As everyone knows, since the end of the Second World War there has been a sensational revival of interest in the non-Christian religions particularly in the United States and in this country. The revival has taken two forms, the one popular, the other academic. The first of these has turned almost exclusively to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism and can be seen as an energetic reaction against the dogmatic and until very recently rigid structure of institutionalised Christianity and a search for a lived experience of the freedom of the spirit which is held to be the true content of mysticism, obscured in Christianity by the basic dogma of a transcendent God, the ‘wholly Other’ of Rudolf Otto and his numerous followers, but wholly untrammelled by any such concept in the higher reaches of Vedanta and Buddhism, particularly in its Zen manifestation. On the academic side the picture is less clear. There is, of course, the claim that the study of religion, like any other academic study, must be subjected to and controlled by the same principles of ‘scientific’ objectivity to which the other ‘arts’ subjects have been subjected, to their own undoing. But even here there would seem to be a bias in favour of the religions of India and the Far East as against Islam, largely, one supposes, in response to popular demand.

The challenge was originally put nearly twenty years ago in the concluding sentences of my initial contribution to a discussion in the now defunct journal University; a contribution reprinted in 1955 in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, and in several other places since then. Those sentences read: ‘We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God's (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?”’

One problem facing those who attempt to reconcile divine foreknowledge with human freedom is to explain how a temporal God can have knowledge of the future, if the future does not exist. In her recent book, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, Linda Zagzebski attempts to provide an explanation by making use of a fourdimensional model in which the past, present and future exist. In this note I argue that the model Zagzebski offers to support the coplausibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom is inconsistent with the A-theory of time she propounds.

The notions of a ‘devotional experiment’ and an ‘experimental faith’ have been unduly neglected in the philosophy of religion. There seems to be a widespread assumption that experiments in spiritual matters are impossible in principle; the hypotheses in question simply do not lend themselves to empirical testing. This is unfortunate, since any discussion of these notions inevitably sheds light on such central issues as the nature of faith and belief, the rational evaluation of belief systems, and the evidential force of religious experiences.

Though Kierkegaard's writings are rarely referenced in discussions of the problem of hell, the choice model of hell, I argue, can be strengthened by a close reading of the relevant passages of The Sickness unto Death that bear on the topic of damnation. Each of the two major forms of the choice model that are discussed in the contemporary philosophical literature are anticipated and developed in masterful psychological detail in this key Kierkegaardian text. The first form of the choice model, which sees damnation as the explicit and direct object of choice of those who are finally lost, faces the challenge of explaining motive: why would anyone freely choose eternal damnation? The second form, in which damnation is the natural consequence of certain free choices but not that which is chosen directly, faces the significant challenge of explaining why God does not annihilate the damned, mercifully putting them out of their misery. I argue that The Sickness unto Death contains conceptual resources for meeting both of these challenges.

The causal power of Malebranche's God is a function of the content of His will. Yet despite its significance for Malebranche, little exegetical attention has been paid to his notion of volitional content. In this paper I develop the notion of an ‘incomplete’ volition, note that Malebranche accepted and used something like it, and then examine Malebranche's natural theodicy in its light. This yields a new interpretation in which, unlike previous interpretations, Malebranche actually succeeds in reconciling his seemingly incompatible beliefs that: (1) God alone is causally responsible for all natural states of affairs; (2) God's power is His will; (3) God wills to produce only goods; and yet (4) genuine evils exist.

Friendship plays a central role in Augustine's thought. It also played a crucial role in structuring the political and social world of the ancient Greeks. Augustine's treatment of friendship, especially in his Confessions, retains some of the terminology that was central to the Greek account, but it simultaneously transforms friendship, and with it the relationship between individual and community. Augustine's formulation of the inner life is reflected in his transformation of friendship, which loses its inherently social character and political dimension even as it sets the stage for the introduction of political thinking based on the primacy of the individual.

In ‘God, evil, and occasionalism’ Matthew Shea and C.P. Ragland appeal to the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing to argue against Alvin Plantinga that occasionalism is morally worse than conservationism. In this article I critically examine their argument and conclude that it fails because it contains an equivocation or is unwarranted. I also offer a case against their position by, first, arguing that on none of three prominent accounts of doing and allowing God merely allows suffering.

Second, I develop the ‘Epistemological-Equivalence Argument’ in order to show that even if we grant such a distinction for God's acts, they would be morally on a par.

In the past few years philosophers of religion and theologians have devoted much attention to the status of religious statements. There are three main positions: (1) The statements as generally understood are (false) empirical statements. The people who make them have either made honest mistakes (they are unaware of the counter evidence) or they are irrational. This view may be coupled with the claim that religious language can be reconstructed in such a way that we may continue to use it and yet avoid making false assertions. (The position Braithwaite outlines in An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief seems to be close to this.) (2) The statements are not empirical and are therefore not significant. (3) The statements are not empirical— common sense and science are irrelevant to the truth and falsity of religious claims—and yet they are significant.

Among contemporary novelists Iris Murdoch is unique. On the one hand she is a novelist and a philosopher and yet does not write philosophical novels, and, on the other hand, her work as a moral philosopher is uninfluenced by current moral philosophy.

If by personal immortality one means that the soul is naturally eternal and passes as a substance through physical death to another life, then the answer to this question is a firm No. Both Alfred North Whitehead and his most famous student Charles Hartshorne disavowed such personal immortality as philosophically incompatible with the basic tenets of process thought. For Whitehead, and all philosophers who claim to follow him, process is the ultimate metaphysical generality describing how actual entities (occasions) instantiate themselves from the causality of entities in their past to then become objectified as they influence successor actual entities. To claim that there are multiple exceptions to the sway of universal process in the form of eternal souls introduces a radical and unacceptable philosophical incoherence into the Whiteheadian metaphysical system. Hartshorne held that a belief in eternal souls was not only incompatible with process thought but also compromised the philosophy of Berkeley, Descartes and Kant. In addition, he considered such belief bad religion and argued forcibly against it.

Having considered the role of ethics in Indian mystical teachings in a previous, related, essay I would like to consider the same question in its western religious contexts in the present paper, beginning with the Christian mystical tradition. As is the case with Asian traditions charges of moral unconcern are widely directed at Christian mystics, but they are false. Christian mystics are not indifferent to morality nor do they disconnect morality from an intrinsic relationship to their mystical quest. Augustine would already teach that the story of Leah and Rachel was an instructive allegory in which the active life represented by Leah was intrinsic to the contemplative life represented by Rachel while Gregory the Great would unambiguously assert: ‘We ascend to the heights of contemplation by the steps of the active life’, defining the active life as: ‘to dispense to all what they need and to provide those entrusted to us with the means of subsistence’. These representative early samples of the salience of ethical behaviour to the life of contemplation could be multiplied at great length, and almost without exception in the teaching of the major Christian mystics. This historical exegetical exercise, however, is in the present circumstances, both out of place and I hope unnecessary. Instead, the more general, more enigmatic, more repercussive, issues raised by the place and significance of morality within the Christian mystical tradition need attending to.

In ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’ Moritz Schlick expressed the following view: ‘Everything is knowable which can be expressed, and this is the total subject matter concerning which meaningful questions can be raised. There are consequently no questions which are in principle unanswerable, no problems which are in principle insoluble.’ (page 56 in Logical Positivism edited by A. J. Ayer.) I will refer to this as Schlick's principle, although it is shared by many others. What it amounts to is the view that all meaningful questions can be answered by rational procedures, that is by logical argument or appeal to evidence. It is this view which I wish to challenge, at the same time relating what I have to say to belief in God. For it follows from Schlick's principle that provided the question ‘Does God exist?’ can be meaningfully asked, it is in principle possible to answer it either affirmatively or negatively. Having done so, we would then know, and not merely believe, that God does or does not exist. I will try to show that provided the question ‘Does God exist?’ can be meaningfully asked, no such consequence need be taken to follow.

Notable among the current fashions in philosophical theology is the movement away from the view that the mode of being properly attributable to God is some form of atemporal eternity. It sometimes seems almost to be the case that a consensus is in process of formation in support of the contention that the only rationally defensible interpretation of the divine eternity is in terms of sempiternity, i.e. of beginingless and endless temporal duration. This is true not only of the so-called ‘process theologians’, for leading theistic philosophers throughout the English-speaking world seem to be in something of a rush to espouse this particular cause.

In her recent book Atonement, Eleonore Stump objects to the Anselmian theory of atonement, claiming it is not consistent with God's love. I argue that her objection mischaracterizes Anselmian theories. First, Stump equivocates on the concept of forgiveness, conflating personal forgiveness with divine pardon, and second, Stump misrepresents the God of Anselm as unwilling to reconcile with sinners prior to receiving satisfaction. I suggest that Stump's real objection should be to the Anselmian view of divine justice as retributive, not to his conception of divine love. I suggest a model of an all-loving God acting as a retributive judge.

New cross-cultural approaches to philosophy of religion seek to move it beyond the preoccupations of Christian theology and the abstractions of ‘classical theism’, towards an appreciation of a broader range of religious phenomena. But if the concept of religion is itself the product of extrapolation from modern, Western, Christian understandings, disseminated through colonial encounter, does the new philosophy of religion simply reproduce the deficiencies of the old, under the guise of a universalizing, albeit culturally and historically particular, category? This article argues that it is necessary to interrogate the secular episteme within which religion is thematized as a discrete topos.

The place of Christianity in a work such as the Encyclopedia of Religion is an uncomfortable one. The work is, after all, largely the product of Western scholars operating in a culture now widely thought to have abandoned much of its Christian inheritance. How does one in such circumstances fulfil the editorial desire to be evenhanded, to treat all religious phenomena as far as possible ‘objectively’? By giving Fairies a longer entry than Cyril of Alexandria, for example? Or, to take a more serious example, by seeing to it that the Eastern church gains a fair proportion of space, thus giving Cyril I, patriarch, 1570/7–1638, more space than Cyril of Alexandria, theologian and bishop? Such points are an indication of the immense difficulty facing editors of a work such as this.

Professor Wainwright's recent book is the first attempt at a systematic and rigorous assessment of mystical experience since the publication of W. T. Stace's influential Mysticism and Philosophy more than twenty years ago. It is also the first work in English during the period of the critical study of mystical experience inaugurated by Richard M. Bucke and William James at the beginning of this century to adequately formulate and extensively discuss the philosophical problems involved in assessing the cognitive value of mystical experience. Wainwright's conclusions are not unproblematic, but the publication of his work does provide an ideal opportunity for a review of the central problems associated with the assessment of mystical experience. In this paper, therefore, we wish to delineate and discuss the two major areas of difficulty, and to extend and amend some of Wainwright's suggestions in these areas.