David Silver has argued that there is an illegitimate circularity in Plantinga's account of how a Christian theist can defend herself against the potential defeater presented by Paul Draper's formulation of the problem of evil. The way out of the circle for the theist, thinks Silver, would be by adopting a kind of evidentialism: she needs to make an appeal to evidence that is independent of the reasons she has for holding theistic belief in the first place. I shall argue that Silver's argument is unsuccessful, mainly because he does not get Plantinga's thought right. Silver's confusion is in taking causes of belief as reasons for belief, and in failing to account for the impact of belief holism and our web of beliefs on the very hope for independent reasons.

The issue between my view and Hasker's concerns a certain principle that he takes to be true, but I hold to be false. The principle in question asserts that failing to do better than one did is a defect only if doing the best one can is possible for one to do. I claim that this principle is false because if an all-knowing, all-powerful being were confronted with an unending series of increasingly better creatable worlds and deliberately chose to create the least good world, that being would thereby show itself to be something less than a supremely perfect world-creator. In fact, I argue that if a supremely perfect world-creator were to exist and create a world, it would have to be a world than which there is no better creatable world.

Characteristic of metaphysics are general questions of existence, such as ‘Are there numbers?’ This kind of question is the target of Carnap's argument for deflationism, to the effect that general existential questions, if taken at face value, are meaningless. This paper considers deflationism in a theological context, and argues that the question ‘Does God exist?’ can appropriately be grouped with the ‘metaphysical’ questions attacked by Carnap. Deflationism thus has the surprising consequence that the correct approach to theism is that of radical theology. The paper attempts to show why Carnap's argument fails, and why, nevertheless, enough remains of it for us to conclude that God cannot be outside time and space.

A prominent view in religious epistemology, which I call divine-help epistemology, says that people of faith are epistemically gifted by God, whereas non-believers are subject to the noetic effects of a fallen world. This view aims to show how religious beliefs for people of faith can be epistemically justified. But I argue that it makes such people prone to a cluster of epistemic vices that I call epistemic phariseeism. Divine-help epistemology is especially apt to promote these vices because its normativity is not just epistemic, but also religious and moral. I suggest an alternative epistemological view that is better suited to religious faith.

I reply to William Hasker's ‘The Trinity as Social and Constitutional’, continuing our debate over the use of the metaphysical concept of constitution to explicate the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

This article appreciatively reviews Joanna Leidenhag's work Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation while also responding critically to some aspects of Leidenhag's approach and content. The authors acknowledge several strengths of Leidenhag's work, then turn to how a panpsychic framework comports with Christa L. McKirland's recent work in theological anthropology. Finally, Eugene Fuimaono proposes areas of expansion for Leidenhag to consider – specifically as this relates to the value of engaging indigenous perspectives.

Although a personal god of mixed moral character is logically possible, no personal god that has been represented as less than wholly good has gained more than a strictly local appeal. The Judaeo-Christian god is no exception. The god is represented as merciful, kind, longsuffering, forgiving, loving - in a word, wholly good. Of course, representing a god as wholly good is one thing; providing a convincing defence of his goodness is quite another. Indeed, many would contend that of all the defences provided within the Judaeo-Christian system, the defence of the goodness of God is the least convincing.

One of the issues in the current controversy concerning demythologising is whether or not our concept of God is itself mythological. Before this can be resolved, however, we have to sort out what we mean by ‘myth’ and compare this with other possible ways of describing divine activity. Likewise, if we are to decide whether or not all religious uses of language are ‘symbolical’ we have to clarify our conception of symbols. Such clarification is hampered by the almost indiscriminate mention of parables, models, myths, symbols, analogues and allegories which we find in philosophy today. In this paper, I shall list some distinctions of meaning amongst these terms which seem worth keeping in mind. My concern in doing so is not to provide an exhaustive list but to suggest how the distinctions affect our justification of linguistic usage in religion.

The difficulty of ascribing metaphysical predicates such as absoluteness, necessity and perfection to God while simultaneously ascribing personal predicates such as compassion, freedom and agency has often been noted. Most efforts to resolve this dilemma have tended to fall into one of three categories: (I) a merely verbal solution such as that God is ‘compassionate in terms of our experience but…not so in terms of [God's] own’; (2) the univocal and unqualified ascription of the metaphysical predicates to God coupled with equivocation with respect to the personal predicates which results in the final elimination of the latter; (3) the fideistic denial that intelligible language is applicable to God. Unfortunately, none of these is satisfactory. The first solution is seen to be but a version of the second, and it is arguable that the second is, as Feuerbach contends, tantamount to a ‘subtle, disguised atheism’, since ‘to deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself’ or, alternatively, ‘an existence in general, an existence without qualities, is an insipidity, an absurdity’. The third ‘solution’ is no better and is hardly more than an evasive tactic.

It is a commonplace that Kierkegaard believed Christians should adopt a stance of suspicion toward their beliefs. What appear to be genuine Christian beliefs may, he thought, really be spurious, not by virtue of being false, but by virtue of arising in illegitimate ways. Kierkegaard's works are replete with descriptions of these illegitimate ways – the psychological and sociological conditions that produce what people mistakenly take to be genuine Christian beliefs.

One of the problems religious men and philosophers often face is how to convey enlightenment or wisdom to others so that sentient beings can be enlightened or awakened from dogmatic views. This problem is also the question of how truth (the Word of God or Buddha's Dharma) is made known to men. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problem of communicating truth in Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism.

During the past few decades, Zen (Ch'an) Buddhism has been the most popular Buddhist school in the West and many scholars have expounded the essence of Zen. One of the most well–known expositions is D. T. Suzuki's psychological interpretation. Wu–nien in Zen is identified by him with the unconscious, and satori is seen as the psychological leaping of the unconscious. Other scholars contend that Zen has its ontological roots and should be understood ontologically rather than psychologically. Zen Buddhists are said to be pilgrims of the absolute, and Zen is seen as a search for pure being.

The Free Will Defence has been attacked as being unsound, implausible and, more recently, irrelevant. The first section of the paper returns to a discussion on the relevance of the Free Will Defence, arguing that the case for its irrelevance is inextricably impaled on the horns of a dilemma. In the second section it is shown that Free Will Theodicy, even in a form extended to include natural evil, need not be as implausible as it is sometimes portrayed for it demands no more than that good, on the whole, outweighs evil, on the whole. Finally, some tempting objections to the strategy employed in this argument are considered and rejected, both on the grounds that they are untenable in themselves and on the paradoxical ground that, if valid, the objections would appear to rule out any creation.

‘Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: and then stop.’ The King of Hearts' advice is not as easy to follow as might seem on first hearing. It is not simply that I want to speak about the interrelation between two major subjects and there is a certain arbitrariness in choosing with which of the two to start. The problem is far more fundamental than that. Where for the theologian is ‘the beginning’? At whatever point he does begin he is always uneasily aware that way back behind the point that he has chosen there probably lie a number of unquestioned assumptions which have largely prejudged the kind of answer he will give to the very question he is setting out to investigate. This difficulty is not, of course, peculiar to the theologian. None of us, whatever the subject of our investigation, can ever really ‘begin at the beginning’. But if this is a difficulty which the Christian theologian shares with other scholars it is none the less real for that. One obvious and important feature of the tradition in which the Christian theologian stands is that it gives some kind of special authority to the Bible, to the Church and above all—though it is sometimes a little bit elusive to know exactly what is meant by saying this—to Christ himself.

What has Jerusalem to do with Athens? The everchanging contours of the answer to this question have taken an arresting shape with the confluence of existentialist theology and analytic philosophy. This improbable union has led to an impressive and attractive account of religious belief and its language. Under the influence of Kierkegaard, Buber, and others, existentialist theology has argued persuasively for the non-theoretical, practical character of religious belief; it has, of late, discovered inspiration and assistance for this position in the reflections of recent analytic philosophy on the difficulties involved in speculative philosophy. The resultant theological point of view is one which argues for a ‘practical’ interpretation of religion, one which holds that the meaning of religious language is to be found exclusively in its use. Religion is seen as a self-contained ‘form of life’, and its language is held to have its own peculiar ‘logic’. It follows that religious beliefs and conceptions are intelligible in their own right and do not need to be explicated or justified with the aid of an ontology or metaphysic. I propose in this essay to appraise a recent statement of this position, and, in so doing, explore the broad question of the bearing of analytic reflections on the question of Christian theology's relationship to philosophy.

Various attempts have been made in recent years to present Christianity in such a way that no use is made of the traditional dichotomy between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’. Braithwaite, Hare, and van Buren, for instance, appear to have no use for the dichotomy; and I think that, without too much distortion, one can say the same of Bultmann, Tillich, and Robinson. I am not, however, concerned in this paper with the work of any one thinker as such, but rather with a general climate of opinion. What I want to do is to examine the grounds on which it might be argued that belief in the supernatural is discredited. The issue seems to me of special importance at the present time, since, if these grounds are inadequate, programmes of reform under the general heading ‘Christianity without the supernatural’lose much of their point; if, on the other hand, the grounds are compelling, then reform of some kind is forced upon us whatever the accompanying difficulties.

Reasoning about religion would seem to involve both explicit and tacit factors. These latter are what Pascal had in mind when he spoke of the ‘reasons of the heart which the reason knows not of’. Moreover, these reasons of the heart are the more interesting by virtue of being at least the more difficult and perhaps the more crucial. In these pages I want to examine the notion of reasons of the heart from the angle provided by the insights of Michael Polanyi. Space will not permit a review of the major features of Polanyi's crucial concept of tacit knowledge.1 I shall simply introduce and explore certain of these features as they seem relevant to the main concern of the paper. I trust this can be done in such a way as to be both meaningful to the reader and fair to Polanyi.

In his article ‘Infallibility’ (Religious Studies, March 1980) A. P. Martinich has argued that the logical character of infallible utterances has been generally misunderstood. Opponents and supporters of the doctrine of papal infallibility have both assumed, he claims, that infallible utterances are statements; but this is incorrect, for such utterances are not statements, but declarations. Consideration of this point, he believes, would enable us to see that the doctrine of papal infallibility is both coherent and correct.

The final chapter of Peter Winch's book on Simone Weil discusses Weil's idea of supernatural virtue. Weil uses this language in connection with certain exceptional actions: actions of a kind which are for most of us, most of the time, simply impossible. She is particularly struck by cases in which someone refrains from exercising a power which they have over another: in which, for example, someone refrains from killing or enslaving an enemy who has grievously harmed him and who is now at his mercy. We could also speak of cases in which someone helps an enemy, or a stranger, at very real cost, or risk, to himself. In such cases Weil speaks of the ‘supernatural’ as being at work.