In ‘The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions’ (Religious Studies 32, June 1996) Gavin D'Costa argues that ‘pluralism must always logically be a form of exclusivism and that nothing called pluralism really exists’ (225). He sees himself as doing a ‘conceptual spring cleaning exercise’ (225). However the result is to obscure clear and useful distinctions by confused and confusing ones. Some further spring cleaning is therefore called for.

The religious pluralism that D'Costa is referring to is the view that the great world religions constitute conceptually and culturally different responses to an ultimate transcendent reality, these responses being, so far as we can tell, more or less on a par when judged by their fruits. And the religious exclusivism to which he refers holds that one particular religion – in his case Christianity – is alone fully true and salvific, the others being either wholly misleading, or inferior imitations of or inferior approximations to the one ‘true’ religion.

In a recent article in this journal, John Bishop argues in defence of conceiving of Christian faith as a ‘doxastic venture’. That is, he defends the claim that, in exercising faith, agents believe beyond ‘what can be established rationally on the basis of evidence and argument’. Careful examination reveals that Bishop fails adequately to show that faith in the face of inadequate epistemic reasons for believing is, or can even be, a uniquely doxastic venture. I argue that faith is best conceived of as a sub-doxastic venture that involves pragmatically assuming that God exists.

Drawing on the work of Mark Siderits, Jay Garfield, and others, I introduce a global approach to the philosophy of religion that is inspired by ‘fusion’, ‘engagement’, or ‘confluence’ philosophy. To globalize the philosophy of religion requires more than expanding its traditional disciplinary scope or broadening its range of questions; it requires philosophers who are conversant in more than one philosophical tradition. I argue that this approach offers a viable way to develop the discipline by providing a platform for deep and authentic engagement in philosophical inquiry that crosses traditional religious and philosophical boundaries.

Many philosophers have held that traditional theism can be conclusively disproved because it can be shown to be logically inconsistent with some known fact about evil. By ‘traditional theism’ I mean the statement that G. There exists an omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect person who created the universe.

In a recent study entitled ‘Numinous Experience and Religious Language’, Dr Leon Schlamm has endorsed Rudolf Otto's well known and much discussed account of the relationship of religious experience to religious language, and then used this position to criticize some highly influential voices in the continuing debate on the precise nature of mystical experience. The aim of this paper, in response to Schlamm, is to question the plausibility of Otto's account in The Idea of the Holy of the nature of religious knowledge and his closely related understanding of the relationship between religious experience (or as he prefers, numinous experience) and religious language. By implication, this also calls into question Schlamm's use of Otto's position in his criticism of those writers on mysticism that he takes issue with, chiefly Steven Katz and those who propose an essentially Kantian interpretation of mysticism. However, for the most part I shall leave the contemporary debate on mysticism unaddressed, though my comments do have a bearing on it. If there is a wider target, it is chiefly those interpreters of religion, like Schlamm, who conceive of the relationship of religious experience (or the religious object itself) and religious language in essentially the same way as Otto. One thinks immediately here of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom Otto admired greatly, and who stands in the same Liberal Protestant tradition. Also Karl Barth, who ironically, for all his strictures of Liberal Protestantism, actually propounded a view of the meaning and nature of religious language which is remarkably similar to the views of both Schleiermacher and Otto; at least at the beginning of his theological career, in his famous commentary on Romans: all that talk of God as ‘the inexpressible’ and ‘the Wholly Other’. In addition one could mention those classical texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, which like many contemporary writers on mysticism (e.g. the late Deirdre Green), conceive of mystical experience and the truth which it reveals as ‘beyond the scope of discursive thought, language and empirical activity’.

In this paper we investigate composition models of incarnation, according to which Christ is a compound of qualitatively and numerically different constituents. We focus on three-part models, according to which Christ is composed of a divine mind, a human mind, and a human body. We consider four possible relational structures that the three components could form. We argue that a ‘hierarchy of natures’ model, in which the human mind and body are united to each other in the normal way, and in which they are jointly related to the divine mind by the relation of co-action, is the most metaphysically plausible model. Finally, we consider the problem of how Christ can be a single person even when his components may be considered persons. We argue that an Aristotelian metaphysics, according to which identity is a matter of function, offers a plausible solution: Christ's components may acquire a radically new identity through being parts of the whole, which enables them to be reidentified as parts, not persons.

It is beyond question that most ordinary religious believers would find talk about God as having beliefs strange, puzzling, and objectionable. God doesn't believe things, he knows them, and if some philosophers, overlooking or ignoring this obvious point, still speak of God as having beliefs – well, that says something about those philosophers!

Recently this view of the ordinary believer has received help from an unexpected source, namely William P. Alston, who in his paper, ‘Does God Have Beliefs?’ makes a strong case for a negative answer to its title question. To be sure, Alston's reasons for this conclusion are rather more complex than those we have attributed to the ordinary believer; he specifically eschews a ‘cheap way of winning a victory’ by means of the claim that knowledge excludes belief by conceptual necessity (p. 292). Nevertheless, by a longer train of reasoning he comes to the same conclusion, and since this reasoning involves a new and more adequate conception of divine knowledge, and additionally solves two outstanding problems in thedoctrine of omniscience (the foreknowledge problem, and the problem of divine knowledge of propositions containing essential indexicals), the trip is well worth taking.

This article assesses J. L. Schellenberg's account of propositional faith and, in light of that assessment, sketches an alternative that avoids certain objections and coheres better with Schellenberg's aims.

Alvin PlantingaWarranted Christian Belief(New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2000).

In the two previous volumes of his trilogy on ‘warrant’, Alvin Plantinga developed his general theory of warrant, defined as that characteristic enough of which terms a true belief into knowledge. A belief B has warrant if and only if: (1) it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly, (2) in a cognitive environment sufficiently similar to that for which the faculties were designed, (3) according to a design plan aimed at the production of true beliefs, when (4) there is a high statistical probability of such beliefs being true.

Thus my belief that there is a table in front of me has warrant if in the first place, in producing it, my cognitive faculties were functioning properly, the way they were meant to function. Plantinga holds that just as our heart or liver may function properly or not, so may our cognitive faculties. And he also holds that if God made us, our faculties function properly if they function in the way God designed them to function; whereas if evolution (uncaused by God) made us, then our faculties function properly if they function in the way that (in some sense) evolution designed them to function.

I argue that the idea of a freely embraced eternal destiny in hell is deeply incoherent and implies, quite apart from its incoherence, that we are free both to sin with impunity and to defeat God's justice forever.

This article responds to one of Thaddeus Metz's criticisms of the theory that the meaning of life is to fulfil a purpose assigned by God. In particular, it addresses the argument that only an atemporal God could ground meaning but that an atemporal God could not assign a purpose. In order to do this, the article first argues that Metz's criticisms misread the relevant sense of purpose. It then argues that on a more plausible reading of ‘purpose’, we can see that it is in fact the kind of thing that an atemporal God could assign.

One reason for thinking that theism is a relatively simple theory – and that it is thereby more likely to be true than other theories, ceteris paribus – is to insist that infinite degrees of properties are simpler than extremely large, finite degrees of properties. This defence of theism has been championed by Richard Swinburne in recent years. I outline the objections to this line of argument present in the literature, and suggest some novel resources open to Swinburne in defence. I then argue that scientists' preference for universal nomological propositions constitutes a very strong reason for supposing that theism is simpler than parodical alternatives in virtue of its positing omni-properties rather than parallel ‘mega-properties’.

Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss contend that their ‘new cosmological argument’ is an improvement over familiar cosmological arguments because it relies upon a weaker version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason than that used in those more familiar arguments. However, I note that their ‘weaker’ version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason entails the ‘stronger’ version of that principle which is used in more familiar arguments, so that the alleged advantage of their proof turns out to be illusory. Moreover, I contend that, even if their argument did rely on a weaker version of the Principle of Sufficient reason, nontheists would still be perfectly within their rights to refuse to accept the conclusion of the argument.

In Part I of this paper, I took up a challenge posed by Alston (1991), Wainwright (1981), Yandell (1993), and other theists who hold the rather natural view that mystical experiences provide perceptual contact with God, roughly on a par with the access sense experience affords to the natural world. These theists recognize, at the same time, that the plausibility of this view would be significantly compromised by the possibility of scientifically explaining mystical experiences – especially if a scientific explanation were incompatible with, ruled out, or made unlikely the supposition that God has anything special to do with the occurrences of these experiences.

This inquiry is motivated by the question: if atheism is true, is it nevertheless the case that holiness or sacredness is exemplified? I believe the answer to this question is affirmative, and that the path to its affirmation lies in the rejection of the traditional assumption that holiness is a single and simple property of a divinity that eludes analysis. The opposite view, that there are several complex properties comprising holiness, makes it manifest that there are holy beings, even a holy ‘supreme being’, even if there is no God and no gods.

This article outlines an argument against religious belief: the X-claim argument. The argument is novel at least in the sense that it has not yet been clearly articulated or addressed before in the philosophical literature. However, the argument is closely related to two more familiar varieties of argument currently receiving philosophical attention, namely: (i) arguments from religious diversity, and (ii) naturalistic debunking arguments (e.g. Freudian, Marxist, and evolutionary). I set out the X-claim argument, show that it has some prima facie plausibility, distinguish it from these other two arguments with which it might easily be confused, and, finally, explain why it has some significant advantages over these more familiar arguments against religious belief.

We argue that there is a conflict among classical theism's commitments to divine simplicity, divine creative freedom, and omniscience. We start by defining key terms for the debate related to classical theism. Then we articulate a new argument, the Aloneness Argument, aiming to establish a conflict among these attributes. In broad outline, the argument proceeds as follows. Under classical theism, it's possible that God exists without anything apart from Him. Any knowledge God has in such a world would be wholly intrinsic. But there are contingent truths in every world, including the world in which God exists alone. So, it's possible that God (given His omniscience) contingently has wholly intrinsic knowledge. But whatever is contingent and wholly intrinsic is an accident. So, God possibly has an accident. This is incompatible with classical theism. Finally, we consider and rebut several objections.

The metaphysics of time, though almost always diverting, is rarely discomforting. I can wonder what time is, come up only with conundrums, and yet still feel intimately acquainted with time by way of my mundane experience. Familiarity in this case breeds contempt of metaphysics. If I were to pose the question of time as Augustine posed it, however, I would find no refuge in time's familiarity, for time's familiarity is part of what has come into question. My ordinary experience of time may not be of time after all. Facing such a possibility is discomforting, but it may also be the beginning of wisdom. In Augustine's hands, metaphysical questions turn back upon their owners. What I ask of time I ask of myself. The wisdom comes, if it comes at all, in coming to understand the demand knowledge of the world has made upon my self-knowledge. There is nothing worth knowing that does not in some way transform the knower. Augustine hints at the transformation called for in the knowledge of time. It is disturbingly profound.

Several writers have argued for the implausibility of there being naturalistic explanations of mystical experience. These writers recognize that the evidential significance of mystical experiences for theism depends upon whether explanations that exclude supernatural agency can be discounted; but they seem unaware of some of the best scientific work done in this area. Part I of the present paper introduces the theory of I. M. Lewis, an anthropologist, and tests it against the case of St Teresa. I use Teresa because of her prominence, and because we have considerable biographical data for her. I conclude that Lewis's approach, suitably supplemented, is strikingly successful in explaining this case.

The first premise of the Kalam cosmological argument has come under fire in the last few years. The premise states that the universe had a beginning, and one of two prominent arguments for it turns on the claim that an actual infinite collection of entities cannot exist. After stating the Kalam cosmological argument and the two approaches to defending its first premise, I respond to two objections against the notion that an actual infinite collection is impossible: a Platonistic objection from abstract objects and a set-theoretic objection from an ambiguity in the definition of ‘=’ and ‘<’ as applied to sets. The thought-experiment involving Hilbert's Hotel is central to the dialectic, and the discussion clarifies its use in supporting the Kalam cosmological argument.