This paper replies to Evan Fales' sociological explanation of mystical experience in two articles in Religious Studies vol. 32 (143–63 and 297–313). In these papers Fales applies the ideas of I. M. Lewis on spirit possession to show how mystical experiences can be accounted for as vehicles for the acquisition of political power and social control. The rebuttal of Fales contains three main elements: (a) the presentation of specific examples of theistic mystical experience from Christianity and Judaism which provide counter-examples to Fales' theory; (b) the presentation of some general objections to its plausibility; and (c) an argument for the conclusion that the burden of proof lies with naturalistic, reductionist explanations of religious experiences rather than with theistic interpretations of those experiences.

Recently, Clifford Williams has attempted to argue for the plausibility of a Christian form of physicalism. To make his case, Williams appropriates certain claims by John Locke regarding the possibility of thinking matter to argue for what Williams calls the parity theses: (1) God can make matter and nonmatter either to think or not to think. Given God's omnipotence, the justification for (1) is: (2) there is no contradiction in asserting either that matter or nonmatter thinks or that they do not think. If we expand thinking to include other morally and religiously relevant operations of the mind, then we get: (3) God can make either a purely material being or a nonmaterial entity to have moral and religious characteristics. From this, Williams infers that: (4) there is an equal amount of mystery in thinking matter as there is in non-thinking matter. In response to Williams, I argue that his main arguments for the parity theses fail and his Lockean style argument must be judged a failure. To show this I, first, state Williams' Lockean parity argument and, second, criticize the three arguments he offers for its most important premise.

Vincent Brümmer has recently, by taking his starting-point in the writings of Wittgenstein, defended the idea that the debate about the truth or falsehood of the claim that God exists has no future. I suggest that the arguments Brümmer develops to support this claim fail. This is so because he does not show why any attempt to prove or disprove the truth or falsehood of the belief in the existence of God is circular or how the purported non-provability of the belief that God exists entails that the theism–atheism debate of the truth or falsehood of this belief has no future. In addition, Brümmer does not acknowledge that there are many different religious language-games, that within the theistic language-games the claim that God exists is used in many different ways and that, as a result, it is not true that, within the religious language-game, the belief in the existence of God cannot be doubted, denied, or treated as a hypothesis.

This paper is a contribution to the programme of moderating Social Trinitarianism to achieve a fairly orthodox result. I follow Swinburne in relying heavily on divine thisnessless and in the important speculation that the Trinity arose from a primordial ‘unitarian’ God. In this paper I explain why I disagree with Swinburnes's account of how the Trinity came into being and I propose an alternative in which the primordial God fissions into three divine persons for the sake of a loving community.

William Alston has articulated a powerful defence of the claim that mystical perception generates prima facie justified beliefs about God. At the heart of his defence is the claim that mystical perception is ‘innocent until proven guilty’; that is, Alston claims that the practice of forming beliefs on the basis of putative perceptions of God should be accorded the same presumptive innocence we accord to other standard ways of forming beliefs like sense perception, memory and introspection. But Alston employs a strategy for defending mystical perception that seems to obviate the possibility of criticizing mystical perception and thus that renders otiose Alston's claim that that practice is innocent only until proven guilty. I argue that this appearance is deceptive; Alston's strategy does not render effective criticism of mystical perception unreasonably difficult. I further argue that granting the legitimacy of Alston's strategy is essential to a fair, measured criticism of mystical perception.

In a recent issue of Religious Studies Kevin Corcoran has criticized my arguments for the impossibility of theistic experience (i.e. an experience which is phenomenologically of God). Building on, and amending, criticisms already levelled against my views by Nelson Pike (in the latter's Mystic Union), Corcoran argues that my views are based on an account of what it is for an experience to be ‘phenomenologically of’ an individual (or kind of thing) which leads to ‘wildly implausible’ results. I here try to show that Corcoran's criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of my views.

As a personal agent, God's act of creation involves deliberation about His possible courses of action, a decision to act in a certain way, and the execution of that decision. In this paper, I argue that there is good reason to suppose that God's deliberation of the possible worlds cannot make Him temporal. Furthermore, whether we favour a deterministic and indeterministic version of freedom, a model can be constructed of how God timelessly decides to create this world and respond to His creatures. Finally, I argue that the problem of how God executes His decision dissolves, if we adopt a pantheistic viewpoint. This rather unorthodox viewpoint is compatible with other important theistic doctrines.