My claim in this article is that the thesis that Buddhism has no God, insofar as it is taken to apply to Buddhism universally, is false. I defend this claim by interpreting a central text in East-Asian Buddhism – The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna – through the lenses of perfect being theology (PBT), a research programme in philosophy of religion that attempts to provide a description of God through a two-step process: (1) defining God in terms of maximal greatness; (2) inferring the properties or attributes that God must have in virtue of satisfying the definition. My argument comprises two steps. First, I argue that, since PBT is a method for providing a description of God starting from a definition of God, any text that contains a PBT ipso facto contains a notion of God. Second, I argue through textual evidence that The Awakening articulates a PBT, concluding that it contains a notion of God. Since the method of PBT leaves open what descriptions are to be inferred, my argument allows me to conclude that a text contains a notion of God without previously committing to any particular conception of the divine, which makes it particularly versatile and powerful.

Panentheism is the position that the world is in some sense ‘in’ God, and God ‘in’ the world, without the world being identical to God. Thus, it tries, like what I call mainstream theism and against pantheism, to protect the transcendence of God, while giving greater emphasis to his immanence in creation than the former. I aim to explicate an approach that I call Orthodox Panentheism. The word ‘orthodox’ is to be read in two ways. First, the picture is derived from the writings of some of the most important figures in Eastern Christian thought, so that it is Orthodox in the ‘big “O” sense’. Second, I hope to show that it is a legitimate Christian picture of the God–world relation which is both distinctive and worthy of being called ‘panentheism’ – an orthodox panentheism in the ‘little “o” sense’.

As Milton reminds us, the first thing God named not good was loneliness. In proclaiming it not good for man to be alone, was God but projecting his own loneliness? In the words of James Weldon Johnson, God stepped out on space, looked around and said, ‘I'm lonely’.Johnson's concept of God may be very ‘spaced-out’ but the notion of a monotheistic God as lonely is far from preposterous. A God endlessly immersed in the contemplation of its solitary perfection (à la Aristotle, for example) would be an isolation anything but splendid. Such a being might be perfect as an abstract essence, but it would be perfectly alone.

The view that consignment to hell is a matter of having a fixed vicious character of a certain sort – rather than a matter of paying a retributive penalty for sin – is quite popular among philosophical theologians today. However, if proponents of this view wish to maintain that some individuals wind up consigned to hell, and if they embrace a number of independently plausible assumptions, they will be forced toward unreasonable claims about character development and its relationship to consignment to hell. In this paper, I describe the difficulties for these philosophical theologians.

In this paper, I consider what difference knowledge of outcomes – both past and future – might make to the rationality of praying for them on a traditional theistic model. More specifically, I address four questions: (1)‘Could it be rational to pray for outcomes one knows will obtain?’; (2)‘Could it be rational to pray for outcomes one knows will not obtain?’; (3)‘Could it be rational to pray for outcomes one knows have obtained?’; (4)‘Could it be rational to pray for outcomes one knows have not obtained?’. I argue that, on certain common theistic assumptions, the answer to all of these questions is yes.

Positive Evidential Atheism is the two-part view that our available evidence sufficiently supports the belief that God does not exist and that God's non-existence is a morally good thing. Paul Moser's recent work (2012, 2013, 2014, and forthcoming) provides a case that Positive Evidential Atheism is undermined by ‘intentional divine elusiveness’. This essay defends Positive Evidential Atheism from Moser's objection along two lines: (1) Moser's undercutting argument does not respect the fact that the positivity and evidentiality claims of Positive Evidential Atheism are logically connected, and (2) positive atheists needn't be those from whom God has hidden.

Because Anselm of Canterbury argues that the morally responsible created agent must have the option to choose between justice and benefit, many scholars conclude that he is a proto-Kantian, pitting duty against self-interest and natural inclination. This is mistaken. Anselm proposes a hierarchical schema, prefiguring that of Harry Frankfurt, in which the inclination for justice constitutes a second-order desire that one's first-order desires for benefits should be moderated to conform to God's will. I defend this interpretation through careful textual analysis, then show that Anselm's hierarchical analysis is not subject to some of the criticisms one might raise against Frankfurt's.

This article argues that a sense of nature's mystery can inspire and inform ways of experiencing and engaging with natural places and creatures in a way that is deeply morally transformative. Focusing on Daoism, it argues that engagement with natural places and creatures can facilitate the cultivation of receptivity to a sense of nature's mystery in a way that gradually releases a person from stances and conceptions that are morally and ecologically objectionable. The article closes by suggesting that a capacity to cultivate receptivity to nature's mystery is contingent upon the concerns and convictions of our background moral and social culture.

On my view, every bone, every fossil, and every putrid whiff of carrion that one smells on a hike in the country is just as good evidence for a divine intervention as it is for the suffering of an animal.

Rudolf Otto has often been criticized for not showing enough interest in mystical experience. In this article I want to demonstrate how misplaced this criticism is and to show that it is based on an erroneous interpretation of the relationship between numinous and mystical experience in his work by most of his students. I shall argue that, particularly in The Idea of the Holy, Otto offers an account of the nature of mystical experience which should be of considerable interest to students of mysticism today, not least because it calls into question many of the assumptions that are presently made about mysticism by phenomenologists and philosophers of religion. Most of this article will be devoted to an examination of references to mysticism in The Idea of the Holy and to an evaluation of Otto's observations about the nature of mystical experience, and I shall conclude that Otto's account of the relation-ship between mystical and devotional forms of religion provides a significant, but frequently overlooked, insight into the nature of mystical experience.

In ‘The Will to Believe’, the religious hypothesis for William James says, first, ‘that the best things are the more eternal things’, and second, ‘that we are better off now if we believe her first affirmation to be true’ (p.26) He later qualifies the first affirmation: ‘The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form’ (p.27).

If classical Western theism is correct that God's timeless omniscience is compatible with human free will, then it is incoherent to hold that this God can in any strict sense be immutable and a se as well as omniscient. That is my thesis. ‘Classical theism’ shall refer here to the tradition of philosophical theology centring on such mainstream authors as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. ‘Divine omniscience’ shall mean that the eternal God knows all events as a timeless observer of them. ‘Human free will’ shall mean that human beings are, at least sometimes, self-determining agents who make choices not decisively caused to be what they are by external or internal factors other than the free willing itself – choices that these agents have the capacity and the freedom to make differently than they do. Except where stipulated otherwise, ‘divine immutability’ shall ‘mean that God is neither subject to, nor capable of, change in being, knowing, or willing, since God is immune to external influences, and without internal needs, of the sorts that might give rise to such change. Finally, ‘aseity’ shall be used to underline the divine immunity to external influences, since a being that is wholly a se or self-caused (is ‘pure act’ in the Thomistic sense), cannot be open to such influences, cannot be made to be what or how it is by anything other than itself.

O.I. When we ask ‘Does God exist?’, what kind of question are we asking and, further does it make a difference that it is one kind of question rather than another? To find answers to these we will begin by investigating the various kinds of questions to which it seems ‘Does God exist?’ belongs, including questions about physical states of affairs, questions requesting reasons, and questions concerned somehow with the difficult notion of ‘existence’. As part of this initial inquiry we will also examine the relation of presupposition to question and the significance of both negation and assertion in questions.

Suppose Jones sees a mountain in the distance and says to the mountain, ‘Mountain, cast yourself into the sea!’, whereupon the mountain is observed to rise up from its surroundings and fall into the water. If such a phenomenon occurred, why should we say that Jones moved the mountain, rather than that Jones addressed the mountain in a certain way and that by a strange coincidence the mountain happened to move an instant later and fall into the water?

Professor H. P. Owen has remarked that Newman's A Grammar of Assent, which ‘is the fruit of a great mind's reflection over many years, has not received (in this country at any rate) the attention it deserves ’1 However, the year in which these words were written (1969) saw the publication of three lengthy discussions in English of the Grammar, and more studies have appeared since then.2 Owen's general appreciation has been echoed but the prevailing tone has been critical. In this article I shall attempt to reply to some of the more significant of the objections that have been made.

Is experiential evidence irrelevant to acceptance or rejection of belief in the existence of a Divine Being? Charles Hartshorne answers that it is indeed irrelevant, and this answer has an initial and, for me, continuing surprising ring to it. Specifically, Hartshorne makes two distinguishable claims: (1) the traditional allegedly a posteriori arguments, the teleological and cosmological, are in fact incompatible with empiricist methodology and are disguised ontological arguments; (2) the conception of God as necessary being demands that belief in such a being's existence or non-existence in no way depend upon empirical evidence. On the contrary, I shall argue, first, that empirical evidence for God is truly empirical and second, that there is no incompatibility between empirical evidence and necessary existence. My argument will involve an attempt to understand and clarify somewhat the very difficult concepts of ‘experience’ and ‘necessity’ as they arise in the context of religious epistemology. I wish to make clear at the outset that my aim is not to eliminate ontological arguments for God in favour of empirical arguments, for I believe that Hartshorne's work on the modal ontological argument contributes substantially to providing grounds for reasonable belief in theism. Rather, my purpose is to show that ontological and empirical patterns of theistic argumentation are neither incompatible with each other nor reducible to each other.

Recent defences of the Divine Command Theory have ranged from those which attempt to meet objections half-way, and in the process transform the theory, to restatements and defences of the theory in its full rigour. Philip Quinn's Divine Commands and Moral Requirements is one of the latter. Quinn's purpose is to show that the theory, in its several variants, can be stated precisely within several current systems of deontic logic, and that contrary to a common belief, there are no logically decisive objections to the theory. In accordance with this limited aim, there is little positive argument for the theory, little attempt to exhibit it as a plausible or attractive position, and this gives the book a rather narrow formalist aspect.

This paper responds to Helm's rebuttal of Brummer's account of Bernard and Calvin in Religious Studies 30, 4. It contends that Helm confuses indeterminism with nondeterminism and that a clear distinction between freedom from necessity and freedom from compulsion must be drawn. Contra Helm, there is still a contradiction between Calvin's defence of freedom from compulsion and his account of the perseverance of God's grace.

Recent articles in Religious Studies have underscored the questions of whether Buddhism presents any empirical doctrines, and whether, if it does, such doctrines are false or vacuous. In what follows I want to sketch an interpretation of Buddhism according to which it does not offer doctrines which are empirically false, on the one hand, or trivially true on the other. In doing so I take my cue from an earlier, and by now classic, paper by H. H. Price. For the exposition of Buddhism I take the Pali Nikāyas, the single most significant collection of texts in the Buddhist tradition. The particular doctrine which is the focus of discussion here is the kammavāda (Pali) or ‘karma view’ of early Indian Buddhism, for it is the focus of much of the recent literature cited above and a doctrine which some have thought amenable to statement in empirical terms.

‘That a corporeal substance, which hath absolute existence without the minds of spirits, should be produced out of nothing by the mere will of a spirit hath been looked upon as a thing so contrary to all reason, so impossible and absurd, that not only the most celebrated amongst the ancients, but even divers modern and Christian philosophers have thought matter co-eternal with the Deity.’