This paper will examine a descriptive approach in philosophy of religion which portrays authentic religious belief as necessarily characterized by an independence from the world. Such independence is, moreover, claimed to be inextricably linked to self-renunciation through the self attaining a perspective on the world as a whole, a seeing of everything sub specie aeternitatis. This idea of a ‘perspective’ is supposed to elucidate the character of religious belief, to show just how it is distinctive from other forms of belief.

God, as viewed by Muslims, Jews and Christians, is a transcendent being. To say that God is transcendent is to say, among other things, that spatiotemporal predicates do not apply to him. He is disembodied and absolutely immutable. God, nevertheless, is on this same view an agent. He makes things happen, he answers prayers, he judges, he forgives, he punishes, he guides, etc. The concept of God as a being worthy of worship seems to require that God be an absolutely eternal being on the one hand with all that this entails and a being that is absolutely just, merciful, forgiving, loving, good, on the other. It is the predication of such attributes of God that yields the concept of transcendent agency. This means in effect that for a being to be God this being must be, at least, a disembodied agent. But the concept of a disembodied agent, it is argued, is a contradiction in terms.

Ever since its relatively late arrival on the theological scene the historical-critical method has been cast in a wide variety of roles. It is unfortunate that it has seldom made its appearance as one of theology's handmaids. Only recently, with the gradual retreat of the theologies of the Word, has it been enabled to terminate its prolonged contract to play court jester to a series of sovereign directors.

Suppose that I stand firmly in what Alasdair MacIntyre describes as the Thomistic tradition of moral enquiry. I try my best to recover a historical understanding of Aquinas's teachings, and I refuse to let my philosophical opponents set the terms of debate. Now suppose that you yourself are one of my opponents: a Buddhist, a Jew, a Muslim or perhaps a secular humanist. (It makes no difference whether or not you believe in God, just so long as whatever theological commitments you might have diverge sharply from my own.) Finally, suppose that I have always found you a considerate neighbour, a friendly and responsible colleague, and a reliable contributor to worthy causes: you run the neighbourhood recycling programme, do volunteer work at an AIDS hospice, and serve as den mother of your son's Cub Scout troop. All of my experience suggests that you are, by commonly accepted standards, morally admirable; but you don't believe in God, or at least your own understanding of God and God's law differs significantly from my own. Am I, as a loyal Thomist, able to acknowledge your virtues? Or must I dismiss them all as merely apparent?

Belief in life after death is implicated, for the typical ‘Wittgensteinian’, with Cartesian dualism, and the latter seen to entail a private inner subject that cannot survive the anti-private language argument. But Descartes does not really suffer from this defect and belief in life after death is not merely a product of ‘confused’ Cartesian metaphysics. Descartes is presented as an intellectual analogue of the formation of the concept of ‘soul’ in spiritual contexts. Just as metaphysical reflection forces us to conclude, for Descartes, that we are only contingently flesh and blood beings, so it is only under the condition of recalcitrant experience that exemplary practitioners seem forced to forge a distinction between body and soul, thus revising influentially their view of themselves as single beings both conscious and extended.

This article is a reply to Thaddeus Metz's ‘The good, the true, and the beautiful’ (2011). I suggest that Metz's theory is too broad since it entails that merely understanding Einstein's or Darwin's views can make a life highly meaningful. Furthermore, it is unclear whether ‘fundamental conditions’, toward which highly meaningful lives are oriented, may or may not be necessary conditions to ‘non-fundamental conditions’, how completely the former should explain the latter, and whether Metz's account is indeed non-consequentialist. While acknowledging the importance of Metz's contribution, I consider alternative directions that future research might take.

In The Existence of God (1979), Richard Swinburne gave formal expression to his utilization of the cumulative case argument and his application of the probability calculus to the theistic arguments. It is generally agreed, I believe, that this work is meticulous in detail and rigorously argued; it is also, I believe, generally agreed that the conclusion is disappointingly bland – particularly in light of the high-powered apparatus brought to bear on the question of God's existence. It is my intent to show that, perhaps, those disappointed by Swinburne's conclusion were justified in so feeling and that a stronger conclusion follows directly from Swinburne's own arguments and methodologies. Let me state at the outset, however, that this paper is not intended to be either an endorsement or a rejection of cumulative case arguments in general or of the employment of the probability calculus in such applications as the question of God's existence. Rather, I merely seek to assess Swinburne's conclusions on the grounds he lays out in The Existence of God.

Just prior to The Critique of Pure Reason's examination of the various arguments for God's existence, Kant discusses the conceptual relationship between the idea of an ens realissimum and that of a necessary being. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the extent to which this discussion informs his claim that the cosmological argument depends upon the ontological argument.

William Hasker replies to my arguments against Social Trinitarianism, offers some criticism of my own view, and begins a sketch of another account of the Trinity. I reply with some defence of my own theory and some questions about his.

Wittgenstein's remarks on religion suggest a provocative and nuanced account of what makes rituals meaningful – and why some living rituals might have little or no meaning despite their hold on congregants. Wittgenstein's view has been obscured, I argue, in part by the consistent misinterpretation of his controversial ‘scapegoat remark’, which has been taken to be a comment on the internal incoherence of the ancient Jewish scapegoat rite. In fact, Wittgenstein's point is that the scapegoat ritual is particularly easy to misinterpret, and so reflection on it helps illustrate the sort of confusion that plagues much thinking about religion and ritual.

In this article, I argue that Immanuel Kant fails to provide a satisfactory account of ‘moral debt’ in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. More precisely, he fails to answer the question of why we should assume that a debt exists in the first place. In light of recent scholarship on this area of his thought, I sketch some possible readings of Kant on the nature of moral transformation that suggest how he might account for this debt. I then argue that these accounts fail to justify its existence within Kant's project.

This paper explores a seldom discussed difficulty for traditional theists who wish to embrace the purported evidence employed in biochemical intelligent design arguments, and who also employ a commonly used element in their theodicies – namely, the claim that God would have reason to make a relatively orderly and self-sufficient world with stable and simple natural laws. I begin by introducing intelligent design arguments and the varieties of theodicy at issue, then I argue that there is at least a strong prima facie tension between these theodicies and the claim that God intelligently designed biochemical systems in humans and other organisms. Subsequently, I examine three strategies for resolving this tension, in increasing order of plausibility. At the end of the paper, I raise and briefly discuss some wider issues for theists enamoured with theodicy approaches that emphasize natural orderliness and the stability of laws of nature.

Stephen Mumford concludes a recent paper in Religious Studies, in which he advances a new causation-based analysis of miracles, by stating that the onus is ‘on rival accounts of miracles to produce something that matches it’. I take up Mumford's challenge, defending an intention-based definition of miracles, which I developed earlier, that he criticizes. I argue that this definition of miracles is more consistent with ordinary intuitions about miracles than Mumford's causation-based alternative. I further argue that Mumford has failed to demonstrate any advantages that his approach to miracles has over an intention-based approach.

Alvin Plantinga and other philosophers have argued that exclusive religious belief can be rationally held in response to certain experiences – independently of inference to other beliefs, evidence, arguments, and the like – and thus can be ‘properly basic’. We think that this is possible only until the believer acquires the defeater we develop in this paper, a defeater which arises from an awareness of certain salient features of religious pluralism. We argue that, as a consequence of this defeater, continued epistemic support for exclusive religious belief will require the satisfaction of non-basic epistemic criteria (such as evidence and/or argumentation). But then such belief will no longer be properly basic. If successful, we will have presented a challenge not only to Plantinga's position, but also to the general view (often referred to as ‘reformed epistemology’) according to which exclusive religious belief can be properly basic.

John Bishop and Andrei Buckareff have discussed in this journal Bishop's conception of faith, which he has later included in his Believing by Faith (2007). One key question concerned the possibility of believing on inconclusive evidence. Bishop suggested that beliefs may have non-evidential, passional causes that can sustain belief even if what is believed lacks adequate evidential support. Buckareff took a critical stance towards Bishop's claim. In this article I shall expand and defend Buckareff's central claims against Bishop's answer to the criticism as well as his revised view in Believing by Faith. My aim is to show that while beliefs may at times be caused by passional factors, it is doubtful that such beliefs could be sustained in full awareness. In general, I will argue that conscious non-evidential believing is not possible.

In this article, I examine the compatibility thesis, according to which the assumptions and results of cognitive (and other bio-psychological) theories of religion are compatible with the theistic world-view. In particular, I analyse the conception of world-view neutrality concerning scientific theories of religion. I also investigate the nature of pro-theistic argumentation; one aspect of this is the role that various forms of naturalism have in theistic compatibility claims. I point out that the version of theism guiding the argumentation of the proponents of the compatibility thesis is seldom explicated. A commitment to classical theism is problematic because of the ultimate metaphysical separation of God and the world. Instead, I support the compatibility view with a notion of God construed as the structuring cause of the world.

In his paper ‘Miracles: metaphysics, physics, and physicalism’,1 Kirk McDermid appears to have two primary goals. The first is to demonstrate that my account of how God might produce a miracle without violating any laws of nature is radically flawed. The second is to suggest two alternative accounts, one suitable for a deterministic world, one suitable for an indeterministic world, which allow for the occurrence of a miracle without violation of the laws of nature, yet do not suffer from the defects of what McDermid terms the ‘Larmerian’ model. I briefly describe my model, reply to McDermid's criticism of it, and evaluate his alternative accounts.

In this paper I reply to Keith Yandell's recent charge that Anselmian theists cannot also be Trinitarians. Yandell's case turns on the contention that it is impossible to individuate Trinitarian members, if they exist necessarily. Since the ranks of Anselmian Trinitarians includes the likes of Alvin Plantinga, Robert Adams, and Thomas Flint, Yandell's claim is of considerable interest and import. I argue, by contrast, that Anselmians can appeal to what Plantinga calls an essence or haecceity – a property essentially unique to an object – to distinguish Trinitarian members. I go on to show that the main Yandellian objection to this individuative strategy is not successful.

It is sometimes claimed that faith is a virtue. To what extent faith is a virtue depends on what faith is. One construal of faith, which has been popular in both recent and historical work on faith, is that faith is a matter of taking oneself to have been spoken to by God and of trusting this purported divine testimony. In this article, I argue that when faith is understood in this way, for faith to be virtuous then it must be accompanied by intellectual humility. I defend this view by showing how someone ought to respond to purported divine testimony if her faith is to be intellectually humble, and how, if it fails in this respect, it will instead be accompanied by the vices of either servility or arrogance.

In The Metaphysics of Creation and The Metaphysics of Theism, Norman Kretzmann defends an argument for God's existence which he claims to find in Aquinas. I assess this argument's key premise, a principle of sufficient reason, that: ‘PSR2: Every existing thing has a reason for its existence either in the necessity of its own nature or in the causal efficacy of some other beings’. PSR2 requires God's nature to explain His existence. Kretzmann does not tell us how this explanation is supposed to go. I examine such ways as I can envision that God's own nature might explain His existence. None pan out. I argue contra Kretzmann that if God is simple, as Aquinas understood this, His nature does not explain His existence, and while His existence is in itself per se notum (‘self-evident’) this does not entail that it has an explanation. If this is correct, we ought not to read Aquinas as committed to PSR2. Further, if I'm right that it's impossible for ‘the necessity of a thing's nature’ to explain its existence, PSR2 is true only if every existing thing has a reason for its existence in the causal efficacy of some other beings. So, if I'm right, theists ought to steer clear of PSR2, at least read in terms of genuine explanation. I finally offer a weaker reading of ‘a reason for its existence’ which does not generate the problems of the stronger reading Kretzmann seems to have in mind. This too, though, turns out to have its problems.