The trouble with questions like these, I think, is that the answers of elite theist philosophers, in the first step, are most likely to be the same as the answers of much less capable theist philosophers. The points where their answers are more likely to differ are a few steps down the chain of challenge and justification.
In my experience (and by the description of Luke Muehlhauser, whose experience is probably quite a bit more extensive than mine,) philosophers of religion generally know a series of several standard challenges and answers, which have been hammered out in philosophical debate over decades to centuries, in much the way that expert chess players are familiar with a wide variety of openings and gambits. A chess grandmaster isn’t going to be distinguished from a regular expert by knowing some awesome esoteric opening, but by their knowledge of how to follow up in the rest of the game which makes the opening better worth using.
The trouble with questions like these, I think, is that the answers of elite theist philosophers, in the first step, are most likely to be the same as the answers of much less capable theist philosophers. The points where their answers are more likely to differ are a few steps down the chain of challenge and justification.
In my experience (and by the description of Luke Muehlhauser, whose experience is probably quite a bit more extensive than mine,) philosophers of religion generally know a series of several standard challenges and answers, which have been hammered out in philosophical debate over decades to centuries, in much the way that expert chess players are familiar with a wide variety of openings and gambits. A chess grandmaster isn’t going to be distinguished from a regular expert by knowing some awesome esoteric opening, but by their knowledge of how to follow up in the rest of the game which makes the opening better worth using.
Yeah. I should think about how to get around this, and glean useful information from their expertise.