T. J. Mawson

T. J. (Tim) Mawson is a British analytic philosopher of religion long associated with St Peter's College, Oxford, where he has served as Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy. His work occupies the broadly analytic tradition of philosophy of religion shaped by Richard Swinburne, under whom he studied at Oxford, and he engages closely with figures such as Alvin Plantinga, J. L. Mackie, and contemporary critics of theism. Mawson's first monograph, Belief in God (2005), offers an accessible defence of classical theism, surveying arguments from contingency, design, religious experience, and morality, and addressing the problem of evil and divine hiddenness. Belief in God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (2005) is widely used as a textbook in undergraduate philosophy of religion courses. In later works, including The Divine Attributes (2018) and God and the Meanings of Life (2016), Mawson examines the coherence of omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, and divine goodness, and argues that theism makes a substantive difference to whether and how human lives can be meaningful. He has also written on free will, prayer, and the relationship between God and morality. Critics including J. L. Schellenberg and Stephen Maitzen have engaged his treatments of hiddenness and the moral implications of theism, while Mawson's defences remain measured and dialectically careful rather than polemical.