The final chapter of Peter Winch's book on Simone Weil discusses Weil's idea of supernatural virtue. Weil uses this language in connection with certain exceptional actions: actions of a kind which are for most of us, most of the time, simply impossible. She is particularly struck by cases in which someone refrains from exercising a power which they have over another: in which, for example, someone refrains from killing or enslaving an enemy who has grievously harmed him and who is now at his mercy. We could also speak of cases in which someone helps an enemy, or a stranger, at very real cost, or risk, to himself. In such cases Weil speaks of the ‘supernatural’ as being at work.

Many philosophers have held that traditional theism can be conclusively disproved because it can be shown to be logically inconsistent with some known fact about evil. By ‘traditional theism’ I mean the statement that G. There exists an omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect person who created the universe.

As Milton reminds us, the first thing God named not good was loneliness. In proclaiming it not good for man to be alone, was God but projecting his own loneliness? In the words of James Weldon Johnson, God stepped out on space, looked around and said, ‘I'm lonely’.Johnson's concept of God may be very ‘spaced-out’ but the notion of a monotheistic God as lonely is far from preposterous. A God endlessly immersed in the contemplation of its solitary perfection (à la Aristotle, for example) would be an isolation anything but splendid. Such a being might be perfect as an abstract essence, but it would be perfectly alone.

The anthropic principle or the associated anthropic coincidences have been used by philosophers such as John Leslie (1989), William Lane Craig (1988) and Richard Swinburne (1990) to support the thesis that God exists. In this paper I shall examine Swinburne's argument from the anthropic coincidences. I will show that Swinburne's premises, coupled with his principle of credulity and the failure of his theodicy in The Existence of God, disconfirms theism and confirms instead the hypothesis that there exists a malevolent creator of the universe.

The principle that

(P1) One cannot deliberate over what one already (prior to deliberating) knows is going to happen,

when suitably qualified, has seemed to many philosophers to be about as secure a truth as one is likely to find in this life.Fortunately, (P1) poses little restriction on human deliberation, since the conditions which would trigger its prohibition seldom arise for us: our knowledge of the future is intermittent at best, and those things of which we do have advance knowledge (e.g. that the sun will rise tomorrow) are not the sorts of things over which we would deliberate in any case. But matters appear to stand otherwise with an all-knowing agent such as God is traditionally conceived to be; for what an omniprescient deity ‘already knows is going to happen’ is everything that is going to happen; and if He cannot deliberate over such things, there is nothing over which He can deliberate.

In the following there are two principal objectives. Firstly, I hope to show that what seems to be the usual view of Bradley prevalent amongst theologians and philosophers is inaccurate. Secondly, I shall attempt to set Bradley's thought, albeit briefly, in the wider context of our contemporary interests. I have been more concerned to consider the aspects of Bradley's work that are interesting and, I think, quite exciting for theologians than to give a more general account of his philosophy. Bradley's reactions to specific doctrines of Christianity were coloured a good deal by his reaction to an evangelical upbringing (he was the son of an evangelical clergyman), but on a more abstract level he has an interesting and striking philosophical approach to the notion of religious faith. It is with this latter that I am concerned here.

Through various applications of the ‘deep structure’ of moral and religious reasoning, I have sought to illustrate the value of a morally informed approach in helping us to understand the complexity of religious thought and practice…religions are primarily moved by rational moral concerns and…ethical theory provides the single most powerful methodology for understanding religious belief. Ronald Green, Religion and Moral Reason

Of all the examples of ‘belief-in’, belief in God is both the most mysterious and the most challenging. Indeed whether and how an apologist can make a case for the intellectual respectability of theistic belief, depends upon the nature of this ‘belief-in’. I shall attempt to elucidate this matter by an analysis of the relation of ‘belief-in’ to ‘belief-that’ and by treating belief in God as a special case of ‘belief-in’.

Having considered the role of ethics in Indian mystical teachings in a previous, related, essay I would like to consider the same question in its western religious contexts in the present paper, beginning with the Christian mystical tradition. As is the case with Asian traditions charges of moral unconcern are widely directed at Christian mystics, but they are false. Christian mystics are not indifferent to morality nor do they disconnect morality from an intrinsic relationship to their mystical quest. Augustine would already teach that the story of Leah and Rachel was an instructive allegory in which the active life represented by Leah was intrinsic to the contemplative life represented by Rachel while Gregory the Great would unambiguously assert: ‘We ascend to the heights of contemplation by the steps of the active life’, defining the active life as: ‘to dispense to all what they need and to provide those entrusted to us with the means of subsistence’. These representative early samples of the salience of ethical behaviour to the life of contemplation could be multiplied at great length, and almost without exception in the teaching of the major Christian mystics. This historical exegetical exercise, however, is in the present circumstances, both out of place and I hope unnecessary. Instead, the more general, more enigmatic, more repercussive, issues raised by the place and significance of morality within the Christian mystical tradition need attending to.