Paul K. Moser

Paul K. Moser is an American analytic philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, working primarily in epistemology and philosophy of religion. After early work on foundationalist and evidentialist epistemology (Empirical Justification, 1985; Knowledge and Evidence, 1989), he turned increasingly to religious epistemology, developing a distinctive position he calls 'volitional' or 'kardiatheology'. On this view, evidence for the Christian God is not primarily propositional or inferential but takes the form of moral and existential transformation—an authoritative call on the human will to which one must be willing to conform. Central works include The Elusive God (2008), The Evidence for God (2010), and The Severity of God (2013), where he argues that divine hiddenness is purposive: God remains elusive to those unwilling to undergo agape-shaped transformation. Moser co-edited Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (2002) with Daniel Howard-Snyder and The Rationality of Theism (2003) with Paul Copan. Critics including J. L. Schellenberg argue that his volitional account inadequately addresses nonresistant nonbelief, while naturalist philosophers question whether transformative experience can function as public evidence. Moser also engages internally with Reformed epistemology (Plantinga) and classical natural theology, often distancing his kerygmatic approach from both. His work has been influential in framing recent analytic debates on hiddenness, religious experience, and the ethics of inquiry into God.