Scholarship at UWindsor

Grounding the Concept of God in the Human Predicament

Contemporary religious epistemology often neglects offering a substantial defense of a particular conception of God, relying instead on appeals to tradition and past great theologians. This neglect is regrettable due to the large impact one’s concept of God has on the kind of expected evidence of God. I aim to correct this deficiency by offering a defensible concept of God grounded in the predicament faced by all human inquirers. My account of this human predicament will focus on three key features that are salient to religious inquiry: death, moral failure, and suffering and severity. I will defend the idea that death, moral failure, and suffering are all bad things that humans do and ought to seek rescue from. I will then argue that we ought to define our concept of God in terms of what it would take to rescue humanity from its predicament, thus allowing our conception of God to capture what matters most to us.