Daniel Howard-Snyder

Daniel Howard-Snyder is an American analytic philosopher of religion, Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University. Trained at Syracuse University (PhD), he has worked extensively on the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, religious epistemology, and the nature of faith. He edited the influential volume 'The Evidential Argument from Evil' (1996), which collected key essays in the William Rowe–Stephen Wykstra debate and helped establish skeptical theism as a major response to evidential arguments from evil. With Paul Moser, he co-edited 'Divine Hiddenness: New Essays' (2002), the standard reference on J.L. Schellenberg's argument from nonbelief, and he has published numerous articles critically engaging Schellenberg's nonresistant-nonbelief premise. In more recent work, often with his wife Frances Howard-Snyder and with Daniel McKaughan, he has developed an account of propositional faith as compatible with doubt, distinguishing belief-based from non-doxastic models of faith. His approach exemplifies analytic philosophy of religion: careful conceptual analysis, formal modeling of epistemic situations, and engagement with both theistic and atheistic interlocutors. Critics, including Schellenberg himself, contend that skeptical-theist responses to hiddenness risk wider moral skepticism, while defenders of doxastic faith resist his weakened belief conditions. Howard-Snyder remains a central interlocutor in contemporary debates on theistic rationality.