In his book The Existence of God, Professor Swinburne develops a cumulative case for theism. As part of this case, he presents two forms of the argument from design, one form taking as its premise the fact of spatial order, the other proceeding from the fact of temporal order. In this paper, I shall concern myself with the second of these arguments; that is, in Swinburne's terms, I shall concern myself with the argument from regularities of succession.

Many theists of a traditional bent have been bothered by the apparent tension between God's essential omnipotence and his essential moral goodness. Nelson Pike draws attention to the conflict between these two attributes in his article ‘Omnipotence and God's Ability to Sin’, and there have been many attempts to respond to it since that time. Most of these responses argue that the essential omnipotence and essential goodness of God are not logically incompatible, so that the traditional conception of God is not incoherent; I think the arguments have been largely successful. However, some theists have found the typical responses to Pike less than convincing, and are tempted to surrender the claim that God has moral perfection essentially in favour of the more modest claim that God is morally perfect in the actual world (and cannot gain or lose this perfection) though in some possible worlds God is morally defective. I argue in this paper that this fall-back position is incoherent. More accurately, I argue that a necessary being who is essentially omniscient and essentially omnipotent (a ‘NOO’ being) cannot be contingently morally perfect or contingently morally defective. Any such being is either essentially good or essentially evil. Since the latter alternative seems unattractive, I argue that theists should embrace the essential moral perfection of God.

Of the pungent aphorism traduttori traditori, one of the inherent delights is that the phrase itself cannot be translated into other languages without betrayal; at the least, of its pithy charm. All language is imperfect, a reader (or hearer) always understanding what is said in a way that leaves out something of what the writer (or speaker) means, and a way that adds something of what the reader (or hearer) supposes, or imposes, Ortega y Gasset has thoughtfully argued. I agree with this, yet hold that this characteristic of the human situation need not dishearten. We do better to marvel at how much the written or spoken word succeeds in communicating among persons – succeeds in building community between and among persons – than to bemoan that it does not succeed flawlessly.

In ‘Belief-In and Belief in God’ (Religious Studies, 28, 1992), J. N. Williams suggests that belief in God cannot be rational unless one has rational beliefs that God exists. While agreeing with his conclusion (though not with his statement of it), I disagree at almost every step with his method of arriving at it. In particular I suggest that Williams goes astray concerning the dual aspect of belief in, the nature of performatives, the arousal of belief states, and the correct account of belief in God.

What is a religion? As Socrates might have asked: What feature do all and only religions share in virtue of which they are religions? This question may seem misguided. Confronted with the diversity of behaviour called ‘religious’, we may easily doubt the existence of a single feature that explains the religiosity of every religion. To use Wittgenstein's term, there may only be a `family resemblance’ between religions, a network of features generally shared, most of which belong to each religion, no one of which belongs to every religion. Efforts to produce the single defining feature tend to streng-then the doubt that one exists. Is a religion an attempt to approach God or appropriate the sacred? Then Theravada Buddhism is not a religion, for God and the sacred are irrelevancies in this tradition. Is a religion a practice that expresses and advances the ultimate concern of a large number of people? Then the stockmarket is a religion and so is the drug trade. Such accounts are typically too narrow or too general, unless they are circular. Perhaps religion has no essence.

Many philosophers have written in the past as though it were nearly obvious to rational reflection that the existence of evil in this world is incompatible with the presumed properties of the Christian God, and they have assumed a proof of incompatibility to be easy to construct. An informal underpinning for this line of thought is easy to develop. Surely God in his benevolence finds evil to be evil, and hence has both the desire and the means, provided by his omnipotence and omniscience, to eradicate it. But it remains a brute fact that evil exists. While this seems plausible enough at first glance, and seems damaging to the rationality of Christian belief, attempts to pin down a definite proof of incompatibility have encountered difficulties. The root difficulty is perhaps that the surface plausibility of incompatibility is ultimately mistaken. In what he calls a Free Will Defence against natural atheology, Alvin Plantinga has presented what seems a definitive proof, on rather modest assumptions, of the logical compatibility of God's nature and the existence of evil. Logic alone can neither prove nor disprove God's existence, since the defence rests on the empirical assumption that evil exists in this world. What Plantinga shows, put very simply, is that God may have created a world as good as any that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent being might have created given that human beings must exist in that world. Whether Christianity ought to court logical rationality may seem highly dubious, but on the supposition that it does, Plantinga's proof that the existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of evil seems to me to (provisionally) settle the issue of whether Christianity is a possible object of rational belief, at least insofar as the problem of evil is considered the major obstacle to rationality of belief. Perhaps it is now clear that I do not intend here to attack the validity or the significance of Plantinga's proof. At the same time, I think it possible to argue for Plantinga's conclusion on other grounds, grounds that seem to me philosophically more appealing, and grounds that are manifestly compatible with the Biblical record. After briefly summarizing Plantinga's argument, I shall propose an alternative free will defence that circumvents some of the presuppositions of his arguments, an alternative that may be attractive to philosophers who are not interested in an ontology involving Plantinga's conception of possible worlds.

I am grateful for Mr Bagger's thoughtful remarks, as well as those of Professors Cousins, Smith, Katz, and Gimello at a recent American Academy of Religion panel devoted to The Problem of Pure Consciousness. But I cannot help but be struck by the tone of Mr Bagger's notice. As one colleague communicated to me after reading the piece, this is one of the most gratuitously rude pieces he had ever seen! If our book is really as bad as all this, it makes one wonder (a) why Religious Studies, or Mr Bagger, would bother to give it such attention, and (b) whether it indicates how deeply we have touched a nerve in the contemporary debate.

The Dutch writer Menno ter Braak once observed that when there is no bacon in the larder you tend to spend your time sharpening your knives. In a different context a somewhat similar remark concerning his preoccupation with the sharpening of his analytical tools was made by the philosopher Husserl. Applying these remarks—without the least intent of facetiousness—to the comparative study of religions, we might say that concern with methodology should be an occasional pastime, in which we may indulge at moments when we take an occasional respite from our substantive labours—but with plenty of bacon, as it were, in the larder. The quinquennial congresses of the International Association for the History of Religions are undoubtedly an appropriate occasion for such critical and reflective introspection. In fact, some of the best methodological clarifications come not from a priori legislators but from active researchers stepping back for a moment, putting some distance between their nose and the grindstone, and asking themselves what exactly they and their colleagues have been and are doing, and how they should best proceed. (I am thinking, e.g., of J. Schwab's penetrating and profound essay ‘What do Scientists do?’ as an outstanding example of such reflection by a natural scientist.) Whilst the sterility of abstract discussions about the definition of religion is generally admitted, it should be acknowledged that some exceedingly helpful suggestions have been made by practising field-workers and historians of religion. I am thinking of e.g., C. Geertz, M. Spiro, and Th. van Baaren. Other examples of the theoretical clarifications resulting from the interaction—addicts of the currently fashionable jargon would say ‘feedback’—between attempts at definition and the actual praxis of historians of religion are H. Ch. Puech's short introduction and A. Brelich's major Prolégomènes in vol. i of the Pléiade Histoire des Religions (1970), as well as U. Bianchi's thoughtful and thought-provoking recent contribution. Clearly students of religion continue to be very much exercised by the double problem of the nature of their subject-matter and of the proper methods of studying it.

What is the self? What is the ‘I’ that appears to be the subject of all ‘my’ thoughts and imaginings, my experiences and desires? This is not simply about problems of identification. How I pick you out or you recognize me are questions related to the problem of what it is to be or you, but they are not the same issue. If our ‘true selves’ are inaccessible to public scrutiny, how we are identified and re-identified publicly will be different from who ‘we’ are. The problem of the self is a genuinely metaphysical question which cannot be reduced to the epistemological one of how we know each other, without further argument.

Affirming that divine knowledge of occurrent changes among particulars is incompatible with the doctrine of divine immutability, this article seeks to resolve this tension by denying the latter. Reviewing this long-running debate, I first formalize the exchange between al-Ghazālī and Avicenna on this topic, and then set out the ways in which contemporary Sadrāean philosophers have tried to resolve the incompatibility. I argue that none of the cited Sadrāean attempts to resolve the incompatibility between divine omniscience and immutability is successful. Then, by reference to certain principles drawn from Shia theology, I indicate how one might seek to reject the dogma of divine immutability. I conclude that by emancipating ourselves from that dogma, new horizons could be opened for Islamic philosophy, free from traditional Hellenistic constraints.

According to Plantinga's version of the free-will argument (FWA), the existence of free beings in the world who, on the whole, do more good than evil is the greater moral good that cannot be secured by even an omnipotent God without allowing some evil and thereby shows the logical compatibility of God with evil. In this essay, I argue that there are good empirical and moral reasons, from the standpoint of one plausible conception of Christian ethics, to doubt that Plantinga's version of the FWA succeeds as a theodicy. In particular, I argue that, given this understanding of Christian ethics, it seems reasonable to think it false that free beings are doing more good than evil in the world. While there are surely possible worlds in which free beings do more good than evil, this material world seems clearly not one of those. Thus, while Plantinga's version might succeed as a defence against the logical problem of evil, it will neither rebut the evidential problem of evil nor, without more, ground a successful theodicy that reconciles God's existence with the evil that occurs in this world.

In a number of recent articles D. Z. Phillips has presented an exposition and defence of his views on theological realism, views which are based on his reading of Wittgenstein. Eschewing the label ‘anti-realist’ so often applied to his philosophy, Phillips claims that realists and anti-realists alike have ‘failed to appreciate how radical a challenge Wittgenstein makes to our philosophical assumptions’ (SL 22). Far from supporting non-realism above realism, Phillips – following Wittgenstein – wishes to upset the realist/non-realist debate by showing that the two theories offer equally confused accounts of belief and language, and specifically religious belief and language. If this claim could be substantiated it would, of course, be an extremely significant conclusion, and it is unfortunate that Phillips vacillates in his expression of it. Realism and non-realism are variously described as ‘empty’, ‘idle talk’ or like opposing ‘battle cries’ (RB 35), but despite being vacuous they are ‘not intelligible alternatives’ (RB 34) and ‘equally confused’ (RB 34). Furthermore, realism is ‘not coherently expressible’ (RB 45) and involves an ‘incoherent supposition’ (SL 23) and at least some forms of it can be ‘refuted’ (RR 194). In addition to their vacuity, unintelligibility and incoherence, both theories are also said to be guilty of a misguided reductionism (RB 47), and realists are charged with being ‘foundationalists’ who espouse a theory that ‘cannot take seriously the central religious conviction that God is at work in people's lives’ (RB 47).

In this paper we will evaluate the arguments Phillips advances for rejecting realism and non-realism, and consider the sort of problems they might pose for realists. Phillips opposes the positions the realist and non-realist take on two crucial issues: first, whether religious practices and life are grounded in the belief that God is real, second, whether God may be considered to be an object. These are the two principal questions that occupy Phillips in his work on realism; it is in connection with the former that he puts forward his ‘refutation’ of realism. We aim to assess his arguments for their philosophical cogency and value.

I have argued that since (i) intentional agency requires intention-acquisition, (ii) intention-acquisition implies a sense of an open future, and (iii) a sense of an open future is incompatible with complete foreknowledge, then (iv) no agent can be omniscient. Alternatively, an omniscient being is omni-impotent. David Hunt continues to oppose this reasoning, most recently, in Religious Studies 32 (March 1996). It is increasingly clear that the debate turns on larger issues concerning necessity and knowledge, but let me here offer a few comments in defence of my position.

Split brains that result in two simultaneous streams of consciousness cut off from each other are wrongly held to be grounds for doubting the existence of the divinely created soul. The mistake is based on two related errors: first, a failure to appreciate the soul's dependence upon neurological functioning; second, a fallacious belief that if the soul is simple, i.e. without parts, then there must be a unity to its thought, all of its thoughts being potentially accessible to reflection or even unreflective causal interactions. But a soul theorist can allow neurological events to keep some conscious thoughts unavailable to others.

The free-will defence (FWD) holds that the value of significant free will is so great that God is justified in creating significantly free creatures even if there is a risk or certainty that these creatures will sin. A difficulty for the FWD, developed carefully by Quentin Smith, is that God is unable to do evil, and yet surely lacks no genuinely valuable kind of freedom. Smith argues that the kind of freedom that God has can be had by creatures, without a risk of creatures doing evil. I shall show that Smith's argument fails – the case of God is disanalogous to the case of creatures precisely because creatures are creatures.

It is shown that, for certain classes of cosmological model which either postulate or give rise to infinitely many universes, only a measure zero subset of the set of possible universes above a given size can in fact be physically realized. It follows that claims to explain the fine tuning of our universe on the basis of such models by appeal to the existence of all possible universes fail.

Two competing metatheologies – approaches that propose a certain starting point for generating a proper account of the nature of God – are Perfect Being Theology (PBT), the approach to theology originating with Anselm in his efforts to find a way of demonstrating that such a perfect being exists, and Creator Theology (CT). This article argues that CT has significant advantages over PBT. The adversities that afflict PBT, to which CT is immune, are these: the first concerns parsimony in the ontology of divinity, and the second concerns the explanation of contingency itself. CT generates a simpler defence of monotheism and an account of contingency, whereas PBT struggles to defend monotheism and has no resources for generating an account of contingency, an account needed in order to defend the central claims of the ontological argument.

In ‘Moral critique and defence of theodicy’ (2013) Samuel Shearn argues that ambitious theodicies trivialize horrendous suffering in an unacceptable way by reinterpreting evils in a way sufferers do not accept. Against Shearn, the authors of this article will argue that sufferer acceptance should not be used as a criterion for the moral acceptability of what theodicies say about horrendous evils. Also, since theodicy is done in the public square, Shearn does not find it relevant to distinguish between contexts in which it is morally improper to communicate theodicies and those in which it is not. We disagree, and present some arguments as to why making such distinctions is morally relevant. Furthermore Shearn argues that theodicy is self-defeating if it aims to comfort sufferers of horrendous evils. We will critically re-examine the examples used to support his conclusion, and suggest that theodicies do have a comforting function. Finally, Shearn describes the difference between theodicy and anti-theodicy as an aesthetic impasse, rather than a moral issue. Against this, we find good reasons to affirm its predominant moral character.

In this paper, William Alston's argument from religious experience in Perceiving God is characterized and assessed as an indirect analogy-argument. Such arguments, I propose, should establish two similarities between sense perception (SP) and religious experience (CMP): a structural and a functional. I argue that Alston neglects functional similarity, and that SP and CMP actually perform different functions within the practices they belong to. Alston's argument is therefore significantly weaker than generally assumed. Finally, I argue that regardless of whether an increased emphasis on fruits could strengthen indirect analogy-arguments or not, this is not a strategy available to Alston as long as he retains his commitments to religious exclusivism and a religious metaphysical realism.