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Affiliations
  • Faculty, Western Washington University
  • PhD, Syracuse University, 1992.

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About me
Daniel Howard-Snyder is Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University. He has a PhD from Syracuse University and a BA from Seattle Pacific University. His primary research interests are in philosophy of religion and epistemology. He has taught at Syracuse University, Wayne State University, and Seattle Pacific University; he now teaches at Western Washington University. He is the editor or co-editor of three books, The Evidential Argument from Evil (Indiana University Press, 1996), Faith, Freedom, and Rationality (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), and Divine Hiddenness (Cambridge, 2002). He has published articles in, among other places, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Southern Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Erkenntnis, Journal of Philosophical Research, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Religious Studies, Sophia, Faith and Philosophy, and Philosophia Christi. Current projects include a book on arguments against the existence of God, agnosticism, and faith, and papers on various topics in the philosophy of religion and epistemology. When he’s not doing philosophy, he likes to garden, hike, fish, smoke (the fish), play chess, and edit the philosophy of religion page on PhilPapers. But his chief love is his family—Frances, William, and Peter—without whom his life would be bereft of all joy.
My works
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Epistemic Humility, Arguments From Evil, and Moral Skepticism.
    Many arguments from evil at least tacitly rely on something like the following line of thought: The Inference. On sustained reflection, we don’t see how any reason we know of would justify God in permitting all the evil in the world; therefore, there is no reason that would justify God.1 The conclusion is frequently more nuanced: “it is very likely that there is no such reason” or “more likely than not” or “more likely than it otherwise would be”. Some critics (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, How an Unsurpassable Being Can Create a Surpassable World.
    Imagine that there exists a good, essentially omniscient and omnipotent being named Jove, and that there exists nothing else. No possible being is more powerful or knowledgable. Out of his goodness, Jove decides to create. Since he is all-powerful, there is nothing but the bounds of possibility to prevent him from getting what he wants. Unfortunately, as he holds before his mind the host of worlds, Jove sees that for each there is a better one. Although he can create any (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Hiddenness of God.
    Many people are perplexed that God (if such there be) does not make His existence more evident. For many of them, the hiddenness of God puts their faith in God to the test. Others, however, claim that God’s hiddeness is the basis of an argument against God’s existence. While this claim is no newcomer to religious reflection, it has been the focus of renewed debate since the 1990’s.
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Infallibilism and Gettier's Legacy.
    Infallibilism is the view that a belief cannot be at once warranted and false. In this essay we assess three nonpartisan arguments for infallibilism, arguments that do not depend on a prior commitment to some substantive theory of warrant. Three premises, one from each argument, are most significant: (1) if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then the Gettier Problem cannot be solved; (2) if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then its warrant can (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, In Defense of Naïve Universalism.
    Michael J. Murray defends the traditional doctrine of hell by arguing directly against its chief competitor, universalism. Universalism, says Murray, comes in “naïve” and “sophisticated” forms. Murray poses two arguments against naïve universalism before focusing on sophisticated universalism, which is his real target. He proceeds in this fashion because he thinks that his arguments against sophisticated universalism are more easily motivated against naïve universalism, and once their force is clearly seen in the naïve case they will be more clearly seen (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, INTRODUCTION: The Evidential Argument From Evil.
    Evil, it is often said, poses a problem for theism, the view that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, "God," for short. This problem is usually called "the problem of evil." But this is a bad name for what philosophers study under that rubric. They study what is better thought of as an argument, or a host of arguments, rather than a problem. Of course, an argument from evil against theism can be both an argument and a (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Keith E. Yandell, the Epistemology of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press, 1993. VIII and 371 Pages. $00.00.
    Consider the following simple argument: 1. Someone had what seemed to be an experience of God. 2. If someone has what seems to be an experience of God, then there is evidence that God exists. 3. So, there is evidence that God exists. Yandell aims to qualify and defend this argument (33). By the time the qualifying is done, however, we have this.
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, On a “Fatal Dilemma” for Moderate Foundationalism.
    Contemporary foundationalists prefer Moderate Foundationalism over Strong Foundationalism. In this paper, we assess two arguments against the former which have been recently defended by Timothy McGrew. Three theses are central to the discussion: that only beliefs can be probabilifying evidence, that justification is internal, in McGrew’s sense of the term, and that only beliefs can be nonarbitrary justifying reasons.
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, On Rowe's Argument From Particular Horrors.
    Suppose God and evil are incompatible; then, since there clearly is evil, we have enormously strong evidence for atheism. Very few philosophers today who study our topic would endorse this argument, however. Why? Because it seems that God and evil are, strictly speaking, compatible. We can think of various reasons God might have to permit a fair bit of evil; and to the extent that we cannot think of any reason for God to permit so much, we have no good (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Review of J.L. Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993), I-X, 219 Pages.
    Do we rightly expect God to bring it about that, right now, we believe that He exists, on the basis of adequate grounds? It seems so. For if God exists, then He is perfect in love, and love at its best seeks the well-being of its object, not from a distance, but up close, explicitly participating in the beloved's life in a personal fashion, allowing her to draw from that relationship what she may need to flourish. Would an explicit, reciprocal (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Reply to Rowe.
    First, on p. $$ he says: "the idea that none of those instances of suffering could have been prevented by an all-powerful being without loss of a greater good must strike us as an extraordinary idea, quite beyond belief". But if we are in the dark about what goods there are and what omnipotence-constraining connections there are between such goods and the permissions of such evils, how could that idea seem “extraordinary…quite beyond belief”? Only if we assume that there probably (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Theodicy.
    Not long ago, an issue of my local paper reminded its readers of Susan Smith, the Carolinan mother who rolled her Mazda into a lake, drowning her two little sons strapped inside. It also reported the abduction and gang rape of an eleven-year old girl by eight teenage members of Angelitos Sur 13, and the indictment of the "Frito Man" on 68 counts of sexual abuse, a fortyfive year old man who handed out corn chips to neighborhood children in order (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, The Argument From Divine Hiddenness.
    Do we rightly expect a perfectly loving God to bring it about that, right now, we reasonably believe that He exists? It seems so. For love at its best desires the well-being of the beloved, not from a distance, but up close, explicitly participating in her life in a personal fashion, allowing her to draw from that relationship what she may need to flourish. But why suppose that we would be significantly better off were God to engage in an explicit, (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, The Argument From Charity Against Revisionary Ontology.
    Revisionary ontologists are making a comeback. Quasi-nihilists, like Peter van Inwagen and Trenton Merricks, insist that the only composite objects that exist are living things. Unrestriced universalists, like W.V.O. Quine, David Lewis, Mark Heller, and Hud Hudson, insist that any collection of objects composes something, no matter how scattered over time and space they may be. And there are more besides.1 The result, says Eli Hirsch, is that many commonsense judgments about the existence or identity of highly visible physical objects (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, The Christian Theodicist's Appeal to Love.
    Many Christian theodicists believe that God's creating us with the capacity to love Him and each other justifies, in large part, God's permitting evil. For example, after reminding us that, according to Christian doctrine, the supreme good for human beings is to enter into a reciprocal love relationship with God, Vincent Brummer recently wrote: In creating human persons in order to love them, God necessarily assumes vulnerability in relation to them. In fact, in this relation, he becomes even more vulnerable (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Theism, the Hypothesis of Indifference, and the Biological Role of Pain and Pleasure.
    Following Hume’s lead, Paul Draper argues that, given the biological role played by both pain and pleasure in goal-directed organic systems, the observed facts about pain and pleasure in the world are antecedently much more likely on the Hypothesis of Indifference than on theism. I examine one by one Draper’s arguments for this claim and show how they miss the mark.
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Was Jesus Mad, Bad, or God?…Or Merely Mistaken?
    A popular argument for the divinity of Jesus goes like this. Jesus claimed to be divine, but if his claim was false, then either he was insane (mad) or lying (bad), both of which are very unlikely; so, he was divine. I present two objections to this argument. The first, the dwindling probabilities objection, contends that even if we make generous probability assignments to the relevant pieces of evidence for Jesus’ divinity, the probability calculus tell us to suspend judgement on (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder & John Hawthorne, On the a Priori Rejection of Evidential Arguments From Evil.
    Recent work on the evidential argument from evil offers us sundry considerations which are intended to weigh against this form of atheological arguments.1 By far the most provocative is that on a priori grounds alone, evil can be shown to be evidentially impotent. This astonishing thesis has been given a vigorous defense by Keith Yandell. In this paper, we shall measure the prospects for an a priori dismissal of evidential arguments from evil. Yandell's argument is a natural place to begin. (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (2009). The Puzzle of Prayers of Thanksgiving and Praise. In Yujin Nagasawa & Erik J. Wielenberg (eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan.
    in eds. Yujin Nagasawa and Erik Wielenberg, New Waves in Philosophy of Religion (Palgrave MacMillan 2008).
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder & E. J. Coffman (2006). Three Arguments Against Foundationalism: Arbitrariness, Epistemic Regress, and Existential Support. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (4).
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (2005). William P. Alston. In John Shook (ed.), Dictionary of Modern American Philosophy. Thoemmes.
    William P. Alston was born in Shreveport, Louisiana on 29 November 1921 to Eunice Schoolfield and William Alston. After graduating from high school at the age of fifteen, he studied music at Centenary College, majoring in piano. During the Second World War, he was stationed in Northern California (1942-46), playing clarinet and bass drum in an army band and piano in a dance band. It was during those years that he discovered his vocation, inspired by Somerset Maughan’s, The Razor’s Edge. (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-snyder (2005). Foundationalism and Arbitrariness. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (1):18–24.
    A particular belief of a person is basic just in case it is epistemically justified and it owes its justification to something other than her other justified beliefs or their interrelations; a person’s belief is nonbasic just in case it is epistemically justified but not basic. Foundationalists agree that if one has a nonbasic belief, then—at rock bottom—it owes its justification to at least one basic belief. There are justified beliefs (if any) because and only because there are basic beliefs. (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (2004). Lehrer's Case Against Foundationalism. Erkenntnis 60 (1).
    In this essay, I assess Keith Lehrer's case against Foundationalism, which consists of variations on three objections: The Independent Information or Belief Objection, The Risk of Error Objection, and the Hidden Argument Objection. I conclude that each objection fails for reasons that can be endorsed – indeed, I would say for reasons that should be endorsed – byantifoundationalists and foundationalists alike.
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder & Michael Bergmann (2003). Grounds for Belief in God Aside, Does Evil Make Atheism More Reasonable Than Theism? In Michael Peterson & Raymond Van Arrogan (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion. Blackwell.
    Many people deny that evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. After all, they say, the grounds for belief in God are much better than the evidence for atheism, including the evidence provided by evil. We will not join their ranks on this occasion. Rather, we wish to consider the proposition that, setting aside grounds for belief in God and relying only on the background knowledge shared in common by nontheists and theists, evil makes (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder & Paul K. Moser (eds.) (2002). Divine Hiddenness: New Essays. Cambridge University Press.
    For many people the existence of God is by no means a sufficiently clear feature of reality. This problem, the fact of divine hiddenness, has been a source of existential concern and has sometimes been taken as a rationale for support of atheism or agnosticism. In this new collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers of religion explore the question of divine hiddenness in considerable detail. The issue is approached from several perspectives including Jewish, Christian, atheist and agnostic. There (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (2001). Review of David O'Connor, God and Inscrutable Evil. Philosophical Review.
    'Orthodox theism' (OT) is "the cognitive core” of mainstream religious belief in the Abrahamic tradition, according to which God is the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good designer, creator, and sustainer of the world, who made us so that we might develop into morally mature agents capable of choosing freely to love God, on the basis of which we will be judged and our eternal destinies determined (77-79). O'Connor aims to pose a problem for this view, namely, that given the 'standard (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (1999). God, Evil, and Suffering. In Michael Murray (ed.), Reason for the Hope Within. Eerdmans.
    Not long ago, an issue of my local paper reminded its readers of Susan Smith, the Carolinan mother who rolled her Mazda into a lake, drowning her two little sons strapped inside. It also reported the abduction and gang rape of an eleven-year old girl by eight teenage members of Angelitos Sur 13, and the indictment of the "Frito Man" on 68 counts of sexual abuse, a fortyfive year old man who handed out corn chips to neighborhood children in order (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (1998). Transworld Sanctity and Plantinga's Free Will Defense. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 44 (1).
    It used to be widely held by philosophers that God and evil are incompatible.1 Not any longer. Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense is largely responsible for this shift. Indeed, Robert Adams avers that "it is fair to say that Plantinga has solved this problem. That is, he has argued convincingly for the consistency of [God and evil]."2 And William Alston writes that "Plantinga...has established the possibility that God could not actualize a world containing free creatures that always do the right (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (1996). Review of Mark McLeod, Rationality and Theistic Belief. Faith and Philosophy.
    Many Christians say that, on occasion, God manifests Himself to them as doing something, e.g. guiding, forgiving, or strengthening them, or being something, e.g. wise, powerful or loving. They often describe their experiences in much the way we ordinarily describe our perception of nearby physical objects. They don't infer that God best explains their experience, nor do they indicate that they are merely indirectly aware of Him, say, through the words of a friend or by viewing a majestic mountain. Rather, (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (1996). Review of Michael Peterson, The Problem of Evil. The Christian Scholar's Review.
    No other anthology effectively organizes so many previously published essays and excerpts covering such a wide range of philosphical issues on the problem of evil. Classic statements of the problem include Job, Aquinas, Hume, Dostoevsky, Camus, and Wiesel. Three versions of the problem of evil are represented: the standard Mackie and Plantinga pieces on the badly named "logical problem" (the idea that God and evil are logically incompatible), an exchange between Michael Martin and David Basinger over the "evidential problem" (the (...)
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (1996). Review of Peter Forrest, God Without the Supernatural: A Defense of Scientific Theism. Journal of Religion.
    In this sometimes difficult but rewarding book, Peter Forrest aims to defend "anthropic theism," belief in a deity who is sufficiently powerful and knowledgeable to create our physical universe and who has created embodied persons--e.g., humans--chiefly for their own well-being (pp. 8-9). Anthropic theism enables us to understand several familiar facts better than its rivals. What facts? These.
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  • Daniel Howard-snyder (1995). Book Reviews. Mind 104 (414).
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  • John O'Leary-Hawthorne & Daniel Howard-Snyder (1993). God, Schmod and Gratuitous Evil. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4):861-874.
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (1992). Seeing Through CORNEA. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 32 (1).
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  • Daniel Howard-Snyder, Review of Peter Van Inwagen, God, Mystery, and Knowledge.
    This volume collects nine essays published by Peter van Inwagen between 1977 and 1995. Part I features, among other things, modal skepticism with respect to ontological arguments and arguments from evil. Part II addresses certain tensions Christians may feel between modern biology, critical studies of the New Testament, and the comparative study of religions, on the one hand, and Christian orthodoxy, on the other. Part III deploys a formal logic of relative identity to model the internal consistency of the orthodox (...)
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