In the first essay of this issue, Thaddeus Robinson, asks what grounds the traditional theist has for claiming that there are unknown attributes (powers) of God and that they fall consistently within God’s nature as theism presumes. That is, how do we know what God can do, if we don’t know what all of God’s knowledge and powers are? Imagine that someone has admitted that he or she doesn’t know what all the rules of the game are. You’d rightly be surprised to hear such a person speculate that one of these rules is probably legal or illegal. By analogy, why assume that God must possess powers unknow to us, for example, powers that address apparent inconsistencies raised by the problem of evil, while simultaneously admitting that God is a mysterious being and that this renders the full scope of God’s power beyond human comprehension? This problem highlights a tension in the ways that people think about the powers that theism presupposes and the need to address this tension.

In the second essay, Nikk Effingham, considers a standard reading of the doctrine of original sin according to which all human beings are guilty of a sin committed by Adam thousands of years ago. On this view, each human being born after Adam is a ‘fission successor’ to Adam. In this paper, Effingham recaps the current discussion in the literature about this theory, arguing that the standard fission theory does not work. In the wake of this, the author proposes a new version of fission theory that avoids Rea-Hudson objections.

In our third article, Matyáš Moravec raises a new problem for Molinism, the problem of stubbornness. It might be part of God's natural knowledge that God has revealed true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom to his creatures. This possibility seems problematic, however, if we had the further assumption that the creatures in question—the creatures who receive the revelations about the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that apply to them—are stubborn resisters, that is, hell bent on doing the opposite of whatever God providentially arranges for them to do. It seems possible that God reveals true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom about stubborn resisters to those stubborn resisters. However, according to the argument of the paper, if we accept that this is a genuine possibility, then we are required to reject at least one of the following four claims: (1) God does not—perhaps cannot—deceive; (2) God can reveal any (sufficiently simple) item of his knowledge; (3) God has middle knowledge; (4) God's natural knowledge is (at least) conceptually distinct from his middle knowledge. Moravec rejects the idea that God is, or could be, a deceiver and suggests that this constitutes a sufficient reason to reject middle knowledge.

In the concluding article in this issue, Hermen Kroesbergen considers the work of D. Z. Phillips. This is the guiding question: Can a contemplative philosopher describe a particular religious practice as superstitious or does this entail moving beyond the project of neutral conceptual clarification into the realm of philosophical apologetics? According to Philips, the philosophical task is restricted to an analysis of concepts, and in this case the concepts of genuine religions belief and superstition. Without this elucidation of these two contrasting concepts, superstition and genuine religion, Phillips would not have been able to ground both religious beliefs and superstitions in the different practices that give rise to them and to their different meanings. The author defends the aptness of Phillips's use of these terms of contrast and illustrates his approach using examples such as the concept of genuine vs. fake friendship or genuine or fake gratitude.

Philips insists that the terms 'superstition' and 'genuine religion' are part of our ordinary discourse and therefore it is a Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion's job to appeal to common usage to determine the grammar of these terms what he would call their essential differences. (For Wittgenstein, essence is expressed by grammar.) As the author claims, without contemplating the concepts of superstition and genuine religion, Phillips would not have been able to elucidate the contrasting roles that religious belief and superstition play in the lives of those who use these terms. Phillips’s use of the term of superstition therefore does not abandon his commitment to philosophical contemplation but testifies to a strict allegiance to it.