Trent Dougherty

Trent Dougherty is an American analytic philosopher of religion, associate professor at Baylor University, working primarily in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and the problem of evil. He earned his PhD at the University of Rochester under Richard Feldman, and his work develops a broadly evidentialist epistemology while defending the rationality of Christian theistic belief. Dougherty is the editor of Evidentialism and Its Discontents (Oxford, 2011), which gathered defenses and critiques of the evidentialist program, and he co-edited (with Jerry Walls) Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God (Oxford, 2018), a volume of essays expanding Alvin Plantinga's famous lecture into a cumulative-case natural theology. In The Problem of Animal Pain (Palgrave, 2014) he offers a saint-making theodicy that extends soul-making theodicy to non-human animals, arguing that creaturely suffering can be redeemed through eschatological transformation; this proposal has been debated by critics including Michael Murray and Dustin Crummett. Dougherty has also written on skeptical theism, religious experience, and the ethics of belief, often engaging Earl Conee, Richard Swinburne, and William Alston. His position situates him between strict evidentialism and reformed epistemology, attempting to show that proper basicality and evidential support are compatible rather than competing models of religious justification.