Joshua Rasmussen

Joshua Rasmussen is an American analytic philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Azusa Pacific University, working primarily in metaphysics and philosophy of religion. His research focuses on modality, abstract objects, and arguments for a necessary foundation of reality. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame under the supervision of Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen, situating his work within the contemporary tradition of analytic theism associated with Plantinga, van Inwagen, and Robert C. Koons.

With Alexander Pruss, Rasmussen co-authored Necessary Existence (Oxford University Press, 2018), which develops several modal and contingency-based arguments for the existence of a necessary being. His How Reason Can Lead to God (IVP Academic, 2019) presents a stepwise, accessible cumulative case for a foundational mind, addressed to readers across the theism–atheism spectrum. He has also written on theistic conceivability arguments, divine attributes, and the bridge from a necessary foundation to a personal God.

Rasmussen's arguments have been engaged critically by atheist philosophers including Graham Oppy and Felipe Leon, who dispute the principles of sufficient reason and modal premises his arguments employ; he has responded in published exchanges and dialogues. His work is often discussed alongside contemporary defenders of cosmological and contingency arguments such as Pruss and Koons, while critics argue that the move from necessary foundation to theistic God remains underdetermined.