Michael L. Peterson

Michael L. Peterson is an American philosopher of religion, longtime professor of philosophy at Asbury Theological Seminary, and managing editor of the journal Faith and Philosophy. His scholarly work centers on the problem of evil, theistic epistemology, and the interface between Christian theism and science, particularly evolutionary biology. In Evil and the Christian God (1982) and the later God and Evil: An Introduction to the Issues (1998), he defends a position drawing on John Hick's soul-making framework while engaging the evidential arguments of William Rowe and Paul Draper. His Monograph C. S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview (2020) reads Lewis as a constructive philosophical theologian rather than a popular apologist. Peterson is widely known as co-author, with William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger, of Reason and Religious Belief (now in its fifth edition) and Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, standard textbooks in the field. He co-edited Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion with Raymond VanArragon, pairing theistic and atheistic philosophers on central disputes. Methodologically he works within the analytic, broadly Reformed-influenced tradition associated with Alvin Plantinga and William Alston, while remaining within a Wesleyan-Arminian theological orientation that shapes his treatments of divine action, providence, and human freedom. Critics from naturalist quarters, including Rowe and Draper, have pressed him on whether soul-making theodicies adequately address horrendous and animal suffering.