Paul Moser

Paul K. Moser (born 1957 in Bismarck, North Dakota) is an American analytic philosopher who writes on epistemology and the philosophy of religion. He is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and past editor of American Philosophical Quarterly. He earned a BA from Covenant College and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. He is the author of many works in epistemology and the philosophy of religion, in which he has supported versions of epistemic foundationalism and volitional theism. His latest work brings these two positions together to support volitional evidentialism about theistic belief, in contrast to fideism and traditional natural theology. His work draws from some epistemological and theological insights of Blaise Pascal, John Oman, and H. H. Farmer, but adds (i) a notion of purposively available evidence of God’s existence, (ii) a notion of authoritative evidence in contrast with spectator evidence, and (iii) a notion of personifying evidence of God whereby some willing humans become salient evidence of God's existence.