The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die in extreme agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, shall be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should will one venial untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse (John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua)

‘I can't believe that,’ said Alice.

‘Can't you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes.’

Alice laughed. ‘There's no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can't believe impossible things.’

‘I dare say you haven't had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

One of the most vexing problems in the philosophy of religion is the existence of moral evil in light of an omnipotent and wholly good deity. A popular mode of diffusing the argument from evil lies in the appeal to free will. Traditionally it is argued that there is a strong connection, even a necessary one, between the ability to exercise free will and the occurrence of wrong-doing. Transworld depravity, as characterized by Alvin Plantinga, is a concept which has gone far to explain this relationship. Essentially, the notion of transworld depravity involves the claim that in any world where a person is significantly free that person would, on some occasion, act morally wrongly, or as Plantinga phrases it: ‘If S' were actual, P would go wrong with respect to A’ (where S' is a possible world, P is a person and A is an action). Not only, Plantinga claims, is it possible that there are persons who suffer from transworld depravity, but ‘it is possible that everybody suffers from it’. If transworld depravity obtains, Plantinga notes, God ‘might have been able to create worlds in which moral evil is very considerably outweighed by moral good; but it was not within His power to create worlds containing moral good but no moral evil – and this despite the fact that He is omnipotent’. On this view, God could not instantiate perfect-person essences who would not ever sin. Although Plantinga argues that these instantiated beings are significantly free in that they could have done otherwise (i.e. not sinned), it does seem that his claim about transworld depravity amounts to a claim about transworld depravity amounts to a claim about the existence of a necessary connection obtaining between freedom and evil. For even though it makes sense to claim that an individual may have unactualized dispositions, to claim that everyone, past, present and future, has unactualized dispositions seems to be a significantly different claim. It is therefore difficult to see how this latter claim differs in substance from the claim of a necessary connection obtaining between the capacity for free will and the commission of evil acts.

This article investigates the metaphysical transformation that occurs when a believer becomes a new creation, something which hasn't yet been explored in the literature. I start by setting out what this ontological transformation involves, and then provide two models as to how it might go. The first is a type of substratism, based on a theory of mixing, while the second thinks about this transformation in terms of replacementism. Throughout the article I seek to resolve difficulties that both of these models bring, while also showing how other aspects of Christian thought can be explained by these models.

In this paper I argue that the denial of middle knowledge and emphasis on human freedom characteristic of open theism makes the traditional concept of hell even more morally problematic than it would otherwise be. But these same features of open theism present serious difficulties for the view that all will necessarily be saved. I conclude by arguing that the most promising approach for open theists is to adopt a version of contingent, as opposed to necessary, universalism.

Moses and Monotheism is Freud's last book on religion. It was published in its entirety only after his flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna. Moses is perhaps Freud's most controversial book on religion. It is both an apology and a curse. It is a critique of traditional Judaism (by way of an Oedipal analysis of a deified Moses), a defence of a modern humanistic Judaism (a Judaism of moral and intellectual values), and a bitter critique of Christianity (a religion not of the Father but of the sons, a failed religion, which expresses its failure in anti-Semitism). A defiant and rebellious book, one might say, one in which an old man rises to meet his fate and does so with surprising wilfulness and vigour. But Moses also reveals a dogmatic Freud defending a critique of religion that is intellectually flawed and politically misdirected.

Sceptical arguments, it is commonly claimed, may succeed in disarming some powerful objections to religious belief, but they do nothing more than establish a state of parity between the believer and the objector. For this reason, they make no positive contribution to the justification of religious belief and therefore are of value only to the fideist who insists that religious beliefs do not have and do not need rational support. However, while this opinion is widely held by philosophers of religion, it ignores the fact that sceptical arguments have given rise to a constructive tradition in epistemology: what is often referred to as naturalism. In what follows I shall develop a suggestion from this tradition, and that is that sceptical arguments lead not to an abandonment of claims to justified belief but to a revision and contextualization of our epistemic standards. Though this suggestion can be found in a number of philosophers in this tradition, my inspiration for it comes from Pascal, who made an important place for scepticism in the evidentialist argument for Christianity which we find in the Pensées. To develop this suggestion, I shall first sketch a position inspired by Pascal and then argue that the possibilities it suggests have been insufficiently considered in a number of recent discussions of the importance of sceptical arguments in the epistemology of religious belief.

In contemporary theology the doctrine of divine impassibility is a hot issue. The doubts about this doctrine in the present century have their earliest roots in British theology, where we can trace the passibilist tendency back to the last ten years of the nineteenth century. It received a powerful impetus from the First World War, and by the time the Second World War broke out it was almost generally accepted in British theology that God suffered. Since then this tendency has spread to the rest of Europe, notably to France and Germany, to the United States and to Asia. Although it cannot be denied that most of the theologians who explicitly state their views on divine impassibility, hold that this doctrine is to a greater or lesser degree false, the debate over this issue is far from closed. Recently Richard Creel published a thorough study in defence of divine impassibility, which, I expect, will prove quite influential. Apart from him some other theologians defend the doctrine as well. Moreover, the fact that many authors consider it necessary at present to write books and articles in defence of divine passibility also indicates that the truth of the passibilist position is not yet taken for granted by everyone.

The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of Natural Selection has been discovered. Charles Darwin

As a matter of historical fact, most philosophers and theologians who have defended traditional theistic views have been moral realists. Some ‘divine command’ theorists have held that the good is constituted by the content of divine approval – i.e. that things are good because, and insofar as, they have divine approval. However, even amongst those theists who hold that the good is independently constituted – i.e. those who hold that God's pattern of approval is explained by the fact that he approves of all and only that which is good – the dominant meta-ethic has been strongly realistic.

Mysticism and the mystical experience seemingly play little or no part in our Western tradition. Certainly there is no mystical tradition in the West such as Zen Buddhism, nor is there any great understanding of or influence from the writings of Heraclitus, Spinoza, or the mystical passages in the early work of Wittgenstein. Mysticism has been generally misunderstood in the West, and it has even evoked the attacks of philosophers and theologians.1 Mysticism to many conjures up images of monks meditating in caves; it is generally pictured as esoteric, otherworldly, irrational, and at best irrelevant to the daily lives of human beings. If what we say below is correct, it will be seen that mysticism is none of these but is rather a singular human experience that lies at the foundations of civilization.

Theists believe that God is eternal, but they differ as to just what God's eternality means. The traditional, historic view of most Christian philosophers is that eternality means that God is timeless. He is ‘outside’ of time and not subject to any kind of temporal change. Indeed, God is the creator of time. Lets call this view divine timelessness.

Philosophers have tended to discuss theistic proofs (and theistic disproofs) largely in abstraction from their specific roles within the religious traditions in which those proofs were cultivated and in which, until modern times, they flourished. As a result, the traditional theistic proofs of the West are generally presented in the philosophical literature as no more than (failed) attempts to demonstrate or within tolerable limits to establish the probability of the existence of at least one god. Whatever the history of philosophy may suggest, the history of religions shows that theistic proofs have been developed from a variety of motives and have been employed to a variety of ends, only one of which is to persuade someone not already so inclined to believe that god/s exist. Indeed, this latter purpose is fairly subsidiary in the history of religions. A survey of the place and roles of theistic proofs and disproofs within a range of religious traditions, Eastern as well as Western, suggests that in the main they were used to serve intra-traditional ends. Their principal function seems to have been more nearly explanatory than justificatory. Even when they aimed them outside the tradition and used them to apologetic ends, purveyors of the proofs tended to assume prior belief in god/s on the part of their intended audience.

The paper draws on the Heideggerian distinction between Bildung and Besinnung to locate a discussion of theological strategies in the face of Nietzsche's pronouncement that God is dead, and sketches what should be an epistemologically vigilant (and thus properly sceptical) Buddhist response to that pronouncement. The theological options that are mentioned or discussed include naive and critical theological realism, anti-realism and a nontheistic ‘spiritual realism’. Buddhism is discussed in terms of its naturalistic sources and their development in the expression of states of mind rather than in terms of belief.

Christianity affirms, with Judaism and Islam, that God is the omnipotent Creator of all things. But it diverges from them in also affirming that the Creator assumed a human nature in one figure of history, Jesus of Nazareth. Christ thus differs from other men in kind, not merely in degree; he is absolutely, not just relatively, unique. Admittedly many Christian theologians have held that the difference between Christ and other men is only one of degree. Yet the Church's traditional claim, as expressed in the Chalcedonian Definition, is that Jesus was both creature and Creator, both fully man and fully God.

Dale Tuggy argues that his divine-deception argument against Social Trinitarianism remains unscathed, in spite of my recent objections. I maintain that his argument is question-begging and exegetically weak, and does not succeed in refuting Social Trinitarianism.

Paul Draper has argued that the scientific evidence for the dependence of mental states upon brain states provides a good reason for thinking that theism is very probably false because the extreme metaphysical dualism implied by theism makes it antecedently likely, if God exists, that minds should be fundamentally non-physical entities. However, Draper's argument assumes that what makes God's mind a mind is the immaterial stuff it is made of. But that assumption is potentially faulty. Why? Because, if functionalism is true, then all conceivable minds are fundamentally functional entities identified by what they do, rather than by what they are made of.

First, I suggest that it is possible to make some further improvements upon the Gödelian ontological arguments that Pruss develops. Then, I argue that it is possible to parody Pruss's Gödelian ontological arguments in a way that shows that they make no contribution towards ‘lowering the probability of atheism and raising the probability of theism’. I conclude with some remarks about ways in which the arguments of this paper can be extended to apply to the whole family of Gödelian ontological arguments.

As a member of the Victorian-era Metaphysical Society, W. K. Clifford contributed to debate about the prospects for morality in the absence of religion. Clifford thought its chances good. He presented a paper offering a ‘scientific’ approach to moral theory. In my discussion, I explore his proposal, using it to gain interpretative leverage on a paper he delivered before the Society only a year later, ‘The ethics of belief’. I set aside the quarrel with religion so prominent in this influential essay and discount its evidentialist epistemology, the better to reveal it for what it is: a powerful exercise in moral suasion.