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.

This essay seeks to clarify Gandhi's logic of self-suffering. Its inner accents have not received the attention they deserve. So I propose to emphasize them, though the context of such suffering and its impact on men too must be given due regard.

What if doing philosophy across cultures is always implicitly a matter of metaphilosophy – of articulating more clearly the nature of philosophy itself? What if it forces us to ‘stand back’ hermeneutically and map out a ‘view from above’ of the underlying fabric of ideas – in their constitutive concepts, their relations to other ways of thinking, and their potential to be configured in alternative fascinating and fruitful ways?

This article incorporates existing approaches to comparative philosophy within a single scheme of complementary philosophical activities, and a single overarching metaphilosophical project. These approaches are (1) ‘archival’ (exploring parallel but separate philosophical traditions), (2) ‘equivalentist’ (comparing traditions in terms of analogies and contrasts), and (3) ‘problem-solving’ (using multiple traditions to provide philosophical solutions). I situate these within (4) the overarching hermeneutic project of ‘mapping’ concepts and their possibilities. This entails the theory that philosophies drawing on multiple perspectives are always implicitly engaged in mapping out the underlying eidetic structure upon which philosophy does its work, and charting the conceptual possibilities surrounding any idea.

I. Introduction There are still those who think that, if the word ‘miracle’ means a violation of a law of nature, miracles are either impossible or undetectable or a threat to science. I shall take the opposite side and argue that, thus defined, miracles are possible, are detectable in principle, and, again in principle, can be endorsed without compromising legitimate scientific aspirations.

Which form of belief-less religion should the agnostic prefer: non-doxasticism which substitutes belief with some weaker cognitive attitude, or fictionalism which standardly treats religious life as a game of make-believe? I argue for non-doxasticism due to its ability to handle the problems associated with fictionalism. However, in an argument for exclusive availability I go further, denying even that the agnostic has a choice: if she has a religious pro-attitude only non-doxasticism is rationally available to her. I also address and reject a recent argument by Finlay Malcolm to the effect that non-doxasticism cannot be properly distinguished from fictionalism.

The fine-tuning argument for the existence of God requires that the probability that the universe is life-permitting if God exists is not nearly as low as the probability that the universe is life-permitting if God does not exist. Recently, some proponents of the fine-tuning argument have reasoned as follows. ‘Stipulate that the probability that there exists a life-permitting universe if God exists is one in a billion. Only the most hardened sceptic would refuse odds like that, right? So one in a billion is more than just fair to those sceptical of the fine-tuning argument. It is generous. Even on that generous assumption, the fine-tuning argument is very strong.’ This article explains why the assumption is not, in fact, generous.

The utopian community of Auroville (‘City of Dawn’) is nestled along the Coromandel Coast of India approximately five miles north of Pondicherry. Though conceived as a harmonious society and city modelled after the integrative philosophy of the twentieth-century philosopher-mystic, Aurobindo, Auroville has been from its inception a collection of disparate settlements embodying social fragmentation not unity. The question this essay attempts to answer is how the ‘unitary vision’ which the founder and the charter of Auroville expounded is related to the social and physical disorder that has characterized Auroville from its beginning. Put differently, if it is true that an intentional community's physical space will reflect its philosophical (or theological) model, what are the underlying concepts or images which have produced the current situation in Auroville? In answering such a question, much can be learned about the relationship between religious ideas and symbols and the intentional communities to which they intend to give rise.

Theists typically believe that God knows all truths. However, accounts of divine omniscience almost always focus on the scope of God's knowledge or perhaps on whether certain kinds of facts are there to be known by God, such as counterfactuals of creaturely freedom or future contingent facts. Very rarely do these accounts include for analysis the nature of God's knowledge. In this article, I develop an acquaintance theory of God's knowledge where acquaintance with an epistemic relation that guarantees that the truth of God's beliefs is necessary for knowledge. I argue that this view achieves an ideal way of knowing, worthy of the divine being.

Philosophers of religion divide neatly into two camps on the problem of evil: those who think it fatal to the concept of a loving God and those who do not. The latter have established a wide array of defensive positions down through the centuries, but none that has proved impregnable to sceptical attack. In his new book Mr Hick wisely abandons these older fortifications and falls back on highly mobile reserves. Not for him the ‘Fall of Man’ thesis, with its unexplained choice to give up finite perfection; nor the Plotinian principle of plenitude, evil being an inevitable petering out of God's goodness; nor the ‘aesthetic’ gambit where the horrors of life constitute mere ‘shadows’ designed to highlight the beauty of creation; nor the ‘cosmic Toryism’, as someone called it, of Leibniz's ‘best of all possible worlds’; nor even, one might say gratefully, the gaseous obscurantism of Karl Barth's ‘das Nichtige’. All of these defences, and others besides, Mr Hick lumps together under what he calls ‘the majority report’ in Christian theodicy: the Augustinian tradition or type. In place of these venerable ramparts Hick elects the more fluid defence afforded, he thinks, by Irenaeus, Eastern Christianity and, in modern times, by Schleiermacher and a few contemporary thinkers.

Many philosophers and philosophically oriented theologians hold that it is unreasonable to treat the statement ‘There is a God’ as analytic or logically true. As an existential statement, they argue, it is no different from any statement of its kind. Existential statements cannot be analytic, because contra-existential statements cannot be contradictory. (Notice, however, that existential statements can be contradictory, and contra-existential statements can be analytic.) To say, for example, that unicorns do not exist is simply to say that no entity satisfies the description ‘unicorn’. But this cannot be complex in the sense of entailing two contradictory statements. If so, then the existential statement corresponding to it cannot be analytic. In general, since no contra-existential statement can be contradictory, no existential statement can be analytic.

God, a being who is good in the best possible combination of ways, loves us. But does he feel sorrow on our behalf? Thomas Aquinas argues that: every passion is specified by its object. That passion, therefore, whose subject is absolutely unbefitting to God is removed from God even according to the nature of its proper species. Such a passion, however, is sorrow or pain, for its subject is the already present evil, just as the object of joy is the good present and possessed. Sorrow and pain, therefore, of their very nature cannot be found in God.

It has long been recognized that Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is a cryptogram. Encoded within a series of reflections and commentaries on Genesis 22 is a deeper message directed at a reader or readers presumably capable of deciphering the hidden meaning. That this is true is suggested by the book's epigraph: ‘What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not.’

J. L. Mackie's posthumous book on the philosophy of religion, The Miracle of Theism, contains a number of detailed criticisms of versions of inductive arguments for the existence of God, contained in my own book The Existence of God. In this paper I argue that what I take to be the three main criticisms have no force.

There are certain primary religious beliefs which are basic to a whole religious Weltanschauung, for they are the cornerstone of the whole edifice. If these beliefs are unintelligible, incoherent, irrational or false the whole way-of-life, centering around them, is ‘a house of cards’. Certain segments of it may still be seen to have a value when viewed from some other perspective, but if these primary religious belief are faulted, the religious Weltanschauung itself has been undermined. If it has been undermined and if people recognise that it has been undermined and still go around believing in it, accepting and acting in accordance with its tenents, they are then being very irrational. And while in humility we should recognise that we all suffer from propensities to irrationality and perhaps in some spheres of our life can't help being irrational, it is a propensity we should resist, for to be irrational is to do something we ought not to do.

In The Existence of God Richard Swinburne argues that certain religious experiences support the hypothesis that God exists. Indeed, the argument from religious experience is of crucial importance in Swinburne's philosophical theology. For, according to Swinburne, without the argument from religious experience the combined weight of the other arguments he considers, e.g. the teleological, the cosmological, or the argument from miracles, does not render the theistic hypothesis very probable. However, the argument from religious experience combined with these other arguments makes theism more probable than its rivals.

Recently, Religious Studies published an article by Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss, arguing that there exists a necessary being who is a creator of the world. Building on their argument, I argue that, assuming that there is exactly one creator, that creator is essentially omnipotent.

Divine passibility refers to the hypothesis that God feels the suffering and joy of the world. Passibility implies that God not only knows all propositions that are true of the world (if such a list is logically possible) but that God subjectively experiences, either partially or entirely, what is experienced within the world. The question of God's passibility is related to a surprising number of areas important to contemporary theology. For example, omniscience is thought to be impossible unless passibility is assumed, for to know something fully implies a certain level of experiential knowledge. But it seems that any being open to experience would also have to be passible, or so it is argued. Additionally, the precise character of God's passibility or impassibility has ramifications for issues in Christology and theodicy. Not surprisingly, therefore, the question of whether or not God is immanently involved with the processes of a changing world has become a matter of great debate in this century. Recently Charles Hartshorne (1984 relying on 1941, 1948), Marcel Sarot (1992, 1995), Paul Fiddes (1988), Charles Taliaferro (1989) and George Shields (1992) have argued that God does in fact feel, either emotionally or physically, the vicissitudes, happiness and anguish of the world. Others, such as Richard Creel (1986) and Paul Helm (1988, 1990) argue that God cannot possibly be implicated in or, even worse, identified with a created, contingent and imperfect world. Although the question of whether or not God is passible relates to important aspects of God's nature such as omniscience, omnipresence and immutability, this paper will focus on the question of whether divine passibility is metaphysically possible.

Is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity consistent with a very strong version of the thesis of divine simplicity? Yes, so long as the simple divine nature is a relational nature, a nature that could be characterized in terms of such relations as knowing and loving. This divine nature functions simultaneously as agent, patient, and action: as knower, known and knowledge, and lover, beloved, and love. I will draw on work on qua-objects by Kit Fine and Nicholas Asher and on my own account of relational facts to elucidate this model more fully.

I defend Peter van Inwagen's no-minimum response to the problem of evil from a recent objection raised by Jeff Jordan.