This essay is a revision of my earlier effort to overturn the prevailing view that there is merely a ‘family resemblance’ between religions. A religion is a system of practices rationalized by beliefs according to which the practices place the practitioner in a relation-of-value to a supermundane reality so grand that it can figure centrally in the satisfaction of substantial human needs. A ‘supermundane reality’ is one that exceeds the mundane world revealed by sense perception. The theory generates a useful taxonomy of practices and theories closely related to, but substantially different from, religions.

This paper is an exploration and interpretation of Kierkegaard's account of Christian belief. I argue that Kierkegaard believed that the Christian metaphysical tradition was exhausted and hence that there could be no defence of belief in God in purely rational terms. I defend this interpretation against objections, going on to argue that Kierkegaard thought it possible to defend a post-metaphysical conception of religious belief. I argue that Kierkegaard thought that such a defence was available if we understand correctly what it is to speak with ethico-religious authority. I argue that, when interpreted in the way I outline, Kierkegaard's notion of ethico-religious authority shows his conception of religious belief to have great plausibility. However, Kierkegaard goes on to argue that an individual's true relationship with God is constituted through the cultivation of guilt and the sense of himself as a sinner, and I give reasons for rejecting this claim, arguing that such cultivation is a form of asceticism.

In this paper I will investigate Nāgārjuna's approach to the problem of the existence of God. Nāgārjuna lived in the second century A.D. and founded Mādhyamika Buddhism.1 He is considered to be one of the greatest thinkers of India2 and his philosophy, ‘the central philosophy of Buddhism’.3 Although there have been some systematic studies and presentations of Nāgārjuna's writings among Eastern and Western scholars during the past six or seven decades,4 many aspects of his teachings have not been adequately treated. One of these aspects is his examination of the concept of God or deity.

Ethics and mysticism, we are regularly instructed, are if not antithetical, then certainly, at the very least, unrelated. This common wisdom is predicated on a specific understanding of morality and a flawed, though widespread, conception of mysticism and mystical traditions. It is yet another distorted and distorting manifestation of the still more universal misapprehension that mystics are essentially arch-individualists, ‘Lone Rangers’ of the spirit, whose sole intention is to escape the religious environments that spawned them in order to find personal liberation or salvation. Accordingly, mystics are portrayed as rebels and heretics, antinomians and spiritual revolutionaries, if not also underminers of existing social and religious structures. But this characterization, despite its popularity, needs revision. In this essay it is not possible to argue all the detailed reasons why this construal is simply incorrect, but, as a shorthand summary of a much larger, more complex interpretative reconstruction, I would call attention to the fact that mystics share not only the metaphysical problematic, the metaphysical diagnosis of existence, as this is conceptualized within their particular traditions, but also view its overcoming or deconstruction in ways consistent with the teachings of their ‘faith’mmunities. They are, that is to say, fully situated in the ontological, theological, and social contexts of their traditions. Essentially, they share the Weltanschauung of their inherited circumstance and seek to realize, experience, the ‘solutions’ proposed by their tradition.

The pluralistic approach to religions has come in for some serious criticism in recent writings. I shall consider two examples in particular. The first is the book Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, edited by Gavin D'Costa. This is a collection of essays offered in response to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, edited by John Hick and Paul Knitter. The second example is an essay by Paul Morris, ‘Judaism and Pluralism: the Price of “Religious Freedom”’, in Religious Pluralism and Unbelief, edited by Ian Hamnett.

It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected by the scholar. From Plato and Fontenelle to Schelling and Bultmann, philosophers and theologians have proposed innumerable definitions of myth. But all of these have one thing in common: they are based on the analysis of Greek mythology. Now, for a historian of religions this choice is not a very happy one. It is true that only in Greece did myth inspire and guide epic poetry, tragedy and comedy, as well as the plastic arts; but it is no less true that it is especially in Greek culture that myth was submitted to a long and penetrating analysis, from which it emerged radically ‘de-mythicised’. If in every European language the word ‘myth’ denotes a ‘fiction’, it is because the Greeks proclaimed it to be such twenty-five centuries ago. What is even more serious for an historian of religion: we do not know a single Greek myth within its ritual context. Of course this is not the case with the paleo-Oriental and Asiatic religions; it is especially not the case with the so-called ‘primitive’ religions. As is well known, a living myth is always connected with a cult, inspiring and justifying a religious behaviour. None of this of course means that Greek myth should not figure in an investigation of the mythical phenomenon. But it would seem unwise to begin our kind of inquiry by the study of Greek documents, and even more so to restrict it to such documents. The mythology which informs Homer, Hesiod and the tragic poets represents already a selection and an interpretation of archaic materials, some of which had become almost unintelligible. In short, our best chance of understanding the structure of mythical thought is to study cultures where myth is a ‘living thing’, where it constitutes the very ground of the religious life; in other words, where myth, far from indicating a fiction, is considered to reveal the truth par excellence.

The notion of omnipotence has proved to be quite recalcitrant to analysis. Still, during the last three decades or so, there has resurfaced a clever argument to the effect that, whatever omnipotence is, it cannot be exemplified in God: an allegedly impeccable and all-perfect being. Scrutinizing this argument, however, I find it less than convincing. Moreover, and more importantly, I venture a positive account of my own: a non-technical and distinctively metaphysical definition of omnipotence which, if true, sidesteps quite a number of well-known pitfalls. Also, by way of introduction, I review some earlier attempts.

Logical positivism and its derivatives cast a sustained philosophical shadow over religious faith and theological reflection. Any number of issues continue to surface in explicit and subdued forms, all of them relating to the status of religious beliefs. In fairly recent years, much fruitful discussion is dependent on the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's last notes, collected in On Certainty, are still largely unmined by those wishing to gain clarity about religious belief. It turns out, however, that these pages promise to be among the most helpful. In what follows, therefore, there is first offered a summary of the dominant themes of On Certainty – Wittgenstein's critique of G. E. Moore and his treatment of Moore's truisms of common sense. By a painstaking analysis, Wittgenstein shows that the truths defended by Moore are among any number of other fundamental propositions which have an extraordinary logical role in our language and judgements about the world. Next, partly by reference to Wittgenstein's lectures on religious belief and other collected notes, it is argued that many beliefs in Christianity share significant logical features with those fundamental propositions. Not least is the fact that, like the latter but unlike scientific hypotheses, Christian beliefs are removed from the ordinary traffic of verification and falsification. Despite the likenesses, notice is also taken of various dissimilarities which further set the peculiarity of Christian articles of faith into bold relief. The disparities, however, do not impugn the logically fundamental role which those beliefs have in the language and lives of those who embrace the faith.

In this paper I argue that traditional theism, in its theory, history, and practice has implications for the philosophy of nature. Namely, nature should be designed around aesthetic or meaningful principles and nature should be engineered in order to fulfil a fairly well defined set of purposes. If theism is true, we should be able to study nature objectively as a teleological system. After all, the teleological structure of nature is more important to us as spiritual beings than its mechanisms. Since a teleological philosophy of nature is no longer viable, traditional theism is untenable.

According to the free-will defence, the exercise of free will by creatures is of such value that God is willing to allow the existence of evil which comes from the misuse of free will. A well-known objection holds that the exercise of free will is compatible with determinism and thus, if God exists, God could have predetermined exactly how the will would be exercised; God could even have predetermined that free will would be exercised sinlessly. Thus, it is held, the free-will defence cannot be used as a partial account of why God should have allowed evil to exist. I investigate this objection using Kripke's apparatus for treating modalities and natural kinds to explore the nature of the incompatibilism required by the free-will defence. I show why the objection fails even if the standard arguments for compatibilism are acceptable. This is because the modality involved in the incompatibilism needed by the free-will defence differs from the modality involved in the compatibilism that is supported by standard compatibilist arguments. Finally, an argument is sketched for a variety of incompatibilism of the kind needed by the free-will defence.

Nicholas Wolterstorff has recently defended the acceptability of the belief that God speaks and examined various implications of such a belief. This paper examines several of his major hermeneutical and epistemological thesis. Among the issues discussed are the following (i) I examine Wolterstorff's claim to ‘honour’ the results of biblical criticism, and argue that excavative biblical scholarship challenges the plausibility of various crucial assumptions necessary for believing authorial-discourse interpretation of the Bible to be possible. (ii) I dispute his peculiar view that God's speech should not be included under the rubric of divine revelation. (iii) Contrary to Wolterstorff I claim that miracles would have to play an essential role in divine discourse. (iv) I critically examine and reject his claim that – in the case he describes – ‘we are entitled’ to believe God is speaking.

Theists typically think it appropriate to pray to God in the hope that He will thereby intervene in affairs. On the other hand, such prayer is often held to be quite inappropriate for pantheists; a view endorsed by many pantheists themselves. This paper argues for the exact opposite of these positions. It is maintained not only that pantheism can make sense of petitionary prayer but that, despite initial appearances to the contrary, classical theism can not.

Philip Kitcher has recently proposed a form of ‘cosmopolitan secularism’ which he suggests could enable the members of a future secular society to continue to access and benefit from the moral and existential resources of the world's religions. I criticize this proposal by appeal to contemporary work on the role of emotion and practice in religious commitment. Using the work of John Cottingham and Mark Wynn, two objections are offered to the cosmopolitan secularists' claim that the moral resources of a religion could be both preserved by and employed within a secular society whose members lack emotional commitment to and practical engagement with the religions in question. I conclude that, pace Kitcher, cosmopolitan secularism cannot fulfil its promise to preserve the moral resources of religion in the absence of genuine religious traditions and communities.

In this brief rejoinder to Talbott's reply, I argue that his clarifications pose a dilemma for him: he must either modify his account of unbearable misery, or give up his claim that all sinners must reach a point where they can resist God no farther.

The paper seeks to address three objections to pilgrimage practices – they are tied to superstitious beliefs (except where they are seen as simply an aid to the imagination), imply a crude experiential or emotional understanding of the nature of faith, and rest upon a primitive conception of divine localizability. In responding to these objections, I argue that the religious significance of places is not reducible to their contribution to religious imagination, experience or understanding. In this sense, relationship to God is not just a matter of thought, but of location.

Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder suggest that it is possible for an omnipotent being, Jove, to create randomly a world from a continuum of ever more perfect possible worlds. They then go on to argue that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable despite creating a surpassable world. I raise a number of problems for the view that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable when he creates (randomly or not) a surpassable world.

Up to now, a very large majority of work in the religious philosophy of life's meaning has presumed a conception of God that is Abrahamic. In contrast, in this article I critically discuss some of the desirable and undesirable facets of Traditional African Religion's salient conceptions of God as they bear on meaning in life. Given an interest in a maximally meaningful life, and supposing meaning would come from fulfilling God's purpose for us, would it be reasonable to prefer God as characteristically conceived by African philosophers of religion to exist instead of the Abrahamic conception of God? At this stage of enquiry, I answer that, in respect of the range of people to whom God's purpose would apply, a more African view of God would plausibly offer a greater meaning, but that, concerning what the content of God's purpose would be, the Abrahamic view appears to offer a greater one. I conclude by reflecting on this mixed verdict and by suggesting respects in which non-purposive facets of the African and Abrahamic conceptions of God could also have implications for life's meaning.

Pagan revivalism is a growing trend in the contemporary religious landscape. Is it possible to be a neopagan without disregarding the demands of reason? While outright belief in the old gods seems out of the question, I argue that polytheism represents a live epistemic possibility, and that non-doxastic paganism is therefore a viable option. However, the rational, non-doxastic neopagan should only commit to general polytheism, rather than a detailed, specific pagan pantheon (such as the Greek or Old Norse). I also suggest that the ancient pagan conception of the divine as radically immanent must be rejected.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate Rudolf Otto's account of the relationship between numinous experience and religious language in The Idea of the Holy, and this will inevitably also involve some more general discussion of the relationship between all religious experience and discursive reason. In The Idea of the Holy Otto makes a number of controversial claims about the nature of numinous experience and the problems which it creates for anyone wishing to speak about it. Numinous experience, Otto asserts, is qualitatively quite unlike any other experience. It is a religious feeling providing a unique form of religious knowledge inaccessible to our ordinary rational understanding. It is frequently spoken of as ineffable. Moreover because it resists literal description, it must be approached, if at all, then indirectly through analogy. At the heart of this collection of claims about numinous experience is an epistemological assumption about the distance separating religious language and experience. Otto believes that the parameters of numinous experience extend beyond the parameters of religious language, and consequently that it is possible to compare religious experience with language about it in a straightforward way. Indeed, much of The Idea of the Holy is devoted to the struggle of religious experience to cast off what Otto sees as its imprisonment by inadequate religious language.

In this article I shall concern myself with the question ‘Is some type of justification required in order for belief in God to be rational?’ Many philosophers and theologians in the past would have responded affirmatively to this question. However, in our own day, there are those who maintain that natural theology in any form is not necessary. This is because of the rise of a different understanding of the nature of religious belief. Unlike what most people in the past thought, religious belief is not in any sense arrived at or inferred on the basis of other known propositions. On the contrary, belief in God is taken to be as basic as a person's belief in the existence of himself, of the chair in which he is sitting, or the past. The old view that there must be a justification of religious belief, whether known or unknown, is held to be mistaken. One of the most outspoken advocates of this view is Alvin Plantinga. According to Plantinga the mature theist ought not to accept belief in God as a conclusion from other things he believes. Rather, he should accept it as basic, as a part of the bedrock of his noetic structure. ‘The mature theist commits himself to belief in God; this means that he accepts belief in God as basic.’