A decent interval has elapsed since the publication, in Religious Studies, Vol. 11 (1975), pp. 167–79, of Professor R. C. Zaehner's article: ‘Why Not Islam?’ The question, an intriguing one, was answered there with such ambivalence that a cynic might be forgiven for thinking he was being trifled with, while a well-wisher could easily be lost in confusion. The Professor commended Islam from the angle least worthy to command credence or to merit acceptance. His case for Islam had about it an air of almost perverse pleading, identifying Islam's main asset as an authoritarian simplicity suited to simple minds. The writer appeared to be withholding his own position by the very form of his advocacy. The article could equally be read as a subtle dissuasive. ’Sadly, debate cannot now be joined. For the piece must have been among the very last the author published. Death, as with Dickens and the mystery of Edwin Drood, silences inquiry about the puzzle of his intentions. It would be unseemly to have pressed the issues too sharply or too soon. But, at this distance of time, it may be possible to wonder in print about what Professor Zaehner's purpose really was. ’Why not…?’ is a question which it is always well for us to ask about alternatives within the human, or the religious, scene. Negative questions, as the Latin grammarians have it, expect the answer Yes. ’Why not X,’ however, when it comes to grips, has to pass into reasons why in the affirmative. It is in doing so that Zaehner offers what, on many counts, would seem to be dubious, even un-Islamic, reasons for his pleas.

The Participatory Model of Atonement (PMA) offers an alternative view of Christian salvation, drawing on Pauline theology. It conceives of sin as a contagion which can usually be escaped only by dying. By ‘participating’ in Christ's death, the believer can escape its effects without having to die. This notion of ‘participation’ is obscure. I consider a possible way of clarifying it using metaphysical ideas taken from Jonathan Edwards. ‘Participation’ might involve becoming similar to Christ through the action of the Holy Spirit, to such a degree that a person might be called identical (in some sense) with Christ.

Traditional theology asserts that God is omnipotent. I wi11 argue that there is no way that a person could be justified in believing that God is omnipotent. It follows that one cannot know that God is omnipotent, since knowledge requires justified belief.

In my Contemporary Critiques of Religion and in my Scepticism, I argue that non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God do not make sense. By this I mean that we do not have sound grounds for believing that the central truth-claims of Christianity are genuine truth-claims and that we do not have a religiously viable concept of God. I argue that this is so principally because of three interrelated features about God-talk. (I) While purporting to be factual assertions, central bits of God-talk, e.g. ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves man-kind’, are not even in principle verifiable (confirmable or disconfirmable) in such a way that we can say what experienceable states of affairs would count for these putative assertions and against their denials, such that we could say what it would be like to have evidence which would make either their assertion or their denial more or less probably true. (2) Personal predicates, e.g. ‘loves’, ‘creates’, are at least seemingly essential in the use of God-talk, yet they suffer from such an attenuation of meaning in their employment in religious linguistic environments that it at least appears to be the case that we have in such environments unwittingly emptied these predicates of all intelligible meaning so that we do not understand what we are asserting or denying when we utter ‘God loves mankind’ or ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and the like. (3) When we make well-formed assertions, it appears at least to be the case that a necessary condition for such wellformedness is that we should be able successfully to identify the subject of that putative statement so that we can understand what it is that we are talking about and thus understand that a genuine statement has actually been made. But, where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically, we have no even tolerably clear idea about how God, an infinite individual, occupying no particular place or existing at no particular time, and being utterly transcendent to the world, can be identified. Indeed we have no coherent idea of what it would be like to identify him and this means we have no coherent idea of what it would be like for God even to be a person or an it. He cannot be picked out and identified in the way persons and things can.

‘In the world today there are three religions: Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto. Some think they represent the three different countries, India, China and Japan; while others consider them essentially one, or else dispute with one another over the truth or falsity of each. However, the way which may be called the Way of all ways is different from these, and what each of these three teachings calls the Way is not in accord with the Way of Truth. The reason is that Buddhism is the Way of India, and Confucianism is the Way of China. Because they are peculiar to these countries they are not the Way of Japan. Shinto is the Way of Japan, but because of the difference in time, it is not the Way for the present generation. Some may think that the Way is always the Way despite differences in nationality and differences in time; but the Way is called the Way because of its practicality, and a Way which is not practical is not the true Way. Thus, the Way as taught by the three teachings mentioned above is not a Way practicable in present-day Japan’.

‘Apologetics’ is hardly a word to be used without apology in the present dispensation. And to speak of anything like a neglected avenue or opportunity in religious apologetics might almost seem as if one were speaking of an opportunity in just such an enterprise as no self-respecting philosopher would nowadays wish even to be associated with. For all of their avoidance of the term, however, the thing designated by the term is something with which not a few philosophers of recent years have been not above dabbling in, albeit usually under other names and other labels. After all, religious language has now come to be recognized as not just a legitimate, but even a fashionable object of philosophic attention. And a concern with religious language has often brought with it a concern with religious attitudes, religious behaviour, religious argumentation — yes, even to the point of occasionally becoming a concern with the very religious realities themselves that religious language, religious attitudes, religious behaviour, and religious argument are presumably all about. True, religious realities in this sense are to today's garden of philosophy pretty much what the tree of knowledge once was to the garden of Eden. In fact, one even suspects that there could be a serpent about somewhere, for cases have been reported of an occasional philosopher Adam or philosopher Eve having yielded to temptation: a consideration of God-talk has been known to lead to cautious admissions that such talk might be cognitively meaningful; a consideration of God-experiences to the admission that such experiences under certain circumstances could be veridical; or, even more rarely, a consideration of proofs for God's existence to the gingerly admission that at least some of these proofs might just possibly be valid. Needless to say, though, such a yielding to temptation on the part of some few contemporary philosophers, while it may not have led to any manifest sewing together of fig-leaves, has certainly brought with it the danger, if not always the reality, of a supercilious expulsion from the glorious Eden of contemporary professional philosophy.

The late Karl Barth once wrote that no one can hope to overcome Ludwig Feuerbach ‘…with whining or with angry criticism of his views of religion.’ This is plainly correct, for Feuerbach's argument that religious language is always anthropological is an argument of great attractiveness—and, apparently, of great explanatory utility to psychologists, historians, and philosophers. Barth's solution to the problem raised by Feuerbach is less satisfactory. It just will not do for Christian believers simply to cleanse Christian theology of anthropological foundations by admitting ‘…that even in our relation to God,… we can lay claim to his truth, his certainty, his salvation as grace and only as grace’. Nor will it do for Christian believers, secure in the promise of divine succour, to ‘… laugh… at Feuerbach’ for his naive view of human possibilities. Even though a cleansing of theology may be helpful to the Church, it will have little (more likely, no) effect upon the widespread popular and scholarly acceptance of Feuerbach's conclusions.

In a recent article Professor Phillips has argued against Mascall's contention that the role of philosophy in relation to religious belief is to justify that belief by seeking ‘rational grounds for asserting the existence of God’. In this paper I shall investigate the case Phillips presents and the argument he utilises from Winch to establish the conclusion that it is a fundamental misunderstanding to think that one could justify religious belief and I shall further point out a serious dilemma in Phillips's position on the question of religious truth. It is my claim that Phillips does not establish that Mascall's enterprise is an impossible one and that his own position in criticising Mascall leads him into the dilemma I have alluded to.

The article discusses moral critique of theodicies, and suggests the need for several distinctions in order to avoid misunderstanding. It distinguishes between moral critique of concrete theodicies and theodicies in general, and between moral critique of the content of theodicies and the consequences of theodicies. But there are also different kinds of moral critique of the content and the consequences. After presenting these distinctions, the article responds to Robert Simpson's ‘Some moral critique of theodicies is misplaced, but not all’.

Philosophers and theologians have long recognized apparent contradictions in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation wherein Jesus is both fully divine and fully human and thereby exemplifies all properties essential to being divine and all properties essential to being human, including, respectively, immutability and mutability. In this article, we outline a new account of such apparent contradictions, wherein each such pair of (modal) properties involves different modal operators.

Process theology is far less prominent in Britain than in its country of origin, but its central doctrine of a developing God would prove, I think, to be held by many British theologians if one made enquiry. Professor Keith Ward may show which way the wind is blowing when he writes in his recent book Rational Theology and the Creativity of God: ‘only if God is temporal, can he be the free creator of a universe of free creatures; only if he is eternal, can he possess that necessity which is the foundation of the world; only if he is dipolar, can he be both’. To that extent he accepts the Whitehead-Hartshorne position. Why has the the absolute timelessness of God seemed obvious so regularly to thinking religious people down the ages? It must be, I shall say, that they have felt themselves in touch somehow with another world, or rather another state, in which time is absolutely transcended. But I am not concerned only with that in this article. My business is to suggest that process theology is important for a number of reasons. I shall return to Ward's book at the end.

The Muʿtazilī theologians, particularly the later Imāmī ones, developed numerous interesting arguments against divine command theory. The arguments, however, have not received the attention they deserve. Some of the arguments have been discussed in passing, and some have not been discussed at all. In this article, I aim to present and analyse the arguments. To that end, I first distinguish between different semantic, ontological, epistemological, and theological theses that were often conflated in the debate, and examine the logical relation among them. Then I go over the Muʿtazila's arguments determining, among other things, which of the theses was targeted by each argument. In presenting the arguments, I focus mainly on the late kalām period, the period falling roughly between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries of the common era, as the arguments were at their most sophisticated level by this time.

Pascal's wager has fascinated philosophers far in excess of its reputation as effective apologetics. Very few of the wager's defenders, in fact, have retained more than an academic interest in its power to persuade. Partly this is a matter of good manners. Pascal is supposed to have pitched his wager at folks who understand only self-interested motivations, and today it is no longer fashionable for defenders of theism to disparage the character of their opponents. But partly the low-key concern with apologetics expresses a philosophical judgement. Pascal's defenders have found the question of the wager's audience to be less philosophically engaging than the logic of its argument. I believe that this assessment is mistaken. The most puzzling feature of Pascal's wager is its invocation of infinite utility. What are finite human beings, theists or otherwise, supposed to make of the idea of an infinitely desirable happiness? There are, I will argue, two sorts of response to this question, and depending on which sort Pascal had in mind, the logic of his wager comes out very differently.

In the above reply Professor Reichenbach repeatedly announces or suggests that my thesis is this: the view that persons are resurrected in some physical sense is inconsistent with the Pauline view of the resurrected body. Having consulted both my original intentions and my text, I must affirm again my basic point in section III of the article: the belief that resurrected persons are not embodied is not incompatible with what Paul says about resurrected bodies. While not wishing to attribute such a belief to Paul himself (pp. 205, 211), I claimed that seeing resurrected persons as non-corporeal is a ‘supportable interpretation’ of the Pauline concept (p. 205), not forbidden by the text (p. 211), whereas the materiality of the resurrected body is ‘not necessarily implied’ (p. 209). So, of two interpretations, I have not attempted to show one inconsistent with the text; I have instead tried to argue that a rival interpretation is also consistent with the same text.

In his article ‘Nietzsche, Tristan, and the rehabilitation of erotic distance’ Joseph D. Kuzma identifies two seemingly opposed erotic ideals in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. He claims that Nietzsche applauded the first and sought to dispense with the second, and that this was his solution to the problem of nihilism. I argue that this ‘solution’ is as ill-defined as the ideals it involves, and that it either consigns us to hell or offers a terminological variant upon theism. I rescue Schopenhauer from some familiar charges and make a link with Simone Weil's reflections upon love's impossibility.

Muslim philosophers commonly endorse a version of the so-called ‘privation theory of evil’ (PTE), according to which all essential evils consist in the non-existence of an entity or privation of a deserved perfection. In this article, I first provide a short sketch of PTE based on clarification of its main conceptual components. Then I examine the main reasons for the truth of PTE offered by Muslim philosophers and show that none of them is sufficiently plausible. Finally, I investigate the most significant objections against PTE and criticize the proposed responses.

In this article, I argue that foundationalist reconstructions of religious experience lose on all counts: First, philosophical defences of foundationalism are untenable. Second, the theological benefits that can be reaped from foundationalism come at too high a price. I show that both William Alston's and Alvin Plantinga's foundationalism leads to sceptical conclusions. Third, I argue that the epistemic implications of foundationalist reconstructions of religious experience are incompatible with Christian ontology. Criticizing the account Plantinga develops in his books on warrant, I suggest that it is preferrable to reconstruct religious experience in antifoundationalist, i.e., coherentist, terms and develop the model of a mobile for these purposes.