Interesting question. To begin, matters of "proof" are rarely involved in analytical philosophy of religion. In fact, the days of when any philosopher claims to "prove" a thesis in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science etc seem past. Philosophers for a while seem to settle on advancing good or cogent arguments (or plausible counter-arguments and counter-examples) rather than claiming to prove a point. Though there are some philosophers who do think they have proofs. Galen Strawson, for example, claims (wrongly, in my view) to have proven that no person is morally responsible for any of their acts. Proofs to one side, it is interesting to wonder whether the evidential standards differ among analytic philosophers when they consider claims in science and claims in or about religion. Roger Trigg is an interesting philosopher who contend that science requires a philosophical foundation and that foundation invites or provides some evidence for theism. Richard Swinburne takes up and...

Atheism is, indeed, a respectable philosophical stance. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism would provide a helpful overview, and for contemporary reflection on atheism you might check out the Oxford University Press book Philosophers Without God, edited by a panelist on this website. Michael Martin's book Atheism is a massive sustained argument for atheism. There are, indeed, many positive philosophical works on theism and Christianity in particular. I happen to be a Christian philosopher (or a philosopher who is a Christian) so I do not think you have been buying the wrong books! But I study and engage with the excellent and growing body of philosophical works that advance atheistic positions and I recommend these to you. Somewhat related to your question, please allow me to add an observation about the concept or category of *atheism.* English usage of the term may be somewhat fluid, but I am inclined to think that if someone (a philosopher or professor in some other field or, really, anyone at...

The Bible has been subject to enormous philosophical attention. This is not only true for all the great medieval philosophers and the philosophers in late antiquity, but for many modern philosophers such as Pascal, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant --for Kant, the book of Job was of great significance-- Kierkegaard. Historically and today, some philosophers treat the Bible as a source for the philosophy of God or the philosophy of religion, exploring concepts such as divine revelation, the divine attributes, the relationship between God and the cosmos, and so on. The Bible has been used both for constructive philosophical work *see, for example, the collection Jesus and Philosophy edited by Paul Moser* as well as for advancing philosophical objections to theism in general or specific Biblical teachings. As a general source, check out the Routledge Companion to Theism. In the 20th century I think two of the most balanced philosophers who worked constructively on the Bible are A.E. Taylor and Austin Farrer. ...

A very insightful point of view! As a panelist who has responded to lots of "God questions" on this site and who has published a bit in philosophy of religion, my overall impression is that when most users of this site (and here please note I may be off base) have theism in mind when they ask 'Does God exist?' or raise questions about the implications of the existence (or non-existence of God). Theistic views of God (for the most part) understand God to be the all powerful, all knowing, omnipresent, essentially (that is, necessarily) good, everlasting or eternal (that is, either God is outside of time or in time and without temporal origin or end), necessarily existing (that is, God has aseity or self-existence and does not exist due to the power of another being) Creator and sustainer of the cosmos. This is (roughly) how God is conceived of in traditional Judaism, Christianity, Islam and in theistic forms of Hinduism. But there are lots of particular further beliefs about God that are not shared in...

On Kant and Aristotle: Kant did not think belief in the existence of God was completely irrational nor that God probably does not exist, but he did argue that the traditional arguments justifying belief in God (and indeed the traditional domain of metaphysics) went beyond the boundaries of reason. This meant, for him, that atheism as well as theism went beyond reason, where reason is understood to involve rational speculation and argument. But Kant went on to hold that what he referred to as practical reason offers grounds for faith that there is an all just God (also faith in an ultimately just cosmos in which there would be concord between virtue and fulfillment, something that may take a miracle or an afterlife to pull off). On Aristotle: He advanced reasoned arguments for recognizing the reality of God and, in a sense, he suggests in the Ethics that our ultimate fulfillment in a life of philosophical contemplation is one that mirrors the divine, but Aristotle's God is not a providential creator and...

This is still a little confusing to me, but I take it that you may be looking for the term: Vaticinium ex eventu This occurs when a writer (whether Biblical or not) offers a prophecy that some event will occur when (it is assumed) that the writer already knows the event has taken place. In the context of the Bible, perhaps the most salient case that is the subject of controversy is the New Testament recording of Jesus predicting that the Temple will be destroyed, which it was some forty years after his death. It is not obvious, though, whether this is a case of writing ex eventu. It is possible that Jesus could have foreseen the destruction of the Temple, especially when you consider the evidence available during Jesus' lifetime of how Rome responds to rebellion and recent past cases of Jewish resistance to Roman imperial power. This is more a matter of history, than philosophy per se, though philosophers have long had an interest in thinking about the miraculous and whether it can ever be...

I go on to recommend some other texts below and address the topic of philosophical disagreements and consensus, but first a comment on Stephen Maitzen's observation about not being under any obligation to believe either side in a dispute over theistic arguments. I am not disagreeing with Stephen on this, but I do wonder about the general point of when one might be obligated to come to terms (oneself) in believing one side or another in a philosophical debate.... Here is a suggestion: Let's say you have been appointed the task of establishing a university in a developing nation in which there are different religious communities (Christian and Islamic or Hindu and Buddhist, for example). You have enough funds to establish sound programs in engineering, the sciences, languages...and now you are considering how much to devote to a philosophy department and, perhaps more specifically, you must decide whether that department or a religion department should include scholars who are well trained and are...

Very interesting! I think you have a point, but let me back up a bit. If it is necessarily the case that God is a Creator, then there is no possible world in which God does not create. In that case, if you have described a plausible state of affairs (there is a possible world in which God does not create), it seems that God is not necessarily a Creator. The claim that 'our cosmos is contingent' seems to mean that there there is no necessity that it exists: its existence is possible and its non-existence is possible. If our cosmos exists necessarily then (it seems that) there would be no possible world in which our cosmos does not exist or, putting things differently, our cosmos exists in all possible worlds. Off hand, that seems to be a tenuous claim as it seems we can imagine our cosmos not existing; we can imagine a lifeless cosmos or one in which there are no stable laws of nature that allow for suns, planets, galaxies. Maybe the following is promising: it seems unlikely that there is a...

Your question(s) / challenge(s) is/ are important and well put (no need to apologize for syntax!). Along with many (but by no means all) philosophers, I agree with what I think you are suggesting or open to in your second to last sentence: questions about the meaning and value of life involve more than calculating the amount of suffering and illusion. Indeed, I suggest that the concerns you address have a bearing on some rising cultural movements. Those of us who are theists affirm the overall goodness of there being a world such as ours (or at least we affirm the goodness of [a] God who permits evils that exist that will be overcome and redeemed by God's omnipotent love.) But a growing (though still small) group of philosophers have argued for a highly pessimistic view of life. Sometime inspired by Schopenhauer, these philosophers (and public intellectuals) have argued that it would be good if the human species ceased to be. Some have even gone further in concluding that it good for all sentient...

This is a complicated matter. Realist views of truth, including versions of the correspondence theory, hold that reality cannot or should not be split into different venues in which, say, Vishnu exists and is divine for one person, but not for another. Realists, then, hold that if Allah exists, then it is false to claim that Allah does not exist. The term "pragmatic truth" is a little puzzling to me, but perhaps what you are getting at is the idea that matters of what we call "truth" may be treated in terms of justification. So, for Saladon to claim that there is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet, is to claim that he is justified in making such a claim. I suggest, though, that such justification or epistemic theories of truth are themselves pretty hard to justify (and, hence, on its own assumptions, a justification theory of truth might not be true because it is not justified). There may be one other angle to consider. Some apparent disagreements may not be radical. Consider a dispute...