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I attempt to analyze, reconstruct, and otherwise defend William Alston's vindication of the cognitive status of mystical experience. I begin by reconstructing Alston's doxastic practice approach to epistemology, which provides him with general criteria by which to determine whether or not mystical experience contributes to the justification of an agent's mystical beliefs. I then present Alston's case for the claim that, according to his general epistemic position, there is a way of forming beliefs about God on the basis of the perception of God which we have adequate epistemic reason to believe is reliable. At the heart of Alston's case are the claims that a way of forming beliefs should be regarded as presumptively reliable so long as it is socially established and that the beliefs generated by autonomous ways of forming beliefs are not necessarily subject to epistemic norms de jure for other practices. I attempt to discredit Alston's appeal to social establishment as grounds for imputing presumptive epistemic innocence and I attempt to provide a rationale for Alston's claim that mystical beliefs should not be subject to the same epistemic norms to which we subject sense-perceptual beliefs.

A puzzle about some of the basic commitments of Leibniz's metaphysics is that they fail to come anywhere near approaching the self-evidence one should expect of metaphysical principles. Notwithstanding that Leibniz's adherence to Christian theology has not generally been granted as having had a decisive impact on his metaphysics, the latter, in fact, was largely the result of a life-long project to give a comprehensive rational defense of Christianity. In particular, a close study of four theological commitments and six metaphysical commitments in the context of Leibniz's thought reveals that the former are in a sense more basic than, are motivationally prior to, the latter. Namely: that God the perfect being exists, that Real Presence is true, that the Lutheran, Catholic, and perhaps even Calvinist accounts of the Eucharist are compatible, and that Original Sin is true. Each had a resolute impact on the formation of Leibniz's metaphysical commitments: that the actual world is the best possible world, that teleological explanation is indispensible for scientific understanding, that the substance of body is not its extension but its active principle, that natures are complete concepts, that there are no material atoms, and that actual substances were created all at once. It is not surprising that Leibniz's best-possible-world theory and his commitment to the universal applicability of teleology have their roots in his commitment to the existence of God the perfect being. But it is also the case that his anti-materialist stance on substances was formed in defense of Real Presence and in response to a reconciliatory envisionment of the Eucharist that could resolve denominational disputes; that his commitment to natures as complete concepts and his anti-atomism derive largely from a commitment to God's omniscience; and that his commitment to the all-at-once creation of substances stems from his attempts to understand Original Sin. In short, Leibniz's metaphysics is Revelation-inspired. Yet although there are some good reasons in favor of calling it a "Christian metaphysics", as he had hoped, there are some serious drawbacks to its being considered such.

Two tenets associated with major strands of classical Christian orthodoxy assert both that God is meticulously provident and that humans have libertarian free will. On this view, God's meticulous providence is, in part, a function of His essential omniscience. God, on this view, is said to be all knowing. Classically, this has been construed to mean that God is infallible and that God exhaustively knows every detail of the past, present, and the future. But if God infallibly knew, in the past, what we would do in the future, then it looks like there may be a conflict with libertarian free will, at least insofar libertarian free will has traditionally been understood as the ability to do otherwise. It is my aim to provide a slightly new solution to this longstanding and deeply perplexing problem. In Chapter 1, I will delineate and attempt to motivate what I will call, the Problem of Theological Fatalism. I will then describe a very recent solution that has attracted many philosophers in recent years: Open Theism. I will then argue that, although the open theists' challenge to more traditional solutions is formidable, the case for Open Theism is hardly decisive. In Chapter 2 I will survey two historically significant responses to the Problem of Theological Fatalism. The first response is known as the Boethian solution that attempts to leverage the notion of God's alleged atemporality to avoid complications with the necessity of the past. Although this view has a number of able defenders, I ultimately reject Boethianism due to worries about the necessity of eternity. I then turn to the second historically significant solution that has resurfaced in recent decades, the Ockhamist Solution. This solution relies on distinguishing between facts that are in part about the past and facts that are strictly about the past in order to show that God's past beliefs are not saddled with the necessity of the past. Chapter 3, however, is a detailed analysis of the Molinist solution. Here, I raise and respond to the most pressing objections to Molinism, but insist on a key revision to standard Molinism. I argue that God does have Middle Knowledge, but I reject the common Molinist claim that we have counterfactual power over God's past infallible beliefs. Thus, I conclude that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with libertarian free will as historically conceived. From there, I conclude in Chapter 4 by attempting to motivate a source-incompatibilist view of human free will that preserves a strong sense of moral responsibility. I argue that the conjunction of Modified Molinism and source-incompatibilism yields a philosophically tenable and theologically satisfying resolution to the Problem of Theological Fatalism. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 20, 2017. / foreknowledge, free will, incompatibilism, molinism, sourcehood / Includes bibliographical references. / David McNaughton, Professor Directing Dissertation; Philip Bowers, University Representative; Alfred Mele, Committee Member; John Roberts, Committee Member.

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