In the first article, Perry Hendricks and Kirk Lougheeed discuss the claim that theistic goods such as an afterlife, divine Intervention, divine justice, and personal relationships with God, are increased in a world in which God is hidden rather than in a world in which God is unhidden. In the latter world, atheistic goods such as privacy and solitude could not be obtained. What needs to be addressed, however, is the question of whether theistic goods can be obtained in a world in which God does not exist. They argue that this is possible. However, without a principled reason to show that the obtaining of theistic goods is more valuable than the obtaining of atheistic goods, it is arbitrary to favor a world in which God hides over an atheistic world. Attempting to answer this question turns back finally on the question of God’s nature and existence.

In the next article, Philip Pegan considers Street’s argument that accepting the claim that God exists and has morally good reasons for permitting all of the bad things that occur in the world, gives the theist good reason to doubt the reliability of judgments of moral common sense. The theist seems committed to the idea that what seems to be a bad thing from the human perspective is not a bad thing from God’s (otherwise it would not be permitted). So, our common moral judgements, for example, that a horrific accident killing innocent people is a bad thing, are not reliable. Indeed, such accidents would not be permitted if they were ultimately bad—something that suggests that there are no real horrific accidents for theists. Pegan finds Street’s argument unconvincing. He claims that a theist can concede that God’s reasons are not our reasons without being forced to doubt the reliability of human judgments of moral common sense.

In an intricate scholastic-like discussion of the problem of inconsistency that seems to be implied in Conciliar Christology, G. H. Labooy argues in the next essay for a concept of stepped characterization that avoids the apparent contradiction between the following two examples of qua-propositions, “Christ qua God is not created” and “Christ qua man is created”. Stepped characterization is designed to resolve the following puzzle: “How can one and the same person, the Second Person of the Trinity, be both God and man? For being God implies having certain attributes, perhaps immutability, or impassibility, whereas being human implies having apparently inconsistent attributes.” As Labooy says, “One way of dealing with this coherence problem is to invoke so-called ‘qua-propositions’. These propositions divide the predicates between the two natures, such that some predicates apply to the person in virtue of the divine nature, and some in virtue of the human nature. This paper is a contribution to this approach.”

As is well known, Hume argues that belief in miracle-testimony is never justified. In the first of our concluding two articles that deal with Hume’s critique of religious faith, Joshua Kulmac Butler argues that Hume’s critique of miracles is mistaken. His argument is based on the work of Thomas Kuhn who argues that there is common agreement amongst scientists that they are sometimes rationally justified in believing scientific testimony for PCA’s. (paradigm theory conflicting scientific anomalies). Butler argues that PCA’s are analogous to miracles—understood as Hume did, namely, as violations of the laws of nature. Understood as such paradigm anomalies, miracle-testimony is potentially justifiable, and Hume’s claim that such testimony is never justifiable is false. As Butler says: “this paper serves to lay to rest Hume’s first argument against miracles and move the conversation toward other aspects of the possible validity of miracle-testimony.”

In the final essay in this issue, Hartmut von Sass challenges the usual reading of Demea as the weakest character in Hume’s famous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. In his novel interpretation, inspired in part by the work ordinary language philosophers such as D.Z Phillips and Norman Malcomb, Sass maintains that Demea contributes a more interesting perspective on religious belief than that represented by Philo and Cleanthes. Demea forswears metaphysical fantasies and skepticism in favor of concrete religious practices like worship and prayer. As he understands it, “religious belief has its place in the midst of life and is integrated in ramified ways in an emotional network of hope, confidence, trust, and awe”. As Sass remarks, the fact that religious belief is grounded in feelings of weakness, of misery, of sickness, establishes religion’s relationship to life—its nearness. This is not simply mysticism; rather it is as Sass says: “…a ‘post-metaphysical’ image of religious belief—and, eventually, we are invited to belong to the ‘friends of Demea’”.