The problem of evil has traditionally been formulated as a claim about the incompatibility of the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’. Hume, for example, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, part x, claims that the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’ are incompatible. In his esssy ‘Hume on Evil’, Nelson Pike argues that it has not been shown that the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’ are incompatible because it has not been shown that God could not have a morally sufficient reason for permitting suffering he could prevent.1 Moreover, according to Pike, the theist who is convinced that God must have a morally sufficient reason for permitting suffering he can prevent will claim that the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’ are not incompatible. He will claim this even though he cannot specify the morally sufficient reason why God permits suffering he can prevent. The theist will thus maintain that God exists even given the occurrence of suffering in the world.2 Robert Richman, in his essay ‘The Argument from Evil’, argues that Pike is too generous to the theist. According to Richman, only if the theist can specify the morally sufficient reason why God permits suffering he can prevent will the theist be rationally justified in maintaining that God exists in the face of suffering in the world. Richman supports his position by reformulating the argument from evil in terms of what he calls ‘the logic of our moral judgmentsr’.3 Richman thinks that his formulation of the argument from evil is successful against the theist who cannot specify the morally sufficient reason why God permits evil he can prevent. In this paper, I shall argue that Richman's argument is not successful against the typical theist, i.e. the person who accepts the existence of God on the basis of faith or a priori arguments.4

A comedy, unlike a tragedy which the experts maintain has to succeed greatly if it is to succeed at all, can be evaluated on a more or less basis. The former can likewise be great, but it can also be quite funny or only mildly amusing and remain a worthwhile comedy and it is this kind of relativist assessment that this writer believes is appropriate with regard to the sections of this encyclopaedia dealing with ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ religions. The former section, taken in the round, is impressive in terms of its range, the quality of the entries and the back-up or support material, the latter is somewhat less so in all of these areas but nonetheless worthwhile.

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 a 1953 paper H. H Price described a possible set of afterlife conditions for a disembodied self or consciousness. His model has remained something of a benchmark for dualist philosophers up to the present day. The purpose of this article is to begin with Price and, noting certain major weaknesses in his position, put forward an alternative view which is both more consistent and more theistic.

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.

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.

Of all the distinctive features of the Buddhist religion, one of the most neglected is the sangha. Scholars give much attention to the study of texts and commentaries, the analysis of doctrines and the classification of schools. But the core of the Buddhist religion is the sangha, the community of bhikkhus around whose corporate life the religion is moulded. It is the existence and structure of the sangha which has shaped the history of Buddhism, enabled it to take root in new countries, and given it the customs and rituals which have made it a religion rather than a small sect.

China's regard for nature, as expressed (for example) in Sung landscape painting, is clear and well recognised. What the Chinese believed to exceed the natural world, the realm of ‘the ten-thousand things’, is less clear. The present essay tries to explore this question systematically.

Debate over indigenization of Christianity continues in earnest even after the waning of the missionary zeal of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, set afire in no small measure by the wave of Great Awakening that swept New England and beyond. The context in which the Gospel of Christ is to be heard anew has ceased to be the God forsaken lands of heathens but is now one in which new challenges have emerged, ranging widely from Marxism and Islam, scientific scepticism and technological revolution, to urbanization and the rise of the ‘Third World’. In a country where since the early seventeenth century the Christians have scarcely numbered more than half of one percent of the population, the Gospel continues to intrigue the inquiring minds and the tired souls of the Japanese, particularly among the educated for many of whom the initial exposure to Christianity was through schooling or personal cultural enrichment. While many have regarded Christianity as a passage to Western culture and civilization when Japan still held the West in awe, worthy of emulation, others have taken upon themselves a more sobering, if troubling to some, task of inquiring whether the teaching of Christ could be the spiritual and social force to redeem and to transform the Japanese without relinquishing, if possible, but rather affirming the integrity of their own heritage. In no other country has a religious tradition exerted influence so far out of pro-portion to its membership as has Christianity in modern Japan.

Donald Evans, for one, thinks not. J. L. Austin, it could be argued, would have disagreed with him. But regardless of what Austin might have said on the question (someone is bound to suggest that he would have taken it back after he said it) I think that Evans is wrong.

Q: If necessity is the mother of invention, whence necessity?

A. (Thesis): The matrix of necessity in God-talk is religious experience, philosophically interpreted. The interpreters, theists and non-thesists, have indeed been inventive.

The most elusive and perhaps famous argument in the history of the philosophy of religion was put forth in the eleventh century by St Anselm. Now known as the ontological argument, it is based on the idea that God is that being greater than which is inconceivable. Although historically debate focused on the issue of whether existence is a property, or a perfection, required in our concept of such a being, recently it has taken a back seat to the examination of the indisputable attributes a perfect being must exemplify if He exists. Traditionally such attributes include: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, immutability and so forth. The first challenge to the accepted attributes was posed in the Middle Ages; it is the oldest and probably the best known paradox in the philosophy of religion: Can God create a stone so heavy that even He cannot lift it? Whatever the answer is, apparently He is not Almighty. A slightly different version of the omnipotence paradox was advanced in 1955 by J. L. Mackie who questioned whether an omnipotent being could ‘make things He cannot subsequently control’.Both versions are intended to show that the concept of omnipotence suffers from internal incoherence and is therefore inapplicable to any being.

I want to put forward a certain view of the logical foundation of religious belief. It is, in a sentence, the view that religious belief is constituted by the concept of god. This view will be discussed under three headings. First, I shall explain as clearly as I can what I mean by it. Secondly, I shall indicate what seem to me to be interesting parallels, both with regard to universes of discourse in general and to religious belief in particular, between my idea of a constitutive concept and Wittgenstein's ideas of a fundamental proposition and a religious ‘picture’. Thirdly, I shall try to substantiate the view I take of the logical foundation of religious belief by rebutting three conceivable objections to it: namely, that it rests on an illegitimate craving for generality, that it is at variance with common usage, and that it consigns religious belief to an intellectual ghetto.

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 spite of many claims by people who have had the kind of mystical experiences that I want to discuss, such experiences do not reveal any reality beyond the experience itself; nor does the experience itself constitute a cosmic principle such as the Godhead, Absolute, One or Chaos. These experiences are in the last analysis merely subjective experiences. I say ‘merely’ here only to deny that the experiences have any significance for the cosmologists; not to deny that the experience has significant value for the experiencer. It may be that the experiences are the ultimate goal attainable by human beings. Their value does not depend on their being the ultimate truth.

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 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.

To many Western students of India, svarāj and mokṣa have often seemed to represent two very different ideals of freedom, the former social, political, and modern; the latter individual, spiritual, and traditional. It is not surprising that the Hindu ideal of spiritual freedom is most commonly known by the term mokṣa (liberation), for it is this word that is usually listed as the fourth and supreme goal in the famous four ends of man (puruṣārtha). The first three ends, desire (kāma), success (artha), and morality (dharma), find their fulfillment within society, while mokṣa, it is generally said, takes one beyond society. It is pertinent to note, as Ingalls and others have pointed out, that mokṣa is a relatively late term, which came to be added to the older, first three goals of man. As a noun, mokṣa does not appear until the latest of the Upanisads, and then only three times, in Śvetāśvatara 6.16 and Maitrī 6.20 and 30. In addition, some orthodox schools did not accept the ideal of mokṣa for several more centuries, the Mīmāṁsā denying it until the eighth century A.D.