The canonical texts of Early Buddhism describe and explain a way to achieve a goal. What the goal is is not immediately clear; many different descriptions are given of it, and these descriptions can be variously interpreted. It is to some extent easier to find out what is the way to achieve the goal; the texts contain frequently repeated lists of stages on this Way. The best way of starting a consideration of the nature of the goal and its moral status is to examine the most important of these lists.

The critics of Schleiermacher's hermeneutic are legion and its defenders few – due, to a great extent, to the popularity of Gadamer's Truth and Method and its attack on Schleiermacher. I believe that the critics of Schleiermacher have not understood him very well and the failure of his hermeneutics to gain very much respect lies, at least partially, to a lack of understanding of what he had to say. Besides, if we look at contemporary scholars who focus on the study of language and how it functions we will find that they often have views very much like those found in Schleiermacher's discussion of hermeneutics.

Alvin Plantinga, in some essays recently published and presented, defends the rationality of a belief in the existence of God on the grounds that it is foundationally justified. Though this belief does not appear to be justified were we to adopt what Plantinga calls classical foundationalism, there are other, less restrictive (and presumably at least equally plausible) versions of foundationalism. Plantinga urges that we recognize that a belief in the existence of God can be warranted within one of these frameworks.

Of all the examples of ‘belief-in’, belief in God is both the most mysterious and the most challenging. Indeed whether and how an apologist can make a case for the intellectual respectability of theistic belief, depends upon the nature of this ‘belief-in’. I shall attempt to elucidate this matter by an analysis of the relation of ‘belief-in’ to ‘belief-that’ and by treating belief in God as a special case of ‘belief-in’.

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Gregory S. Kavka argues that John Hick was wrong when he said that the statement ‘God (as conceived by Christians) exists’ is verifiable but not falsifiable. Kavka constructs an imaginary `resurrection world' ruled by Satan and inhabited by such resurrected evildoers as Hitler and Stalin. In such a world, those who had been virtuous in earthly life in the hopes of a Christ-dominated resurrection world discover that virtue is inversely rewarded, with the ‘living’ intolerable for them and worst of all for those among them who had lived especially virtuous lives, i.e. the saints. Further, they are told by presumably knowledgeable inhabitants of this world that:

…the historical Christ was an agent sent by Satan to raise in good people false hopes of eternal salvation. This story is confirmed by Satan himself who demonstrates through a huge telescope-like device how he continues to send false saviours to other planets inhabited by intelligent beings in a cruel plan to make such beings miserable in the long run.

During World War I, Bertrand Russell's outspoken pacifism resulted in his being committed to jail. When he entered the prison, he was met by the warden who showed himself to be quite ecumenical in his religious beliefs, as indicated by this anecdote:

‘I was much cheered on my arrival by the warder at the gate, who had to take particluars about me. He asked my religion and I replied “agnostic”. He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God”. This remark kept me cheerful about a week.’

The Tao Tê Ching is probably the world's second most translated and annotated book (after the Bible), yet it remains among the most enigmatic. Of its eighty-one chapters, no one denies that the most important is the first, and many scholars (e.g. Wing-tsit Chan, Chang Chung-yuan) go further to claim that it is the key to the whole work: if it is understood fully, all the rest may be seen to be implied. Unfortunately, the first chapter also happens to be the most ambiguous. But even so, after so much attention can there be anything left to say? It seems to me that an important point has been missed or at least obscured, and that the popularity of certain translations has made this obscuration more prevalent recently. To correct this, I shall offer below a line-by-line explication of this crucial passage. The following interpretation first demonstrates the parallel structure of the first eight lines as signifying two different ways of experiencing: lines one, three, five and seven refer to the experience of Tao, and lines two, four, six and eight to our more usual way of experiencing the world. I shall suggest that the difference between these ways is the difference between our familiar dualistic experience (or understanding of experience) and a much less common nondualistic way of experiencing in which there is no bifurcation between subject and object. Second, we shall see that the parallel structure unfolds dialectically: each succeeding pair of lines elaborates upon the issues that naturally arise in response to the preceding pair. In the process of showing this, I shall take sides on the two main controversies over this chapter: first, whether it should be interpreted cosmologically or ontologically/epistemologically (I have already revealed my preference for the latter), and second, whether lines, five and six should be punctuated to translate yü as ‘desire/intention’. My main thesis is that the traditional understanding of yü as ‘desire’ or ‘intention’ is an essential part of the meaning of the chapter. This is by no means an original claim, but why it is so important does not seem to have been noticed before and provides the reason for this paper. Wing-tsit Chan's criticism of such translations, that ‘intention interrupts the thought of the chapter’, 1 is thus a serious misreading of the text.

The purpose of this essay is to present a brief description and evaluation of Mircea Eliade's interpretation of religious symbols with an eye to certain methodological difficulties. Professor Eliade characterises the procedure of the historian of religions as being uniquely preoccupied with religious symbols, that is, with those symbols which are involved in both the experience of homo religiosus and in his conception of the cosmos. As an historian of religions Eliade's own approach has consistently been to study religious symbols from a position that is not reductionist. Although admitting the influence of cultural and environmental factors upon the formulation of religious symbols, he has been primarily concerned to discern the typical structures or types of religious experience and expression by a consideration of religious phenomena. In his own words, he has attempted to study ‘the conceptions of being and reality that can be read from the behaviour of man of the premodern societies’.

I am most grateful to Richard Gale for the detailed attention which he has paid to my detailed arguments, and for the kind remarks between which he sandwiches his hard-hitting criticisms. The first of the latter is that I ‘slosh back and forth’ (211) between different theses, Ss, Sw, and W. I hope not, but I agree that I may not have made the relation between these sufficiently clear. I am certainly committed to, and sought to argue for, the strong version of the strong thesis:

Ss For every instance of evil, God is justified in allowing it.

But I cannot examine every instance of evil in order to show that – I do not know of all the evils, let alone have time or space to discuss each of them. So I need to produce an inductive argument for Ss, and I seek to do so by considering the various kinds of evil, and trying to show that God is justified in allowing any evil of that kind. Hence I consider the evils of having bad desires, making wrong choices which cause suffering to oneself, making wrong choices which cause suffering to others, suffering occurring through natural processes, ignorance of God etc. I divide evils into kinds, in such a way that the morally significant differences between evils of a given kind is simply one of degree – different instances of suffering occurring through natural processes differ in respect of their intensity and the period of time they last.

What does it mean to love God ‘more’ than people? This article engages the difficulty of defining worship, veneration, and idolatry, by looking at C. S. Lewis's observations on the subject. Lewis offers helpful nudges towards more than a merely conceptual distinction, but he does not consistently apply his love principles to cover human love for the saints (Mary in particular). The article concludes with eight follow-up questions that benefit philosophers and theologians alike as they seek to formulate more focused definitions of worship, veneration, and idolatry.

The first part of the essay explore's three features of Wolterstorff's account of God as a performer of speech acts: (1) the claim that God literally speaks, suggesting that this claim needs something like a Thomistic theory of analogy as an alternative to univocity and mere metaphor; (2) the claim that speaking is not reducible to revealing; and (3) the political implications of these claims, especially in relation to Habermasian theory. The second part focuses on the theory of double discourse, which seeks to make sense of the notion that God speaks to us through the human voices of prophets, apostles, and especially of Scripture, and seeks to show that a fuller account of the speech act by which God deputizes or appropriates human speech is needed. The final section suggests that Ricoeur and Derrida are not the threat to his theory that Wolterstorff takes them to be and that their emphasis on the text, rather than the author, makes sense in contexts where we have only the text to consult.

John Taylor complains that the Kalam cosmological argument gives the appearance of being a swift and simple demonstration of the existence of a Creator of the universe, whereas in fact a convincing argument involving the premiss that the universe began to exist is very difficult to achieve. But Taylor's proffered defeaters of the premisses of the philosophical arguments for the beginning of the universe are themselves typically undercut due to Taylor's inadvertence to alternatives open to the defender of the Kalam arguments. With respect to empirical confirmation of the universe's beginning Taylor is forced into an anti-realist position on the Big Bang theory, but without sufficient warrant for singling out the theory as non-realistic. Therefore, despite the virtue of simplicity of form, the Kalam cosmological argument has not been defeated by Taylor's all too swift refutation.

This article advances a non-doxastic account of saving faith that nevertheless emphasizes the connection between faith and belief. I argue that saving faith epistemically justifies some religious beliefs. I offer an account that is meant to show how faith can play a variety of significant roles it is often purported to play, that is, how a specific virtue of faith can secure salvation, epistemically justify theistic belief, practically justify religious ways of life, and belong to practitioners of different religions. The account also provides an alternative to evidentialist, fideist, and Reformed Epistemology approaches to faith and reason.

This paper examines Alvin Plantinga's defence of theistic belief in the light of Paul Draper's formulation of the problem of evil. Draper argues (a) that the facts concerning the distribution of pain and pleasure in the world are better explained by a hypothesis which does not include the existence of God than by a hypothesis which does; and (b) that this provides an epistemic challenge to theists. Plantinga counters that a theist could accept (a) yet still rationally maintain a belief in God. His defence of theism depends on the epistemic value of religious experience. I argue, however, that Plantinga's defence of theism is not successful.

An increasing number of natural scientists are doubling as natural theologians. I critically examine two recent defences of the design argument by biologists: Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe and Nature's Destiny by Michael Denton. Each claims that recent findings in biology provide new evidence for belief in a supernatural designer. For the sake of argument, I grant both the validity and soundness of their arguments. What I then try to show is that even if we grant that the new biology supports a supernatural designer, J. S. Mill's objections, based on ordinary observation, still make it reasonable to doubt that the designer is the God of traditional theism – a being infinite in power, knowledge, and goodness.

Eleonore Stump's Atonement marks a significant advance in atonement theory, especially in its nuanced approach to ethical and relational complexities, but tends to treat sin as social only insofar as one individual's sin can harm or shame another. I argue that that social sin requires social redemption and that exemplarism would provide a solution. Christ's pursuit of love and justice, in the midst of oppression, temptation, and struggle, offers a distinctive model of virtue, towards collective restoration of the world. While we cannot redeem ourselves, in calling us to effect justice and union with one another, God may also call us closer to Godself.

In this paper, I argue that if the libertarian free will defence were seen to fail because determinism were seen to be true, then another solution to the problem of evil would present itself. I start by arguing that one cannot, by consideration of agents' choices between morally indifferent options, reach any conclusion as to these agents' moral qualities. If certain forms of consequentialism were false, determinism true, and if there were a God who chose to create this universe, then His choice would have been between such options. Consideration of the general nature of the universe God putatively chose to create would not then license any conclusion as His moral qualities.

Many in the Christian tradition affirm two things: (1) that Jesus Christ descended to Hades/Limbus Patrum on Holy Saturday and (2) that the human nature of Jesus is a hylemorphic compound, the unity of a human soul and prime matter. I argue that (1) and (2) are incompatible; for the name ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’, and ‘Jesus Christ’ rigidly designates a human being. But, given a certain view of hylemorphism, the human being, Jesus, ceased to exist in the time between his death and resurrection. So, Jesus did not descend to Hades/Limbus Patrum, even if God the Son did.

According to the Law of Non–Contradiction, no statement and its negation are jointly true. According to many critics, Christians cannot serve both the orthodox faith and the Law of Non–Contradiction: if they hold to the one they must despise the other. And according to an impressive number of these critics, Christians who cling to the traditional doctrine of the Trinity must despise the Law of Non–Contradiction. Augustine's statement of this doctrine poses the problem as poignantly as any.

That God has acted in history has been, and usually still is, a central Christian affirmation. Its explication has been sought after in a number of ways: by investigating God's relationship to the world, by considering the nature of miracles, by poring over what might be called historiographical problems, by discussing the interrelation of divine and human wills. Each of these approaches has its own worthy place, as do several others. However, what seems to be the obvious preliminary task has often been given less generous space, and is sometimes completely neglected. For how can one use the verb ‘to act’ of God at all without first enquiring what we commonly mean when we use it in any other context? without gaining a prior understanding of what its use seems to imply and entail? This paper attempts to examine the concept of action. It does so with the conviction that such an examination will illumine our use of the concept in a theological context and that, further, it may offer hints as to the way we ought to use the word in such a context.