Arif Ahmed is Reader in Philosophy at Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius. He writes mainly on decision theory, but also has an interest in religion and has debated whether God exists against William Lane Craig, Tariq Ramadan, Rowan Williams and others. He is an atheist and a classical liberal, his philosophical outlook being most closely allied with those of David Hume and Friedrich Hayek.

William P. Alston (1921–2009) was Professor Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Syracuse University. He made many contributions in philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. His books include Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (1991) and Beyond “Justification”: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (2005).

Charity Anderson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University. Her research is primarily in epistemology and philosophy of religion, with a focus on issues concerning fallibilism, evidence, epistemic modals, invariantism, and knowledge norms. She is currently engaged in a research project on the topic of divine hiddenness.

Louise Antony is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts. She has published many articles in philosophy of mind, epistemology, feminism, and philosophy of religion, and co‐edited two volumes: A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (1993) with Charlotte Witt, and Chomsky and His Critics (2003) with Norbert Hornstein. She edited the anthology Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (2010) which includes her own essay “For the Love of Reason.”

Lynne Rudder Baker (1944–2017) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. She is best known for her work in metaphysics, and her key books include Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (2001), and Naturalism and the First‐Person Perspective (2013).

David Basinger is Professor of Philosophy and the Chief Academic Officer at Roberts Wesleyan College. Current research interests include epistemic humility, religious diversity, and the interplay between divine control and human freedom. He is the author of the “Religious Diversity” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and his most recent book is Miracles (2018) in the Cambridge Press “Elements in the Philosophy of Religion” series.

Michael Bergmann is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. In addition to dozens of articles in epistemology and philosophy of religion in journals and edited volumes, he is author of Justification without Awareness (2006) and co‐editor of Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (2011), Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief (2014), Reason and Faith (2016), and Intellectual Assurance: Essays on Traditional Epistemic Internalism (2016).

Peter Byrne is Emeritus Professor of Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion at King's College London. He is the author of Prologomena to Religious Pluralism (1995) and seven other books in ethics and the philosophy of religion. He is a past editor of Religious Studies: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion.

Robin Collins is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. He has written over forty‐five substantial articles and book chapters in philosophy, spanning the areas of philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mind. He is a leading expert on the fine‐tuning of the universe for life and its philosophical implications. His current work is on how the universe appears to be fine‐tuned to optimize scientific discovery.

Evan Fales is emeritus faculty at the University of Iowa. In the area of philosophy of religion, he has written on explanations for mystical experience and its significance as evidence for theism, divine command theory, Biblical hermeneutics, the problem of evil, the moral content of the Bible, miracles, and other topics. His book Divine Intervention: Metaphysical and Epistemological Puzzles (2015) examines questions related to whether and how an immaterial god can interact with the world.

William Hasker is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Huntington University, where he taught from 1966 until 2000. He was the editor of Christian Scholar’s Review from 1985 to 1994, and the editor of Faith and Philosophy from 2000 until 2007. He has contributed numerous articles to journals and reference works, and is the author of Metaphysics (1983), God, Time, and Knowledge (1989), The Emergent Self (1999), Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God (2004), The Triumph of God Over Evil (2008), and Metaphysics and the Tri‐ Personal God (2013).

Paul Helm is Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion Emeritus, King's College, London, UK. Before that he taught in the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool. Among his books are Eternal God 2nd edition (2011), and John Calvin's Ideas (2006). His latest book is Human Nature from Calvin to Edwards (2018).

Daniel Howard‐Snyder is Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University. His interests include philosophy of religion and epistemology. He is author of dozens of articles and editor of The Evidential Argument from Evil (1996) and, with Justinn McBrayer, The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil (2013).

Robert C. Koons is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught since 1987. Specializing in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion, Koons has written four books, most recently The Atlas of Reality (2017) with Tim Pickavance, and has co‐editied (with George Bealer) The Waning of Materialism (2010) and (with William Simpson and Nicholas Teh) Neo‐Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (2017). He has authored over 50 journal articles.

Mark D. Linville is Senior Research Fellow and Philosophy Tutor in the PhD Humanities program at Faulkner University. He has written numerous essays on the relationship between religion and morality, including “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (2009).

Blake McAllister is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy & Religion at Hillsdale College. He publishes mainly in epistemology, early modern philosophy, and the philosophy of religion—often at the intersection of these fields. His work has appeared in venues such as Synthese, Religious Studies, History of Philosophy Quarterly and The Journal of Scottish Philosophy.

Wes Morriston is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he taught for forty‐two years. He has published dozens of papers on various topics in philosophy of religion, including divine freedom, the problem of evil, and the Kalām cosmological argument.

Paul K. Moser is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of several books, including The Elusive God (2009), The Evidence for God (2010), The Severity of God (2013), and The God Relationship (2017). He is also editor of The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology (2005) and Jesus and Philosophy (2008). He is the co‐editor of the two book series Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society, and Cambridge Elements: Religion and Monotheism.

Mark C. Murphy is the McDevitt Professor of Religious Philosophy at Georgetown University. He works primarily at the intersection of ethics and philosophy of religion. He is the author of six books, among them God's Own Ethics: Norms of Divine Agency and the Argument from Evil (2017), God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality (2011), and Philosophy of Law: The Fundamentals (2007).

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. He is the author of Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (1996), Arguing about Gods (2006), The Best Argument against God (2013), Describing Gods (2014), Reinventing Philosophy of Religion (2014), Atheism and Agnosticism (2018), Naturalism and Religion (2018), and Atheism: The Basics (2018).

Michael L. Peterson is Professor of Philosophy at Asbury Theological Seminary. His books include C. S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview (forthcoming), God and Evil (1998), and With All Your Mind (2001). He is senior author of Reason and Religious Belief, senior editor of Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, and editor of The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings. All three have multiple editions. With Michael Ruse, he co‐authored Science, Evolution, and Religion: A Debate about Atheism and Theism (2017). He is Managing Editor of the scholarly journal Faith and Philosophy.

Kathryn Pogin is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Northwestern University and a J.D. Candidate at Yale Law School. She has done work in social epistemology and feminist philosophy. She has published a number of popular‐level pieces, including “Discrimination is Un‐Christian, Too” (2014) which was a commentary on the Supreme Court case Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and appeared in the New York Times’ philosophy blog, The Stone.

Alexander Pruss is Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, and works in metaphysics, formal epistemology, philosophy of religion, applied ethics, and philosophy of mathematics. His latest books are Infinity, Causation and Paradox (2018) and Necessary Existence (2018), co‐ authored with Joshua Rasmussen.

Michael Rea is Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2001. He is also a Professorial Fellow at the Logos Institute for Analytic & Exegetical Theology at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses primarily on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and analytic theology. His books include Metaphysics: the Basics (2014), and World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism (2002).

William L. Rowe (1931–2015) was Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Purdue University. He specialized in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, and his work on the problem of evil remains extremely influential. His books include The Cosmological Argument (1998), God and the Problem of Evil (2001), and Can God be Free? (2006).

Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University. He is the author or editor of over fifty books. He was the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy. He has co‐edited the Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species (2008) and recently edited The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Charles Darwin and Evolutionary Thought (2013) which won a PROSE award. Extending his Darwinian analysis of philosophical issues it The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and their Battle to Understand Human Conflict (2019).

J. L. Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University. He is the author of half a dozen books, including The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy's New Challenge to Belief in God (2015). His articles have appeared in such journals as American Philosophical Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Faith and Philosophy, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, and Religious Studies, as well as in edited collections published by such presses as Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press.

Elliott Sober is a philosopher of science at University of Wisconsin‐Madison. His interests center on probability theory and evolutionary biology. His books include Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (1998, co‐authored with David Sloan Wilson), Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science (2008), Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? (2011), and Ockham’s Razors: A User’s Manual (2015). He is also winner of the 2014 Carl Hempel Prize for lifetime achievement in Philosophy of Science, awarded by the Philosophy of Science Association.

Thomas Talbott is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. His publications in the area of his topic in this volume include “The Doctrine of Everlasting Punishment” in Faith and Philosophy (1990), the entry on universalism in Jerry Walls (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (2007), “Grace, Character Formation, and Predestination unto Glory” in Joel Buenting (ed.), The Problem of Hell: A Philosophical Anthology (2010), The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (2014) and “Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017).

Raymond J. VanArragon is Professor of Philosophy at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN. He has published many articles in philosophy of religion, including the entry on “Reformed Epistemology” in the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion. He is also editor (with Kelly James Clark) of Evidence and Religious Belief (2011) and author of Key Terms in Philosophy of Religion (2010).

Jerry L. Walls is a Scholar in Residence and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University. His primary focus is on philosophy of religion, ethics and Christian apologetics. He has authored, co‐authored, edited or co‐edited more than a dozen books and over eighty articles and reviews. Among these is a trilogy on the afterlife: Hell: The Logic of Damnation (1992); Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (2007); and Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (2011).

Dean W. Zimmerman has taught at the University of Notre Dame, Syracuse University, and Rutgers University, where he is co‐director of the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion and a professor in the philosophy department. Zimmerman is founding editor of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (now co‐edited with Karen Bennett), and co‐editor of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. He has co‐edited several other books, and his publications include over fifty articles.

This is the first book in Blackwell’s Contemporary Debates textbook series. It was designed to feature some of the most important current controversies in the philosophy of religion. In the Western philosophical tradition, theism – the belief that an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God exists – has been the focus of much philosophical debate and discussion. Although not a living religion itself, theism forms a significant conceptual component of three living religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Moreover, beliefs within living religions – particularly beliefs of the historic Christian faith – have also occupied the attention of philosophers of religion. So, in staking out the territory for this book, we selected some issues related to classical theism and some related to Christian faith in particular.

Most Anglo‐American philosophy is oriented toward the rigorous analysis of ideas, arguments, and positions – and this orientation certainly flourishes in the philosophical treatment of religion. Since the analytic approach lends itself to crisp, straightforward debate, we have made “debate” the central motif of the book. With its most notable origins in Socratic dialectic, debate is essentially the interplay between opposing positions. Each debate here is organized around a key question on which recognized experts take drastically different positions. For each question, one expert on the subject answers in the affirmative and develops his or her argument, another answers in the negative with a corresponding argument. Brief rejoinders are also included to allow writers to clarify further their own positions, identify weaknesses in the opposing position, and point out directions for further discussion. Each debate on a given question has a short editorial introduction, and then the following structure: Affirmative Essay – Negative Essay – Reply to Negative Position – Reply to Positive Position.

Teach the conflicts! We are convinced of the pedagogical value of teaching vigorous, well‐argued debate for encouraging students to sharpen their own critical abilities and formulate their own points of view. The noteworthy growth and vibrancy of contemporary philosophy of religion provide a wide range of exciting topics for debate. From this rich vein of discussion, we have chosen topics that fall into three general categories: those involving attacks on religious belief, those involving arguments for religious belief, and those involving internal evaluation of the coherence or appropriateness of certain religious beliefs. In the first two categories, the debates are waged between theists and nontheists; in the last category, the debates are largely between religious believers who differ over the implications of their faith commitments. In all, these debates provide an ideal format not simply for students but for professional philosophers and interested nonprofessionals to explore issues in the philosophy of religion.

This second edition of Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion is, like the first, intended to feature some of the most important current controversies in the philosophy of religion. The book has three sections, each containing five debates, one chapter for each. The first section includes debates about considerations in favor of religious belief, while the debates of the second section are about challenges to religious belief. The debates of the third section cover issues that are internal to religious belief.

Each chapter begins with a question for debate and follows with statements of the affirmative position, then the negative position, and then responses to each. (There are two exceptions: in Chapter 9, about the morality of the God of the Hebrew Bible, the negative position goes first; and in Chapter 12, about whether we should think of God as masculine, both essays in fact take negative positions, but for different reasons.) The essays are intended to be accessible to undergraduates, though the content will also be of interest to professional philosophers and interested nonprofessionals who wish to explore issues in the philosophy of religion. The essays are also of necessity quite brief, so they make many points that cannot be fully developed, and they do not end the discussion! For that reason, each chapter is followed by suggestions for further reading. Readers are encouraged to study further by following those suggestions and by exploring the articles and books cited in the essays themselves.

Welcome to the debates! We hope that you learn from experts in the field and use their work as a springboard for development of your own views.

Our thanks to Chris Holland for his excellent work as our research assistant, to Luke Arend and Christa Holland for their careful proofreading, to Lin Maria Riotto for creating a thorough index, and to Marissa Koors and Manish Luthra for indispensable editorial help and advice.