Book summary “Philosophy of Religion”: summary

Introduction

You often struggle to navigate complex religious claims and competing philosophical systems without a reliable guide. Traditional doctrines face intense scrutiny from scientific naturalism, moral dilemmas, and the stubborn presence of human suffering. You need a systematic method to evaluate these profound questions rather than relying on unexamined intuition or uncritical skepticism.

Michael Peterson provides a comprehensive framework in Philosophy of Religion to help you analyze these ultimate commitments. This volume presents rigorous contemporary philosophical debates on classical arguments for God, major challenges like evil and hiddenness, and internal religious issues. The text equips you to test your own beliefs against logic and evidence.

The book is organized into three major areas of investigation. You first examine arguments for the existence of God, such as cosmology, fine-tuning, morality, and experience. You then confront major defeaters to religious belief, including the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and scientific naturalism. You finally explore internal philosophical issues regarding revelation, religious pluralism, and divine attributes.

• Does the universe require an intelligent creator to explain its origin?
• How do you account for objective moral values without a transcendent source?
• Can religious belief survive the overwhelming reality of evil and suffering?
• What distinguishes genuine miracles from natural anomalies?
• How should you evaluate competing truth claims among world religions?

1. Cosmology and Fine-Tuning Arguments

The universe's origin and fine-tuned physical parameters are evaluated to determine whether an intelligent designer is necessary.

Cosmology and Causation

The cosmological argument investigates whether the universe has an outside cause. Philosophers remain divided on whether any uncaused cause is natural or supernatural. Robert Koons argues that the universe requires a cause distinct from itself that is uncaused. Graham Oppy argues that if an uncaused cause exists, you should prefer it as part of the natural order.

Philosophical arguments regarding the cause of the universe examine infinite causal regresses and uncaused realities. The index references concepts such as causal finitism, the Kalam Causal Principle, the Grim Reaper paradox, and the impossibility of infinite causal regresses without a first cause or necessary being.

Hypothetical supertasks like the Grim Reaper paradox demonstrate the impossibility of infinite causal regresses. Jóse Benardete's paradox involves an infinite phalanx of executioners assigned staggered deadlines to kill a victim named Fred. This results in a logical contradiction that proves causal chains must be finite.

Fred is targeted by an infinite sequence of Grim Reapers. Reaper #1 has a 12:01 a.m. deadline. Reaper #2 acts 30 seconds after midnight, and Reaper #3 acts 15 seconds after midnight. The sequence continues ad infinitum.

Accepting an a priori causal principle is necessary to avoid global skepticism about empirical knowledge. Without a priori knowledge that sensory experiences and memories are caused reliably, you could not rule out deception or uncaused random occurrences. That failure collapses your ability to gain knowledge.

Descartes' First Meditation scenario involves a powerful demon bent on deceiving the thinker about the causes of their perceptions. Cartesian skepticism tests whether you can establish secure foundations without assuming causal universalism.

Fine-Tuning and Evidence

Teleological arguments claim that features of the natural world make an intelligent designer more probable than mere chance. These arguments point to specific aspects of nature and evaluate whether a designer or random processes better explain them.

Physical evidence for fine-tuning falls into laws of physics, fundamental constants, and the initial conditions of the universe. Physicists discovered that basic structures and parameters must be adjusted with extraordinary precision for complex life to exist.

The fine-tuning of the universe's physical constants serves as evidence for the existence of God. Peterson indexes discussions regarding anthropic fine-tuning, the multiverse hypothesis, and probability principles like the restricted indifference principle and observational selection effect. You use these tools to evaluate whether a designer is necessary for life-permitting physical parameters among embodied conscious agents.

Physical parameters demonstrate extreme exactness across three main categories:

• the constants of physics, such as gravity and electromagnetism;
• the phase space of the universe and initial mass-energy configurations;
• the fundamental laws of physics permitting complex chemistry.

The strong nuclear force is stronger than gravity by a factor of $10^{40}$. The fine-tuning precision of the cosmological constant is typically estimated at $10^{120}$. Roger Penrose calculates the fraction of phase space volume required for the initial mass-energy configuration as $10^{10^{123}}$.

A lottery analogy illustrates how unexpected rarity in winning conditions increases the likelihood of rigging or design. Collins compares finding out that a lottery had one hundred million tickets instead of one hundred to discovering fine-tuning. Greater rarity shifts probability toward intentional design when an independent motivation is present.

A grand jury investigates a lottery commissioner whose sister won. They start with an initial local scenario of 100 lottery tickets, then move to a revised scenario of 100 million tickets. They realize that a larger pool of tickets increases the likelihood that the lottery was rigged.

Elliott Sober argues that the fine-tuning argument is undermined by an observational selection effect modeled on Eddington's fishing net. Using the Law of Likelihood and the principle of total evidence, Sober contends that conditioning on the observational process makes the likelihoods of God and chance equal. That equivalence renders fine-tuning unsupportive of design.

An observer uses a net with big holes in a lake and concludes that all fish are over 10 inches long. The investigator eventually discovers the net's observational selection effect, altering the conclusion about the fish population.

2. Morality, Experience, and Miracles

Objective moral values, mystical religious experiences, and historical miracle reports are analyzed for their evidential weight.

Authors such as William Ruse, Michael Linehan, and Erik Wielenberg debate whether Darwinian fitness-conferring behavior undermines moral realism or whether a robust moral framework requires a divine ground. Mark Linville argues that evolutionary naturalism fails to offer a proper fit for objective morality and moral knowledge, leaving moral beliefs without warrant unless anchored by a theistic framework where human moral faculties are designed to discern moral truth.

Human moral predispositions emerged because they promoted reproductive fitness, but this evolutionary origin undermines the justification for believing that moral beliefs are objectively true. According to Darwin, morality stems from social instincts overlain with rationality. Because natural selection favors traits that aid survival rather than truth tracking, a Darwinian account acts as an undercutting defeater for moral beliefs.

Linville describes how he formed the false belief that his colleague Jeff was on campus upon seeing Jeff's identical twin, illustrating how an undercutting defeater removes reasons for holding a belief even if the belief happens to be true.

Religious Experience

Religious experiences provide a source of belief that can be evaluated through epistemological principles and cross-checking mechanisms.

William Alston and Richard Swinburne defend the reliability of perceptual and mystical religious experiences using principles of credulity, while critics raise concerns about subjectivity and epistemic imperialism. Alston defines mystical perception as a direct, non-sensory, focal awareness of God that generates M-beliefs regarding divine actions and characteristics. He maintains that such experiences give initial credibility and a presumption of truth, remaining rationally acceptable unless defeated by rebutters or underminers.

Alston cites William James's case of a French-speaking Swiss whom he calls Bonnet, who felt the presence of God penetrating him altogether and telling him to do His will from day to day.

Contemplative religious communities utilize specific tests to evaluate the accuracy of particular reports of mystical perception. Alston notes that mystical reports are tested against scriptural expectations, internal fruits such as stable inner peace and spiritual growth, and external content that the subject could not have developed independently. While not infallible, these parallel the imperfect tests used for ordinary sense perception.

• Check for conformity with what would be expected by basic doctrines concerning the nature of God.
• Assess the fruits of the experience, such as a stable inner peace and growth in spirituality.
• Examine if the content of the experience is something the person would not have developed on their own.

Evan Fales argues that religious experiences cannot justify religious belief unless they are rigorously cross-checked to authenticate a divine cause. Fales maintains that because multiple causes can produce the same experiential effect, cross-checking is mandatory for any perceptual epistemic practice. He asserts that theists fail to provide necessary cross-checks and lack any testable hypothesis regarding the causal mechanism by which God appears.

Fales uses the analogy of investigating a skinned cat carcass on a lawn, where the observer must locate bloodied knives, run hemoglobin tests, and find honest eyewitnesses through systematic cross-checking.

Prophecy serves as a direct potential cross-check for mystical experience, but historical religious prophecies consistently fail rigorous testing criteria. Fales argues that prophetic revelations could authenticate mystical experiences if they met strict methodological conditions. However, actual recorded prophecies in biblical and religious traditions fail to satisfy these criteria, demonstrating a consistent record of failure.

• Ensure the prophecy is of some event not intrinsically likely.
• Ensure the prophecy is not self-fulfilling or brought about by the prophet or followers.
• Demonstrate that the prophecy was made prior to the events counting as its fulfillment.
• Keep the prophecy sufficiently specific and unambiguous to preclude ex post facto reinterpretation.
• Verify the fulfillment of the prophecy independently of the say-so of partisans or tradition.

Fales points to specific biblical passages containing unfulfilled or false prophecies, such as Matthew 16:27, Joshua 4:7, Ezekiel 26:14-21, and Isaiah 60:1-62:12.

Miracles and Testimony

Evaluating miraculous claims involves analyzing witness testimony, background beliefs, and probability calculations using Bayesian updating.

Drawing on David Hume and modern defenders, the text explores how miracle reports and the empty tomb scenario interact with background beliefs and probability factors. Mere unlikelihood of an event does not automatically invalidate the credibility of testimony, as demonstrated by probability models of liars and lottery numbers. Anderson and Pruss use a numerical model with a lottery having a 1 in 25 million probability. They show that even an unreliable liar who lies one-third of the time can provide an evidential boost because a liar is unlikely to randomly select a very specific messy sequence.

Lotto Texas drawing on December 2, 2017, with winning numbers 12, 15, 17, 31, 38, and 47, which has a probability of approximately 1 in 25 million across 75 million hypothetical lottery runs.

Rejecting all miracle reports via the tainted testimony objection is flawed, similar to incorrectly dismissing all reports of human age. Instead, evaluators must screen for a testifier's motivation for gain, vulnerability to wishful thinking or mistakes, and situational risks such as the likelihood of getting caught or facing persecution. Televangelists seeking money, fame, and power provide clear reasons for skepticism due to murky financial records, whereas scholars risking their reputations face high chances of getting caught fabricating data.

Subjective Bayesianism demonstrates mathematically that witness testimony to a resurrection leaves rational observers far more confident in error, deceit, or illusion. Using formal credence functions and Bayesian updating ratios, Ahmed shows that the initial prior probability of a miracle is practically zero compared to naturalistic alternatives. Since explanatory power for the testimony itself is roughly equal between miracle and fraud hypotheses, the extremely low prior probability of a resurrection ensures that naturalistic error vastly outweighs miraculous claims.

Historical accounts of Ewen McDonald, a 19-year-old Scottish soldier convicted of murder in Newcastle in 1754 who partially survived hanging and execution before being dispatched during dissection.

3. Evil, Hiddenness, and Science

The presence of suffering, divine hiddenness, and scientific naturalism challenge traditional religious belief.

Evil and Hiddenness

Discussions encompass noseeum and noconceiveum arguments regarding evil, Plantinga's free will defense, and the relationship between divine hiddenness and agnosticism. Analogies of a hiding child and loving mother illustrate the problem of divine hiddenness.

William Rowe argues that the existence of pervasive and horrendous evil provides strong evidence that an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God does not exist. Rowe posits that there are evils which an omnibenevolent and omnipotent being would have no justifying reason to permit. Since God would only allow evil to achieve an outweighing good or prevent a worse evil, and given the massive amount of apparently pointless suffering, it is rational to conclude that God likely does not exist.

Rowe illustrates this with two cases: a fawn horribly burned in a forest fire that suffers for five days before dying, and a five-year-old girl in Flint, Michigan, who was brutally beaten, raped, and strangled.

Theists often respond to the problem of evil by arguing that human ignorance of divine goods makes our failure to see justifications irrelevant. Drawing an analogy to good parents who permit a child to undergo painful surgery for reasons the child cannot comprehend, theists argue that God's mind infinitely transcends ours, meaning justifying goods are beyond our ken. Rowe counters that an omnipotent deity differs from a finite parent and would provide conscious presence and comfort during suffering, which is often absent.

A loving parent permits a very young child to suffer a painful surgical procedure for a good the child cannot comprehend.

Daniel Howard-Snyder and Michael Bergmann argue that arguments from evil rely on flawed noseeum assumptions based on human cognitive limitations. The authors introduce noseeum arguments—inferring that something does not exist simply because we do not detect it. They argue that just as we cannot assume there is no extraterrestrial life merely because we detect no signals, we cannot assume there are no God-justifying reasons simply because finite humans fail to discern them.

J.L. Schellenberg argues via analogy that an all-loving God would not remain hidden from sincere seekers, and since such hiddenness occurs, atheism is justified. Schellenberg uses analogies of a mother hiding during hide-and-seek, a child with amnesia searching for a mother, and a lost child in a rainforest calling out to an unresponsive mother to illustrate that a loving caretaker would respond to earnest requests. Because God possesses unsurpassable love and omnipotence, God would not be hidden from sincere seekers who want a relationship, making atheism a rational conclusion.

A child playing hide and seek in the woods or trapped in a rainforest calling out for a mother who does not answer.

The Conceptual Argument posits that a perfectly loving God would ensure sufficient evidence is available to all nonresisters capable of a personal relationship. Analyzing the concept of divine love shows that God must desire a personal relationship with all receptive individuals. Because personal relationship requires belief, and belief is involuntary, God must provide sufficient evidence for belief to nonresisters. The absence of such evidence for many people indicates that the traditional God does not exist.

Science and Religion

Science challenges religion by contradicting specific religious claims and steadily diminishing the need for divine explanations. Michael Ruse argues that the scientific enterprise undermines religious doctrines across the physical, life, and social sciences, making traditional tenets such as special creation and divine intervention increasingly untenable.

Ruse notes how geology undermined the traditional biblical timeline of a six-thousand-year-old earth and the historical reality of a worldwide Noah's flood.

The perceived conflict between science and religion is actually a deeper philosophical clash between naturalism and theism. Michael Peterson argues that science itself does not inherently conflict with religion; rather, the conflict arises when science is co-opted by a naturalist worldview that rules out the supernatural a priori and dismisses religious knowledge as illegitimate.

Theism provides a superior philosophical home for science because it accounts for the rational intelligibility of the universe and human cognitive faculties. Peterson contends that science rests on two assumptions: a lawfully ordered universe and human minds capable of comprehending it. Theism renders these assumptions far less epistemically surprising than naturalism does, where both order and reason emerge purely by chance from nonrational matter.

4. Internal Theological and Philosophical Debates

Internal religious issues address biblical goodness, pluralism, evidence requirements, gender, risk, dualism, and hell.

Wes Morriston argues that the biblical record shows God lashing out in disproportionate anger. God sends poisonous serpents to bite grumbling Israelites, orders the execution of all firstborns in Egypt during the final plague, and tells King Saul to completely destroy the Amalekites, sparing neither infants nor nursing children. God sends 70,000 Israelites killed by a plague sent by God after David conducted a census during their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. Mark C. Murphy argues that the perfect goodness of the God of the Hebrew Bible should be understood as goodness-as-excellence rather than human-centered moral goodness. A majestic mountain range or a powerful hurricane can cause human death and destruction, yet they retain a wonderful, attractive goodness-as-excellence that is worthy of admiration.

David Basinger and Peter Byrne examine different philosophical perspectives to determine the epistemic status of religious claims. Basinger argues that an adherent of a self-consistent and comprehensive religious belief system can justifiably claim exclusive truth even in the absence of objective, non-question-begging criteria. Alvin Plantinga suggests that a Christian may rely on the Internal Witness of the Holy Spirit to maintain a justified belief that their perspective is superior despite lacking objective proofs.

Religious evidentialism states that a religious belief is justified only if it is supported by sufficient evidence. Raymond VanArragon argues that evidence is not required for religious belief in terms of moral justification, epistemic justification, or rationality. In reformed epistemology, belief in God is triggered by experiences like a perception of divine forgiveness or a spontaneous hymn of thanks on a spring morning, functioning similarly to basic perceptual or memory beliefs through the sensus divinitatis.

Biblical Morality and Pluralism

Michael Rea argues for the equal accuracy thesis based on the premise that men and women are created equally in the image of God. If God has strongly gendered attributes, the doctrine of the Trinity implies that God is equally masculine and feminine, making exclusive masculine characterizations metaphysically misleading. Kathryn Pogin argues that conceiving of God as male is practically and epistemically harmful to both women and men. A Harris Poll from 2013 found that 39 percent of Americans believe God is male, 1 percent believe God is female, and 31 percent believe God is neither. Kathryn Pogin shares a personal story of a church member telling her as a teenager that she would struggle to find a husband because it is hard to find a man smarter than her.

William Hasker explains that if God grants human beings libertarian freedom, God inherently becomes a risk-taker who is open to surprise and disappointment. Hasker introduces the transfer-of-responsibility principle to show that if theological determinism is true, God becomes the sufficient cause of sin and moral evil. An undercover policeman buying narcotics from a drug dealer who already had the prior intention to commit the offense maintains the dealer's responsibility, unlike entrapment where there is no prior disposition.

• Apply the transfer-of-responsibility principle by evaluating whether an initiator who establishes causal conditions of wrongdoing absorbs the moral blame.

Faith, Gender, Freedom, and Damnation

The doctrine of eternal damnation is evaluated for its compatibility with the Christian concept of a perfectly good and loving God.

Lynne Rudder Baker defends the constitution view, arguing that human persons are entirely material beings defined by a first-person perspective. The text indexes positions on substance dualism, emergent dualism, and the constitution view associated with Lynne Rudder Baker and Dean Zimmerman to address personal identity and the first-person perspective.

The problem of hell is an extension of the broader problem of evil, questioning how an omnipotent and perfectly good God can permit eternal damnation. C.S. Lewis's work The Great Divorce is referenced in relation to the choice of damnation. Walls utilizes Alvin Plantinga's free will defense, asserting that genuine personal relationships and moral choices require libertarian freedom, which is incompatible with determinism.

10 Key Ideas

1. The cosmological argument maintains that the universe requires a distinct, uncaused cause to avoid an impossible infinite causal regress.
2. The fine-tuning of fundamental physical constants and initial mass-energy configurations serves as evidence for an intentional designer over random chance.
3. Evolutionary naturalism acts as an undercutting defeater for moral beliefs because natural selection favors reproductive fitness rather than truth-tracking.
4. Mystical religious experiences provide an initial presumption of truth and credibility that can be rationally maintained unless defeated by counterarguments.
5. Subjective Bayesianism demonstrates mathematically that witness testimony to a resurrection leaves rational observers far more confident in naturalistic error or deceit.
6. William Rowe argues that the existence of pervasive and horrendous evil provides strong evidence that an all-powerful and perfectly good God does not exist.
7. J.L. Schellenberg contends that an all-loving God would not remain hidden from sincere seekers, making atheism a rational conclusion in the absence of sufficient evidence.
8. Theism provides a superior philosophical home for science because it accounts for the rational intelligibility of the universe and human cognitive faculties much better than naturalism.
9. Mark C. Murphy argues that the perfect goodness of the God of the Hebrew Bible should be understood as goodness-as-excellence rather than human-centered moral goodness.
10. Jerry Walls utilizes Alvin Plantinga's free will defense to address the problem of hell, asserting that genuine personal relationships and moral choices require libertarian freedom.