evil by proposing a limited skepticism about the purposes of God, and our abilities to determine whether any given instance is truly an example of gratuitous evil. This collection, of 22 original essays, presents cutting-edge work on skeptical theistic responses to the problem of evil and the persistent objections that such responses invite. Divided into four sections, the volume discusses the epistemology of sceptical theism, conditions of reasonable epistemic access, the implications for theism, and the implications for morality.

Modernism's theological project was an attempt to explain two things: firstly, how faith might enable persons to experience their lives as hanging together, even in the face of disintegrating forces like injustice, tragedy, and luck; and secondly, how one could see such faith, and so a life held together by it, as self-expressive. Modern theologians such as Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ritschl, and Tillich thus offer accounts of how one's life would have to hang together such that one could identify with it; of the oppositions which stand in the way of such hanging-together; of God as the one by whom oppositions are overcome, such that one can have faith that one's life ultimately hangs together; and of what such faith would have to be like in order for one to identify with it, too. So understood, modern theology not only sheds light on faith's potential role in enabling persons to identify with their lives, but stands in unexpected continuity with contemporary 'contextual' theologies. This book offers clear, careful readings of modernism's key figures in order to explain their relevance to practical concerns and to contemporary understandings of faith.

Brian Leftow offers a theory of the possible and the necessary in which God plays the chief role, and a new sort of argument for God's existence. It has become usual to say that a proposition is possible just in case it is true in some 'possible world' (roughly, some complete history a universe might have) and necessary just if it is true in all. Thus much discussion of possibility and necessity since the 1960s has focussed on the nature and existence (or not) of possible worlds. God and Necessity holds that there are no such things, nor any sort of abstract entity. It assigns the metaphysical 'work' such items usually do to God and events in God's mind, and reduces 'broadly logical' modalities to causal modalities, replacing possible worlds in the semantics of modal logic with God and His mental events. Leftow argues that theists are committed to theist modal theories, and that the merits of a theist modal theory provide an argument for God's existence. Historically, almost all theist modal theories base all necessary truth on God's nature. Leftow disagrees: he argues that necessary truths about possible creatures and kinds of creatures are due ultimately to God's unconstrained imagination and choice. On his theory, it is in no sense part of the nature of God that normal zebras have stripes (if that is a necessary truth). Stripy zebras are simply things God thought up, and they have the nature they do simply because that is how God thought of them. Thus Leftow's essay in metaphysics takes a half-step toward Descartes' view of modal truth, and presents a compelling theist theory of necessity and possibility.

Christianity has traditionally claimed to have the unique truth about God. But Christians have been challenged for two thousand years by the existence of genuine devotion, goodness, and insight in other faiths. This book gives a guide to different ways of understanding the relationship between faiths, investigating the origins, strengths, and weaknesses of popular views. It concludes that the best way forward is honestly to admit that no faith has a full understanding of God. Christianity, like other faiths, is a provisional attempt to understand God, and should have the humility to recognise the limitations of its vision.This humility should lead Christians to recognise that other faiths may get things right, and equally that Christianity may get things wrong. Rather than placing their own faith on a unique pedestal, Christians should recognise that all faiths operate on a level playing field, and have much to learn from each other. If believers in different faiths can take this approach to each other, they can move forward together to build understanding, and to resist fundamentalism and religious conflict.

The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology is the first collection to consider the full breadth of natural theology from both historical and contemporary perspectives and to bring together leading scholars to offer accessible high-level accounts of the major themes. The volume embodies and develops the recent revival of interest in natural theology as a topic of serious critical engagement. Frequently misunderstood or polemicized, natural theology is an under-studied yet persistent and pervasive presence throughout the history of thought about ultimate reality - from the classical Greek theology of the philosophers to twenty-first-century debates in science and religion. Of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this authoritative handbook draws on the very best of contemporary scholarship to present a critical overview of the subject area. Thirty-eight new essays trace the transformations of natural theology in different historical and religious contexts, the place of natural theology in different philosophical traditions and diverse scientific disciplines, and the various cultural and aesthetic approaches to natural theology to reveal a rich seam of multi-faceted theological reflection rooted in human nature and the environments within which we find ourselves.

Loriliai Biernacki and Philip Clayton offer a collection of groundbreaking new essays on panentheism. Not to be confused with pantheism-the ancient Greek notion that God is everywhere, an animistic force in rocks and trees-panentheism suggests that God is both in the world, immanent, and also beyond the confines of mere matter, transcendent. One of the fundamental premises in this book is that panentheism, despite being unlabeled until the nineteenth century, is not merely a modern Western invention. The contributors examine a number of the world's established and ancient religious traditions-Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, among others-to draw out the panentheistic dimensions of these traditions and the possibilities they suggest. Panentheism is not simply an esoteric, potentially heretical, and habitually mystical vision of the world's great religious pasts; it persists today with a proper name and a lineage. As this volume demonstrates, a new paradigm is emerging in modern panentheism, one eminently suited to a world view that can no longer shake off the realities of our evolving species and our evolving technological world. Panentheism's enticingly heretical vision of the relationship between the divine and matter has historically been denied a serious place in scholarship. As Panentheism across the World's Traditions shows, the dynamism between matter and spirit that panentheism offers has had a profound influence in the modern world.

Discover the astonishing evidence for intelligent design in this New York Times bestselling book by award-winning journalist Lee Strobel. "My road to atheism was paved by science . . . but, ironically, so was my later journey to God," Strobel says. During his academic years, Lee Strobel became convinced that God was obsolete, a belief that colored his journalism career. Science had made the idea of a Creator irrelevant--or so Strobel thought. But today science points in a different direction. A diverse and impressive body of research has increasingly supported the conclusion that the universe was intelligently designed. At the same time, Darwinism has faltered in the face of concrete facts and hard reason. Has science discovered God? At the very least, it's giving faith an immense boost, as new findings emerge about the incredible complexity of our universe. Join Strobel as he reexamines the theories that once led him away from God. Through his compelling and highly readable account, you'll encounter the mind-stretching discoveries from cosmology, cellular biology, DNA research, astronomy, physics, and human consciousness that present compelling evidence in The Case for a Creator. Also available: The Case for a Creator small group video study and study guide, Spanish edition, kids' edition, student edition, and more.

In Omnisubjectivity: A Defense of a Divine attribute, Linda Zagzebski reflects on how the modern discovery of subjectivity should influence the way we think about God's attributes. Her examination of recent conceptions of omnipresence and omniscience reveals that if God truly has all possible cognitive perfections, then a new attribute should rightly be applied to God which the 'traditional attributes' do not address: omnisubjectivity. Zagzebski describes omnisubjectivity as the complete and accurate grasp of every conscious state of every conscious being from that being's first person perspective. Thus, God is not only omniscient, knowing that Mary sees red. But God is omnisubjective, knowing, from the first person perspective, the quality, qualia, and phenomenal consciousness of what it is like for Mary to see red. In this intriguing lecture, Zagzebski examines exactly why God must be omnisubjective and addresses the possible moral and ethical concerns of what it means for God to be fully present in His creatures' subjectivity.

This is the first full-length study of the doctrine of the Trinity from the standpoint of analytic philosophical theology. William Hasker reviews the evidence concerning fourth-century pro-Nicene trinitarianism in the light of recent developments in the scholarship on this period, arguing for particular interpretations of crucial concepts. He then reviews and criticizes recent work on the issue of the divine three-in-oneness, including systematic theologians such as Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, and Zizioulas, and analytic philosophers of religion such as Leftow, van Inwagen, Craig, and Swinburne. In the final part of the book he develops a carefully articulated social doctrine of the Trinity which is coherent, intelligible, and faithful to scripture and tradition.

From Morality to Metaphysics offers an argument for the existence of God, based on our most fundamental moral beliefs. Angus Ritchie engages with a range of the most significant secular moral philosophers of our time, and argues that they all face a common difficulty which only theism can overcome. The book begins with a defence of the 'deliberative indispensability' of moral realism, arguing that the practical deliberation human beings engage in on a daily basis only makes sense if they take themselves to be aiming at an objective truth. Furthermore, when humans engage in practical deliberation, they necessarily take their processes of reasoning to have some ability to track the truth. Ritchie's central argument builds on this claim, to assert that only theism can adequately explain our capacity for knowledge of objective moral truths. He demonstrates that we need an explanation as well as a justification of these cognitive capacities. Evolutionary biology is not able to generate the kind of explanation which is required-and, in consequence, all secular philosophical accounts are forced either to abandon moral objectivism or to render the human capacity for moral knowledge inexplicable. This case is illustrated with discussions of a wide range of moral philosophers including Simon Blackburn, Thomas Scanlon, Philippa Foot, and John McDowell. Ritchie concludes by arguing that only purposive accounts of the universe (such as theism and Platonism) can account for human moral knowledge. Among such purposive accounts, From Morality to Metaphysics makes the case for theism as the most satisfying, intelligible explanation of our cognitive capacities.