Despite the title, I do not intend to launch another expedition into the domain of epistemology. I wish instead to call attention to some problems which have arisen for philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion, as a result of two facts about the development of modern philosophy and its bearing on the analysis and interpretation of religious insight. Following these considerations, I shall propose in brief compass a programme for the future which I believe will prove fruitful for the philosophical treatment of religious concerns.

Feigned madness can be a valuable asset. King David once used it to escape from the Philistines (I Sam. 21), and a twentieth century king, Pirandello's Henry IV pulled much the same trick on a modern philistine culture. Thrown from his horse and struck on the head while on his way to a masquerade party dressed as the Henry of Canossa's chill repentance, he had for twenty years insanely identified himself with the eleventh century monarch. At least this is what his family and the court they provided for his humour thought. As the play opens they are unaware that he has returned to sanity, but has continued to play Henry IV for the last eight of the twenty years, preferring the mad world in which he had lived to the sane world to which he would have to return.

The phrase ‘essence of Christianity’ is ambiguous. The basic reason for this is that the word ‘essence’ has a more natural, though by no means uncomplicated, reference to substances, whether in philosophical or pharmacological discussion. Outside such contexts the use of phrases like ‘the heart of the matter’, or ‘the essence of happiness’ sound like earnest, but rhetorical devices to commend the depth or fundamental character of a specific investigation.

‘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.

‘The whole future of the Earth, as of religion, seems to me to depend on the awakening of our faith in the future.’

The relation between I and my bodily behaviour does not provide an apt analogy for the relation between God and I, or between God and any of the many particular ‘mores’ of particular observables. The relation between the one divine ‘more’ and the many particular ‘mores’ needs another kind of analogy if it is to be at all intelligible. Ramsey seems to be hinting at another kind of analogy, another kind of approach to the use of the word ‘God’ as a unifying key word, in his essay ‘Paradox in Religion’:

‘The word “God” is a unique and ultimate keyword dominating the whole of a theistic language scheme, an “irreducible posit” to which the theist appeals as his end-point of explanation.’

Debate continues to rage among philosophers of religion over Anthony Flew's famous little paper ‘Theology and Falsification’ and the responses it provoked, most notably R. M. Hare's response that religious claims are in no way like scientific hypotheses. For now, twenty years later, we still find many theists taking a similar tack to Hare's. A particularly interesting example is J. F. Miller in Religious Studies, 1969, who replies to Flew that propositions like ‘God loves mankind’ cannot be subject to falsifiability conditions because they are used as claims expressing ‘religious first-order principles of the Judaeo-Christian Weltanschauung and as such are not amenable to falsification’ (p. 50). Miller seems to put his faith in some kind of great gulf fixed between what he would consider decently falsifiable scientific hypotheses and what he takes to be unfalsifiable first-order principles both of theology and of contemporary science. In what follows we will try to sketch a more rational strategy for modern believers of a liberal empiricist type, for those whose interest in appealing and deferring to experience includes but is not restricted to so-called ‘sense experience’. This will involve accepting analogies between theological statements and so-called hypotheses, insofar as the latter are propositions held and put forward in a somewhat tentative spirit with a view to explaining what we experience.

Recent discussions, principally among analytic philosophers, concerning the meaning and the validity of the ‘question of life's meaning’ (hereafter referred to as QLM) are significant in several ways. They indicate how analytic philosophy, long charged with sterility, can clarify deeply human questions. They suggest useful avenues of discussion between the analysts and the existentialists, phenomenologists and process philosophers. And they offer some illuminating discriminations between theism and naturalism, and between religious and non-religious understandings of life. But an additional consequence of these discussions is the emergence of a series of challenges to most forms of theism, especially Christianity. In this paper we will be concerned with the latter.

In several essays published recently, Professor Geach argues against the thesis that ‘God’, in its Christian use, is a proper name and produces considerations in favour of ‘God’ being a ‘descriptive, predicable, term’; a nomen naturae in Aquinas's vocabulary: a ‘concept’ in Frege's sense (Begriffswort). I have no dispute with Geach concerning ‘God’ not being a proper name, but there seems to me to be a serious difficulty in one argument which he uses to establish his positive thesis. This argument appears in all the essays mentioned; I give the appropriate quotations:

(i) ‘Only because of this (i.e. “God” being a descriptive predicable term) can the heathen say that his idol is God and the Christian contradict him and both be using “God” in the same sense: if “God” were a proper name it would be a logically impossible, not a lying, wicked act, to predicate it of sticks and stones (Ia q 13 art. 10).’

(ii) ‘When St Augustine and his companions landed in England they found the English paying latria to Woden, Thor, and other imaginary beings to each of whom they applied the word “God” and the missionaries taught them not to apply this word any more to Woden and Thor and the rest, but solely to the Blessed Trinity.… This makes it clear that in the mind of the Church the word “God” is not a proper name, as the word “Woden” was meant to be, but a descriptive term, true of the blessed Trinity and not true of Woden.’

(iii) ‘The name “God” as thus introduced is regarded by Aquinas, not as a proper name, but as a general term (nomen naturae) so far as its mode of significance goes … Aquinas rejects the idea that “God” is necessarily used equivocally by polytheists and by monotheists: he holds the view that the polytheists may be using the word “God” in the same sense when he says his idol is God, as the missionary when he says that the idol is not God but a senseless block.’

Kneeling down or grovelling on the ground, even to express your reverence for heavenly things, is contrary to human dignity.

For Ian Ramsey, talk about God raises many philosophical problems:

‘If we are not to use anthropomorphic concepts like love, power, wisdom, we cannot talk about God; but if we do use them, how do we manage to talk of God and not man?’ (MJGC152)

‘Believers wish on the one hand to claim that he (God) is indescribable and ineffable, and yet on the other hand to talk a great deal about him. Nay more, when they speak of God they say that he is transcendent and immanent, im passible yet loving, and so on. But if we speak like this, are we talking significantly at all? Here is the Falsification Problem: What kind of talk can this talk about God be, if it permits us to use such conflicting descriptions of God and to continue to use these descriptions in the face of any and all empirical phenomena?’ (RL 13–14).

Many writers (including professional philosophers) often generalise about mysticism without a sufficiently close analysis of texts. Consequently the generalisations are often invalid. My present aim is to analyse one text and, in the light of this analysis, to offer some observations concerning mysticism in general and Christian mysticism in particular.

Norbert Wiener has recently pointed out that the relation between God and man, according to orthodox Jewish and Christian theology, is analogous to the relation between men and ‘intelligent’ machines. God is supposed to have created man just as man has created (or ‘manufactured’) machines. And just as God has endowed man with intelligence, creating him in his own image (although the Imago Dei admittedly involves more than this), so man has endowed the machine with intelligence—i.e. with problem solving capacities of a high order. Moreover, just as the endowment of man with intelligence led to unintended, if not unforeseen developments (i.e. the Fall), so the development of sophisticated computing machinery raises the possibility that some unintended and unwanted consequences may be forthcoming in the man-machine domain. Just such a possibility is realised in the recent film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a quasi-human computer is represented as having both emotions and purposes of its own. Even though this particular film may be regarded as a bit far-fetched, in some respects, there are nonetheless many who, like Wiener, wonder whether the machines we have brought into being will always behave with reasonable predict ability, and in ways that will promote rather than frustrate human purposes.

Buddhist teaching about illusion is, I think, generally considered difficult to understand. What I wish to do is to try to indicate some of its more general and prevalent features with the further aim of using them to throw some light on typical Buddhist method and procedure. I shall be concerned mainly with some of the teachings to be found in the Mahayana and will try to be as untechnical as possible. This latter is sure to be displeasing to some, but I have no wish to induce intellectual paralysis either in the reader or myself by a parade of technicalities most of which are not properly translatable into English. A great deal of scholarly and technical work has already been done and now it seems to me important to try as much as possible to express the general sense or pattern or at least some of its features in terms of our own more natural modes of thought and speech. This is what I have tried to do. I should point out that when dealing with the teaching about illusion we are concerned with only the more austere intellectual side of Buddhism. Nevertheless the religious philosophising which we encounter is as much a part of religious practice as meditation and expressing reverence and respect for the Buddha. I have confined myself throughout to exposition and have not attempted discussion and evaluation. References given are to books which are for the most part easily available in English. I will begin with three quotations.

The historian of Indian religion is confronted with a baffling array of textual materials spanning three or more millennia and written in a perplexing number of languages. It is scarcely surprising that when the attentions of European scholars first focused on this material they should have singled out three main languages and their literatures for study. The three were Vedic, the language of the Vedas, Sanskrit with its vast and wellnigh universal coverage of every aspect of ancient and medieval India, and Pāli, the language of the early Buddhist canon. The lead these three gained has since been maintained, while other languages and literatures have remained comparatively less known to the outside world. One may cite the comparative neglect of the Apabhramśa language and massive Jaina literature. In particular the Dravidian languages have been neglected and their literatures have remained almost unknown even in north India, accessible only to a tiny handful of students.

The problems that arise over the concept of the miraculous are of continuing importance for the philosophy of religion, and because of their relation to issues such as the nature of explanation, and of scientific laws, they are of considerable interest to philosophy in general.

Basic issues in the recent ‘death-of-God’ movement can be illuminated by comparison and contrast with the relevant ideas of two American philosophers, John Dewey and William James. Dewey is an earlier spokesman for ideas that are central to the ‘radical theology’ of Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, and Paul Van Buren. His reasons for rejecting theism closely resemble propositions maintained by these ‘death-of-God’ theologians. James, on the other hand, points toward a theological alternative. He takes cognizance of ideas similar to those in the ‘radical theology’, but he does not opt for either a metaphorical or real elimination of God. Thus, the contentions of this paper are (1) that there has been a version of the ‘death-of-God’ perspective in American thought before, and (2) that there are resources in the American tradition that suggest a viable option to this perspective.

In his article ‘A Critique of the Doctrine of Universal Salvation’, J. D. Bettis criticises the argument that all men will be saved because ‘God's love is both absolutely good and absolutely sovereign’ (p. 330). I would like to argue that either some of Bettis's criticisms are confused, or else that he is not using ‘love’ in anything like its ordinary sense. I will not attempt a full defence of universalism here, however. In particular, I will not try to defend it against the sort of criticisms Bettis says an Arminian might raise (p. 336).

The ‘death of self’ appears to be an essential feature of the redemptive goal on which several religious quests converge. It would seem, therefore, that here lies a convenient pragmatic criterion to determine the efficacy of the various religions in achieving their desired ends, and one which would be valid in several religious traditions, thereby overcoming the impasse of particularity in inter-faith discussion.

Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the argument from design is in many respects the most impressive, as everyone remarks that Kant remarked. Certainly it is an argument which seems to have appealed to the popular imagination and even today does not lack philosophical proponents. The purpose of the present paper is to examine a recent formulation of the argument. In particular I shall be concerned to bring into the open its dualist assumptions and to show how these militate against its general plausibility.