ABSTRACT
One of the first attempts to connect philosophical discussions of luck to concerns within philosophy of religion and theology was a 1994 paper by Linda Zagzebski, “Religious Luck.” Some theologians and philosophers might hold that being advantageously situated to receive theistic evidence is uniformly a question of evidential luck, which when it leads to an acquired true belief is “benign” luck. In Abrahamic religions, predetermination teachings are one natural focus for appeals to constitutive luck. Religious narratives place readers where they can feel what it is like to have certain sorts of experience, but they appear not to situate them well for making truth claims, let alone exclusivist ones, on their basis. The concept of religious luck grants us significant insights into the moral, theological, and epistemological adequacy of different models of religious faith and the responses to religious multiplicity that they motivate.
