A new emphasis in epistemology is burgeoning, known by the phrase ‘the epistemology of disagreement’. The object of investigation is the situation where the two combatants of a disagreement are equally well situated epistemologically. Central questions include whether peer epistemic conflict reduces the support one has for one's belief, whether the reduction should be understood on internalist or externalist lines, and how often such peer conflict happens. The main objective in the first two sections will be to provide background by bringing key points of contention to the surface in the recent epistemologies of disagreement both in mainstream epistemology and in religious epistemology. A final section asserts that epistemic externalism in religious epistemology doesn't easily escape the challenge of epistemic, peer, religious disagreement.

Gödel's ontological argument is a formal argument for a being defined in terms of the concept of a positive property. I shall defend several versions of Gödel's argument, using weaker premises than Anderson's (1990) version, and avoiding Oppy's (1996 and 2000) parody refutations.

One version of the free-will argument relies on the claim that, other things being equal, a world in which free beings exist is morally preferable to a world in which free beings do not exist (the ‘value thesis’). I argue that this version of the free-will argument cannot support a theodicy that should alleviate the doubts about God's existence to which the problems of evil give rise. In particular, I argue that the value thesis has no foundation in common intuitions about morality. Without some sort of intuitive support, the value thesis lacks the resources to serve as the foundation for a theodicy that addresses the powerful intuition, which affects believers and non-believers alike, that a perfect God would not allow so much evil.

The doctrine of hell has always been troublesome for philosophical theology and has particularly captured the attention of philosophers in the past decade. Those contemporary philosophers who defend the doctrine of hell inevitably argue that it is the result of free choice on the part of the damned. Richard Swinburne in his ‘Theodicy of Heaven and Hell’ says that ‘It is good that God should not let a man damn himself without much urging and giving him many opportunities to change his mind, but it is bad that someone should not in the all-important matter of the destiny of his soul be allowed finally to destroy it.’ William Lane Craig believes that hell is consistent with God's justice and love since ‘Those who make a well-informed and free decision to reject Christ are self-condemned ... By spurning God's prevenient grace and the solicitation of His Spirit, they shut out God's mercy and seal their own destiny.’ Similar passages could be culled from the recent books of Jerry Walls and Jonathan Kvanvig.

Disregarding variations in approach, the strategy common to these philosophers is to argue that hell is neither unjust nor unloving if it is freely chosen by the damned. Such a strategy is moot if it turns out that no one can choose hell. In a much discussed passage, Thomas Talbott denies that the notion of freely choosing hell is coherent. I will first examine Talbott's argument in an attempt to understand it. Then I will show how the published responses to Talbott fail to strike at the heart of the argument. Finally I will present my own defence of hell, based on two strands in early church theodicy.

The last two decades have seen an unprecedented amount of philosophical work on the topics of divine foreknowledge, middle knowledge, and timelessness in relation to human freedom. Most of this effort has been directed at logical and metaphysical aspects of these topics – the compatibility of foreknowledge with free will, the existence of true counterfactuals of freedom and the possibility of middle knowledge, the conceivability and metaphysical possibility of divine timelessness, and so on. Far less attention, in contrast, has been devoted to the broader theological ramifications of these theories. Yet insofar as they are theological theories, they are properly appreciated and indeed fully understood only when placed in the appropriate theological context.

Miss G. E. M. Anscombe has said that, in order for progress to be made in ethics, we must have some determinate idea of ‘human flourishing.’ I want to cite in what follows the work of a number of writers in the psychiatric field who seem to me to throw light on just what it is for a human individual to flourish, for a human community to flourish, and for a human individual to flourish in relation to or in spite of his community.

In his Edifying Discourses, Soren Kierkegaard published a sermon entitled ‘The Unchangeableness of God’ in which he reiterated the dogma which dominated Catholic, Protestant and even Jewish expressions of classical supernaturalist theology from the first century A.D. until the advent of process theology in the twentieth century. The dogma that as a perfect being, God must be totally unchanging in every conceivable respect was expressed by Kierkegaard in such ways as:

He changes all, Himself unchanged. When everything seems stable (for it is only in appearance that the external world is for a time unchanged, in reality it is always in flux) and in the overturn of all things, He remains equally unchanged; no change touches Him, not even the shadow of a change; in unaltered clearness He, the father of lights, remained eternally unchanged.1

Graham Oppy has criticized several Thomistic versions of the cosmological argument in a series of publications over the years, most recently in a Religious Studies article responding to my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Here I reply to his criticisms, arguing that while Oppy raises important issues, a besetting weakness of his approach is a failure adequately to grapple with the metaphysical underpinnings of the arguments.

Centred on figures like Herbert McCabe, David Burrell, and Brian Davies the loose tradition known as grammatical thomism is undervalued within analytic philosophy of religion. This is particularly unfortunate, since a grammatical thomist approach offers the prospect of both a reorientation towards a more apophatic conception of God, consonant with the theology and practice of many religious traditions, and of moving beyond certain debates in the philosophy of religion. In this article, a grammatical thomist approach to the word ‘God’ is laid out: the conditions for introducing the word constrain its grammar, such that it cannot be understood as designating anything within our world. Accordingly inferential moves which we might otherwise find tempting are blocked. The result is an apophatic theology grounded in linguistic considerations. Objections against linguistic approaches to philosophy and theology, owing to Williamson and Murphy respectively, are considered and counter-arguments presented. The potential for therapeutic approaches to both the problem of evil and questions around theology and politics is then flagged.

In recent years the issue of whether mysticism can be induced by drugs has been pursued by both scholars of mystical literature and psychological researchers. R. C. Zaehner is perhaps the best known among the scholars of religious literature who have addressed the issues of drug-induced mysticism. While on the side of empirical psychology investigators such as Walter N. Pahnke, R. E. L. Masters, and Jean Houston have pursued some of the same issues using the techniques of laboratory experimentation. Zaehner, who was familiar with both Eastern and Western mysticism, argued that drug-induced experiences are not the same as religious mystical experiences of the theistic variety. It was farcical, he argued, for Aldous Huxley to posit a connection between his preternatural feeling of oneness with his chair and the Beatific Vision. The issue between Zaehner and Huxley was not over the veridicality of Huxley's mystical experience. It was over the significance of Huxley's experience: Was it or was it not a drug-induced mystical experience of the sort attained by mystics after heroic struggles of self-discipline? This was the issue again when Zaehner came to address himself to the claims of Timothy Leary, a chief proponent of ‘the LSD experience’, and, in general terms, this has been the central issue pursued by the psychological researchers.

One of the more popular bedtime stories in our house just now is Horton Hears a Who by Dr Seuss. Horton is an elephant, and unlike the other animals in the jungle, he is capable – thanks doubtless to his large ears – of hearing the faint sounds made by some minute beings called Whos, who live in a town called Whoville on a tiny speck of dust. The other animals think Horton is mad when he talks to the Whos: they take the speck of dust from him and attempt to get rid of it. After a series of adventures Horton retrieves the speck of dust, gets the Whos to shout loudly enough to be heard by the other animals, and so everyone lives happily ever after. In the course of the story, before the speck of dust is taken from him, Horton is walking along and worrying:

‘Should I put this speck down?…’ Horton thought with alarm.

‘If I do these small persons may come to great harm.

I can't put it down. And I won't! After all

A person's a person, no matter how small.’

In this essay I wish to defend the intuition that God transcends time, of which he is the Creator. To do this, I will develop a new understanding of the term ‘timeless eternity’ as it applies to God. This assumes the inadequacy of the traditional notion of divine eternity, as it is found in Boethius, Anselm and Aquinas. Very briefly, the reasons for this inadequacy are as follows. God sustains the universe, which means in part that he is responsible for the fundamental ontological status of things. Because the universe is an everchanging reality, things do change in their fundamental ontological status at different times – a change we must ascribe to God, and cannot ascribe to the objects themselves, since this has to do with their very existence. God himself, therefore, does different things at different times. This implies change in God. Whenever a change occurs, a duration occurs. Therefore, God is in time. But I do not think it is proper to say that God is in our time. God transcends time, and he is the Creator of our space-time. It is theologically more proper to say that we are in God's time, and I will adopt this language here.

Theodicy begins with the recognition that the world is not obviously under the care of a loving God with limitless power and wisdom. If it were, why would the world be burdened with its considerable amount and variety of evil? Theodicists are those who attempt to answer this question by suggesting a possible rationale for the appearance of evil in a theocentric universe. In the past theodicists have taken up the cause of theodicy in the service of piety, so that God might be defended against libel from humans, particularly the accusation that God's reign lacks justice. Contemporary practitioners, who live in a world where the existence of God can no longer be presumed, tend to favour theodicy as an exercise in securing the rationality of religious belief. Their hope is that one crucial theoretical obstacle to responsible belief in God will have been eliminated, once the idea of God has been reconciled with the reality of evil. What has commonly united theodicists, at least since the Enlightenment, is that they must answer to a non–believing antagonist. Until relatively recently, theodicy has been a debate between apologists for theistic faith and their cultured detractors.

The paper that follows continues a discussion with Tomis Kapitan in the pages of this journal over the compatibility of divine agency with divine foreknowledge. I had earlier argued against two premises in Kapitan's case for omniscient impotence: (i) that intentionally A-ing presupposes prior acquisition of the intention to A, and (ii) that acquiring the intention to A presupposes prior ignorance whether one will A. In response to my criticisms, Kapitan has recently offered new defences for these two premises. I show in reply why neither defence succeeds in rehabilitating the case against omniscient agency.

Some philosophers have argued that a world created by an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being would not contain evil. Since the world contains evil in fact, it follows (so it is claimed) that the world was not created by an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being. One of the replies frequently given to this argument is that the world contains evil only because it is populated with free creatures (men and devils) who perform morally wrong action. This is the centre of the so-called ‘Free Will Theodicy’ - a favourite not only of technical theologians such as Thomas Aquinas but of practising believers of the least sophisticated sort. On this view, evil results from the illicit exercise of created free will. The fault thus lies with his creatures and not with the omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good creator.

First, my thanks to Richard Swinburne for his probing and thoughtful review of my book Warranted Christian Belief (WCB). His account of the book's mainline of argument is accurate as far as it goes; it does contain an important lacuna, however. The focus of the book is twofold; it is aimed in two directions. First, just as Swinburne says, I argue that there are no plausible de iure objections to Christian belief that are independent of de facto objections; any plausible objection to the rationality of Christian belief, or to its warrant (the property that distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief), or its justification, will either be obviously mistaken or will (as with Freud, and Marx and a thousand others) presuppose one or more de facto objections. This is intended as a contribution to apologetics; it is important, because many or most objections to Christian belief are of just the sort I attempt to discredit. (‘I don't know whether Christian belief is true or not – who could know a thing like that? – but I do know that it is irrational, or unwarranted, or not rationally justified, or…’.) Second (and this is the focus Swinburne fails to mention), I proposed the extended A/C (Aquinas/Calvin) model as, from the perspective of Christian belief, a plausible account of the way in which Christian belief is, in fact, justified, rational and warranted. So the book is aimed in two directions: first towards readers generally, whether Christian believers or not, and second towards Christian believers.

In his recent trilogy, J. L. Schellenberg presents a new religious option: to have beliefless faith in a general object of religious concern that he thinks is referenced at the core of most sectarian religions – the axiological, soteriological, and metaphysical ultimate, which I call ‘UUU’. After explaining what UUU is more fully, I argue that the claim that UUU exists should not be, as Schellenberg says, the only focus for philosophy of religion. Still, I argue that such a claim is a good basis for a new form of religion, especially if it is modified in a couple of ways.

The traditional Christian view that God foreknows the future exclusively in terms of what will and will not come to pass is partially rooted in two ancient Hellenistic philosophical assumptions. Hellenistic philosophers universally assumed that propositions asserting ‘x will occur’ contradict propositions asserting ‘x will not occur’ and generally assumed that the gods lose significant providential advantage if they know the future partly as a domain of possibilities rather than exclusively in terms of what will and will not occur. Both assumptions continue to influence people in the direction of the traditional understanding of God's knowledge of the future. In this essay I argue that the first assumption is unnecessary and the second largely misguided.

This paper discusses Leibniz's Trinitarian doctrine in the light of his philosophy, as revealed by a set of virtually unstudied texts. The first part of the paper examines Leibniz's defence of the Trinity against the charge of contradiction as a necessary precondition to the development of his own conception of the Trinity. The second part discusses some of the key features of Leibniz's Trinitarian doctrine, notably his conception of person, the analogy between the human mind and the Trinity, and the problem of Trinitarian relations.

John Hick uses a distinction between the formal and the substantial properties of the Real an sich, the noumenal God. Hick claims that substantial properties, such as ‘being good’ or ‘being personal’, cannot be ascribed to the Real an sich. On the other hand, according to Hick, formal properties – such as ‘being such that none of our concepts apply’ – can be predicated of the Real an sich. I argue, first of all, that many of the properties Hick ascribes to the Real an sich are hard to interpret as anything but substantial, unless we adopt a highly arbitrary substantial/formal distinction. Secondly, I argue that it is never possible to ascribe only formal properties to the Real an sich, since the correct framing and application of formal properties involves a prior knowledge of some substantial properties. I show that the predication of formal properties involves having more knowledge than we need for the application of substantial properties. I conclude that Hick's practice is better than his theory, and that by dispensing with the formal/substantial distinction, he would enable his doctrine of God to stand on more respectable and theological grounds.