‘You cannot satisfactorily explain the meaning of your religious utterances; if you cannot explain the meaning, you don't know it; and if you, the speaker, don't know it, how could it exist?’

There are two quite common views which appear to be embraced by a large number of aestheticians as well as a large number of nonaestheticians. It is quite commonly believed by many of both groups that God is omniscient with respect to the future, that is, that God knows everything that will ever occur. I refer to this belief as the doctrine of divine omniprescience. It is also quite common to many of both groups to believe that literary authorship is creative in the sense that by means of his composing activity an author is an agent who brings about the existence of some thing (e.g., a play, a poem, a novel, etc.) which did not exist prior to the composing activity of that agent and which would not exist without the composing activity of that agent or some similar agent. I shall call this belief the doctrine of literary creativity. What does not appear to be recognized is that these two doctrines cannot both be consistently endorsed. I argue that the two doctrines jointly entail a contradiction and I will point out some of the logical consequences of trying to avoid that contradiction.

In a recent paper, Robert A. Oakes argues that a doctrine central to, and partially constitutive of, classical theism implies a certain sort of pantheism. The doctrine in question is a modal form of the claim that God conserves in existence the world of contingent things; alternatively, it is the view that all contingently existing things are necessarily continuously dependent upon God for their existence. And the variety of pantheism at stake is a modal form of the thesis that all contingent things are, in some sense, included within the being of God.

Theists typically believe the following two propositions:

(1) God is omniscient,

and

(2) Human beings are free.

Are they consistent? In order to decide, we must first ask what they mean. Roughly, let us say that a being is omniscient if for any proposition he knows whether it is true or false. Since I have no wish to deny that there are true and false propositions about future states of affairs (as some philosophers have done), omniscience includes foreknowledge, which we can say is knowledge of the truth value of propositions about future states of affairs. For example, I believe the proposition ‘Davis will wear shoes tomorrow’ is true today, and if it is true today, i.e. if I will wear shoes tomorrow, an omniscient being knows today that it is true – and, if this being is eternally omniscient, he knew it millions of years ago.

In an attempt to make the idea of surviving one's own death in a disembodied state intelligible, H. H. Price has presented a possible description of what the afterlife might be like for a disembodied self or consciousness. Price suggests that the world of the disembodied self might be a kind of dream or image world. In it he would replace his present sense-perception by activating his image-producing powers, which are now inhibited by their continuous bombardment by sensory stimuli, to produce mental images. Though he would be cut off from any new supply of sensory material, he might be able to draw upon his memory of his previous physical existence to create an entire environment of images. A nexus of perspectively inter-related images would constitute an object; this would serve as a substitute for the material objects which he perceived in his past life. The entire environment of the disembodied individual would be composed of such families of mental images and would serve to constitute his world. It need not, however, be a solipsistic world, for by means of telepathy the discarnate individual could communicate with other disembodied selves and in this way acquire new information. Price notes that since this world would be as real to the discarnate self as our present world is to our embodied self, in the afterlife the disembodied self in effect would create for itself a real world, though of course if it took it to be anything other than an image world it would be deceiving itself.

The Bhagavad-Gītā is the most important text in the smrti (what is remembered) literature of India, as distinct from the śruti (what is heard) literature which is traditionally regarded as ultimately authoritative. The Bhagavad-Gītā has been assigned a date ranging from the fifth century B.C. to the second century B.C. The Indian religious tradition places the Gītā at the end of the third age of the present cycle of the universe and the beginning of the fourth, namely the Kali Yuga to which we belong.

Zen Buddhism often appears to be ‘anti-intellectual’, ‘illogical’ and ‘trivial’. These apparent aspects of Zen have puzzled many students of Buddhism. Why is Zen so ‘irrational’? By what Buddhist doctrines, tenets or philosophies did Zen masters develop their unconventional and dramatic teachings and practices? The aim of this paper is to show that main San-lun Mādhyamika doctrines, such as Emptiness, the Middle Way, the Twofold Truth and the refutation of erroneous views as the illumination of right views, have been assimilated into Zen teachings and practices Mādhyamika philosophy seems to provide a major ‘theoretical’ foundation for as a ‘practical’; ‘anti-intellectual’, ‘irrational’, ‘unconventional’ and ‘dramatic’ religious movement.

Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), the Indian Nationalist and yogi, developed in the period of his life at Pondicherry in Southeast India a system of thought, practice and experience which he called ‘Integral Yoga’. The title indicated, he said, that ‘it takes up the essence and many processes of the old Yogas — its newness is in its aim, standpoint and the totality of its method’. In the development of Integral Yoga Aurobindo believed he was speaking and acting as a ‘realized yogi’ or, better still, a yogi who was in the process of realization. He had not attained a final experience of jñāna, but he believed he had experienced levels of supra-mental consciousness which would lead to the higher level of Supermind itself.

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.

In a detailed and spirited critique, Professor James M. Humber has found my defence of the ontological argument unconvincing. Humber's case rests upon his claim that my ‘error’ is due to my ‘having accepted an incorrect definition of “physically necessary being” … ’. Now I do indeed claim that God must be conceived as a factuall necessary being, i.e. as eternally independent. I take the notion of God's aseity or eternal independence to be relatively straightforward and uncontroversial; it is accepted as an essential component of the concept God by many philosophers who also insist that there is no acceptable form of demonstrative theism. Thus, it is widely held that ‘God is a factually necessary being’ does not imply ‘God is a logically necessary being’; that God is eternally independent does not imply that he exists in all possible worlds. But it is precisely this view that I have argued is incorrect. While I concur that there is an intelligible concept of God as factually necessary, I deny that the existence of such a being is logically contingent, a mere matter of empirical fact. Indeed, a rigorous inspection of the concept of an eternally independent being reveals that whether that concept is instantiated, i.e. whether there exists a being exemplifying that concept, is knowable a priori. My claim is in fact stronger than this. I argue that the existence of an eternal, independent, omniscient and omnipotent being (God) is demonstrable by conceptual analysis. It is Humber's contention that my alleged demonstration of God's existence crumbles upon the discovery of the unacceptability of my definition of ‘factually necessary being’. Let us see.

It was a little over ten years ago, 1967–8, that H. D. Lewis delivered the first series of Gifford lectures, The Elusive Mind, in the University of Edinburgh. It was my privilege that year to be an auditor in the Seminar at King's College that Professor Lewis was conducting with his students in the area of this topic. I had already read the works in which, in the midst of neo-orthodox and existentialist religious movements, he had devoted himself to critical valuation of those doctrines - witness his Morals and the New Theology (1947), and Morals and Revelation (1951). This earlier work prepared for a comprehensive interpretation of religious experience in his book in 1960: Our Experience of God.

I am deeply grateful to Professor Bertocci for his exceptionally valuable comments. In requesting that I should accept them for publication in Religious Studies, Professor Bertocci also urged me to reply in the same journal. This is, in itself, a very welcome suggestion, but it is with great reluctance that I take up space, in the journal I edit myself, to set forth my own ideas, even as replies to criticism.