Peter Byrne

Peter Byrne is a British philosopher of religion long associated with King's College London, where he served as Professor of Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion. For many years he co-edited the journal Religious Studies with Brian Davies and served on the editorial board of Heythrop Journal, and he edited the Companion Encyclopedia of Theology with Leslie Houlden. His work occupies the analytic tradition of philosophy of religion but engages closely with the history of the field, particularly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural theology and deism. In Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion (1989) he traced the deist roots of the modern academic study of religion. Kant on God (2007) offers a sustained reconstruction of Kant's critique of theistic proofs and his moral theology, arguing that Kant remains a defensible philosophical theist of a chastened sort. The Moral Interpretation of Religion (1998) and God and Realism (2003) develop a moderate moral realism and a critical defense of theological realism against anti-realist programs associated with D. Z. Phillips and Don Cupitt. Byrne is also a leading proponent of religious pluralism in the tradition of John Hick, defending it in Prolegomena to Religious Pluralism (1995) and The Philosophical and Theological Foundations of Ethics. Critics, including exclusivist analytic theologians such as Alvin Plantinga and Gavin D'Costa, have challenged the coherence and theological cost of the pluralist hypothesis.