My interests in philosophy of religion are mostly epistemological. I have written on David Hume’s argument that we never have sufficient evidence to believe that a miracle has occurred, both in the journal Hume Studies and in my 2019 book, David Hume on Miracles, Evidence, and Probability.  One of the future projects I have planned is on Hume’s “contrary religions” argument. In my undergraduate courses in philosophy of religion and early modern philosophy, I regularly teach modules on (well, against) design arguments. 

I’m working on a book project that flows out of these general critiques of religious apologetics, with the working title, Towards a More Perfect Disunion: The Separation of Church and State, where I will argue that the fact that we cannot agree on objective proofs or disproofs of the existence of any god means that religious belief is purely a matter of conscience and therefore governments should never interfere (positively or negatively) in any religious belief. This is not a blanket toleration of private religious belief but instead must be limited in such a way that no one’s beliefs of conscience can be allowed to cause or impose harm on anyone else. The argument thus has implications for many important issues facing modern pluralist societies, including the debate over abortion, and it gives a well-grounded natural societal response to religious-based hate, abhorrent practices like female genital mutilation carried out for supposedly religious reasons, and religious nationalism.