This paper suggests that an ontologically reductionist view of nature which also accepts the completeness of causality at the level of physics can support (1) the blissful transfiguration of the moral, (2) mystical release from standard ego-identification, and (3) psycho-physical transformation cultivated through meditative practice. This mystical naturalism provides the basis for a thicker, more vigorous institutional religious life, including religious life centred around meditation practices, personalist meanings, and the theology of incarnation, than current proposals for strongly naturalist religions allow.

This paper recasts the normative shape of Fear and Trembling by presenting an ‘ethical reading’ based on an ethic of care. It will be argued that Abraham's response represents a commitment to sustain and deepen his fundamental relationship with God, to make absolute his relation to the Absolute. Since most readers tend to focus myopically on ‘the trial’ itself, apart from the context and history of the God-relationship, the proffered interpretations tend inevitably to distort the nature and significance of Abraham's form of life. By remembering the pattern of attachment between God and Abraham, I think that a different normative picture will emerge, one which can be expressed in the grammar of care.

The present article deals with religious faith by comparing the so-called double movement of faith in Kierkegaard to Kant's moral faith. Kierkegaard's double movement of faith and Kant's moral faith can be seen as providing different accounts of religious faith, as well as involving different solutions to the problem of realizing the highest good. The double movement of faith in Fear and Trembling provides an account of the structure of faith that helps us make sense of what Kierkegaard means by religious faith in general, as well as to understand better the relation between philosophy and Christian thinking in Kierkegaard. It is argued that previous scholarship has described the relation between Kierkegaard and Kant in a misleading manner by interpreting Kant as an ethicist and overlooking the role of grace in Kant.

Bayne and Nagasawa have argued that the properties traditionally attributed to God provide an insufficient grounding for the obligation to worship God. They do so partly because the same properties, when possessed in lesser quantities by human beings, do not give rise to similar obligations. In a recent paper, Jeremy Gwiazda challenges this line of argument. He does so because it neglects the possible existence of a threshold obligation to worship, i.e. an obligation that only kicks in when the value of a parameter has crossed a certain threshold. This article argues that there is a serious flaw in Gwiazda's proposal. Although thresholds may play an important part in how we think about our obligations, their function is distinct from that envisaged by Gwiazda. To be precise, this article argues that thresholds are only relevant to obligations to the extent that they transform a pre-existing imperfect obligation or act of supererogation into a perfect obligation. Since it is not clear that there is an imperfect obligation to worship any being, and indeed since on a certain conception of moral agency it is highly unlikely that there could be, the search for a rational basis for the obligation to worship must continue.

I advance three challenges for the view Murphy advances in God's Own Ethics. The first two challenges target Murphy's claim that God does not have requiring reasons to prevent the suffering of rational creatures. I develop two arguments against that position, one based on the intrinsic value of human beings, the other based on the intrinsic badness of the suffering of rational creatures. My third challenge targets Murphy's account of God's contingent love for humanity. I seek to raise doubts about whether Murphy's picture is one in which it is true to say that God loves all human beings.

An interpretation of the work of Schleiermacher and Otto recently offered by Andrew Dole, according to which these two thinkers differed over the extent to which religion can be explained naturalistically, and over the sense in which the supernatural can be admitted, is examined and refuted. It is argued that there is no difference between the two thinkers on this issue. It is shown that Schleiermacher's claim that a supernatural event is at the same time a natural event does not invite, but rather forecloses the possibility of, a naturalistic explanation of the event. It is further demonstrated that Otto, like Schleiermacher, denied the existence of supernatural events interpreted as events that infringe the laws of nature.

This paper is concerned with the centrality of aspect seeing in Wittgenstein's philosophy, with some analogies between religious beliefs and aspect seeing, and with the implications of these analogies for the question of the justification of religious beliefs. If belief in God is neither a hypothesis nor a regular perceptual belief but rather a type of aspect seeing, then the kinds of proofs and justifications that are applicable to it would have to engage the non-believer in a manner that would help her experience the dawning of a new aspect. This is why the standard philosophical proofs for theism, even when accepted as valid, are likely to be unsuccessful in bringing about faith.

Property-identical divine-command theory (PDCT) is the view that being obligatory is identical to being commanded by God in just the way that being water is identical to being H2O. If these identity statements are true, then they express necessary a posteriori truths. PDCT has been defended in Robert M. Adams (1987) and William Alston (1990). More recently Mark C. Murphy (2002) has argued that property-identical divine-command theory is inconsistent with two well-known and well-received theses: the free-command thesis and the supervenience thesis. I show that Murphy's argument is vitiated by mistaken assumptions about the substitutivity of metaphysical identicals in contexts of supervenience. The free-command thesis and the supervenience thesis therefore pose no serious threat to PDCT.

A major aspect of the concern that brings us together in a newly founded and established Institute of Religion and Theology in Great Britain and Ireland is the organisation and management of knowledge and research within our field. During the past generation there has been an explosive growth of knowledge. Unfortunately this has not been accompanied by a corresponding growth in human brain capacity. This has given rise to new problems in the organisation and management of knowledge. The computer has helped, but mainly in the area of the quantifiable and the aggregation and arrangement of brute facts.

Like David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, J. L. Mackie's most potent blast against the rationality of belief in God, his The Miracle of Theism, appeared after his death. The book is a broadside against not only the traditional arguments for God's existence, such as the onto-, cosmo-, and teleological arguments, but also against proofs from consciousness, miracles, the idea of God, and so forth, and against the validity of religious experience and faith without reason, and it presents as well negative arguments against divine existence. The book will no doubt supply much grist for the mill of future discussions, but in this piece I should like to focus on Mackie's analysis of one particular argument, the kalām cosmological argument. For his discussion at this point seems to me to be superficial, and I think it can be shown that he has failed to provide any compelling or even intuitively appealing objection against the argument.

According to the thesis of divine ‘middle knowledge’, first propounded by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century, subjunctive conditionals stating how free agents would freely respond under counter-factual conditions (call such expressions ‘counterfactuals of freedom’) may be straightforwardly true, and thus serve as the objects of divine knowledge. This thesis has provoked considerable controversy, and the recent revival of interest in middle knowledge, initiated by Anthony Kenny, Robert Adams and Alvin Plantinga in the 1970s, has led to two ongoing debates. One is a theoretical debate over the very intelligibility of middle knowledge;1 the other is a practical debate over its philosophical and theological utility.2

Many Christian theodicists believe that God's creating us with the capacity to love Him and each other justifies, in large part, God's permitting evil. For example, after reminding us that, according to Christian doctrine, the supreme good for human beings is to enter into a reciprocal love relationship with God, Vincent Brümmer recently wrote:

In creating human persons in order to love them, God necessarily assumes vulnerability in relation to them. In fact, in this relation, he becomes even more vulnerable than we do, since he cannot count on the steadfastness of our love the way we can count on his steadfastness… If God did not grant us the ability to sin and cause affliction to him and to one another, we would not have the kind of free and autonomous existence necessary to enter into a relation of love with God and with one another… Far from contradicting the value which the free will defence places upon the freedom and responsibility of human persons, the idea of a loving God necessarily entails it. In this way we can see that the free will defence is based on the love of God rather than on the supposed intrinsic value of human freedom and responsibility.

There is some important data which has not as yet found its way into philosophic discussions on the problem of evil. Some religious people report that suffering, instead of being contrary to the love of God, is actually a medium in and through which his love can be experienced. This looks highly paradoxical, but it will be our purpose to show that it is intelligible and that it has important consequences for philosophical discussions of the problem of evil.

While certain of the traditional attributes of God such as omnipotence or omniscience (particularly divine foreknowledge) have been thoroughly – and, one is tempted to say, nearly exhaustively – analyzed and defended in recent philosophical literature, others of the divine attributes such as God's eternity have received scant and generally superficial analysis. Current discussions of God's eternity have been for the most part carried out in almost complete ignorance of the philosophy of space and time and without any profound knowledge of Relativity Theory and its analysis of time – a remarkable shortcoming, when one thinks about it, for how can one pretend to formulate an adequate doctrine of God's eternity and His relationship to time without taking cognizance of what modern philosophy and science have to say about time?

Great philosophical problems are known by their power to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of their own dissolution. Indeed, it may be only thus that we are finally convinced of the enduring significance of a problem. The mind-body problem has been dissolved at least twice in the last fifty years: once by the positivists, and again by the therapeutic analysts. Yet it strongly re-asserts itself, so that it is barely a hyperbole when Wilfrid Sellars says that this problem ‘soon turns out, as one picks at it, to be nothing more nor less than the philosophical enterprise as a whole’.

Swinburne offers a greater-goods defence to the problem of evil within a deontological framework. Yet deontologists characteristically hold that we have no right to inflict great evil on any individual to bring about the greater good. Swinburne accepts that humans generally do not have that right, but argues that God, as the supreme care-giver, does. I contend that Swinburne's argument that care-givers have such a right is flawed, and defend the classical deontological objection to imposing evils that good may come.

In this paper I shall discuss a certain theodicy, or line of argument in response to the problem of evil, viz, the so-called ‘free will defence’. What I propose to do is defend this theodicy against an objection that has been made to it in recent years.

There are five main claims that may be made about life after death:

(a) We are reincarnated in the self-same body we had in life.

(b) We are reincarnated in another body. (For my purposes in this paper it is a matter of indifference whether this is thought of as reincarnation in anotherworld, or as reincarnation in this world: the arguments I shall be examining apply equally to either case. Throughout the paper the term ‘reincarnation’ used without qualification should be taken to mean ‘reincarnation in a different body’.)

(c) We are revived, or continue to live (or to have conscious existence) in a disembodied form.

In his recent book, The Existence of God, Richard Swinburne argues that the world as we find it is one that a good and omnipotent God would have good reason to bring about. He does not claim to demonstrate, that is, deductively to prove, that the world is God–made but rather to show that the proposition that God exists and made the world is more likely to be true and hence more reasonable to believe, all things considered, than its negation. He recognizes that in order to sustain this position he has to justify the existence of evil, especially natural evil, or at least to reconcile both the existence and enormous quantity of such evil with the claim that God exists. In fact, however, Swinburne aims beyond mere reconciliation to the point that the existence and nature of the world (even including its evils) confirm the claim that God made it (224).

My title is of course a variation on Professor H. D. Lewis' well-known Our Experience of God. There he expounded a variety of religious intuitionism, which stands in the line of Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto and Martin Buber. These and other writers have characteristically made ‘the move to experience’, as a new blend of natural and revealed theology. The move makes a great deal of sense. On the one hand it grounds belief at a time when the older natural theology apparently had crumbled. On the other hand, it points to the dynamics of religious inspiration and gave a new perspective on revelation. It softens both reason and faith, of course, but it also provides a defence against skepticism. It fits well with a liberal attitude to scriptures and tradition. So there are manifest advantages of the move to experience, for those who wish to make it in the context of the Western theistic tradition. The writers I cited above, and Professor Lewis himself, have discussed religious experience from a mainly Western and theistic angle – even Otto with his great comparative concerns did so; and more needs to be said about the nature of religious experience in the broader context of Eastern and other religions. Lewis, however, paid attention to this wider problem, for instance in his 1963 article ‘Buddha and God’. In some respects this issue of the relationship of apparently non-theistic religions to theism is the most important one in contemporary crosscultural philosophy of religion.