Dear Colleagues,

In attempting to define the concept of God and God’s relation to the world and its inhabitants, we inevitably use metaphysically significant terms: God is the ultimate cause of the universe, God exists of necessity, God can do anything possible, God is omnipresent, yet transcending space and time, God is absolutely independent of all things, and so forth. And these metaphysically significant terms themselves call out for analysis and explanation. Since there are indeed metaphysical theories of what aspects of reality these terms do or do not pick out, philosophers of religion are increasingly asking whether these theories assist in our understanding of theism or, on the contrary, make difficulties for it. For example, do analyses of causation illuminate the nature of the divine creative act, or force us to develop a non-causal model? If the ground of modal concepts such as possibility and necessity is a plurality of concrete possible worlds, is this consistent with the existence of a necessary being? If space and time are objects in their own right, can omnipresence be analysed in terms of occupancy, or would this lead to paradox?

The interaction between theism and metaphysics also has a second dimension: rather than treating theism as something to be fitted into an independently-justified metaphysical theory of causation, or modality, or space and time, there is the possibility that theism itself can offer the ground of such concepts. Perhaps non-actualised possible worlds should be identified with ideas in God’s mind, ideas that he could have made correspond to actual things, but did not. Or does this suggestion presuppose the very idea that it attempts to explain? Or, to take another example, there seems to be a tension between, on the one hand, the plausible view that consciousness supervenes upon physical states of the brain, and on the other the evident ‘explanatory gap’ between physical fact and consciousness. Is God needed to explain the supervenience of the mental on the physical?

The two dimensions of inquiry above have been expressed in terms of a realist understanding of theism: that the truth-conditions of discourse about God are independent of human thought and convention. Moreover, they suggest a fairly literal understanding of that discourse. But the attempt to integrate theism within metaphysical theory might be construed as providing analogical models of God’s nature. If so, then perhaps the metaphysics of theism might, after all, be interest to religious non-realists (who are often presented as eschewing metaphysical talk about God), such as fictionalists, or to those within the apophatic tradition, which takes our ascriptions to God as false if literally construed.

There are, then three questions we can ask about the relationship between metaphysics and theism:

• Can metaphysical theories of causation, modality, space, time and mind, and so on, provide an understanding of the nature of God?
• Conversely, can God’s nature provide a metaphysical grounding for some of these concepts?
• Does the metaphysics of theism make sense only within a realist, literalist understanding of theistic discourse, or has it a role to play in analogical, fictionalist, or apophatic understandings?

Contributions are invited for this special issue on any of these questions.

Prof. Dr. Robin Le Poidevin
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• metaphysics
• theism
• causation
• necessity
• possibility
• space
• time
• mind
• consciousness
• realism
• non-realism
• analogy