J. L. Schellenberg

​I am Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and also hold an adjunct post in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University. Both universities are in Halifax, the capital city of beautiful Nova Scotia. I live in a rural, wooded part of the province, about 35 minutes from Halifax, with my artist wife Regina Coupar. 

My doctorate is in philosophy and from Oxford, where I studied with Richard Swinburne, David Brown, Maurice Wiles, and Anthony Kenny in the late 1980s. The book that emerged from this study, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell, 1993), introduced a new argument against the existence of a personal God known as the hiddenness argument. This argument has enjoyed a good deal of attention in philosophy. But in a subsequent trilogy (also from Cornell) and in several later volumes, I’ve shown why, even if there is no personal God, we should remain open to other, more general religious possibilities. And I have argued for the viability of an associated form of religious faith grounded in imagination rather than belief. Much of the support for this hybrid stance in the philosophy of religion – part critical, part constructive – comes from our early stage of development as a species. This neglected developmental fact provides a basis for what I call early-stage relativism. Put bluntly, it tells us that if we humans are at an early stage of species-level development, we should act like it -- behaving in ways appropriate to that stage and not as though we’re already fully developed. Early-stage relativism seems to me to have important consequences across a range of philosophical concerns. For example, it supports these views: that a solidly naturalistic commitment in metaphysics is premature; that something other than belief should be central in inquiry and so in epistemology; and that theories in ethics able to handle developmental facts as manifested at the smaller human scale should be preferred to ones that cannot. In the last few years I’ve been busy exploring these broader consequences. Most recently, I’ve also been thinking, with a much narrower focus, about classical Christian doctrine. Here my results are again both critical and constructive, though at this point only the former have been published, in my 2024 book from Oxford University Press: What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine.