Religious believers understand the meaning of their lives in the light of the way in which they are related to God. Life is significant because it is lived in the presence of God, and ultimate bliss consists in being in the right relation with God. Through sin, however, our relationship with God has been drastically disrupted. The fundamental religious issue which we all have to face, therefore, is how this relationship can be restored. How can we attain ultimate bliss by being reconciled with God? Basically, this is the issue with which the doctrine of atonement has to deal:

The English word ‘atonement’ is derived from the words ‘at-one-ment’, to make two parties at one, to reconcile two parties one to another. It means essentially reconciliation… In current usage, the phrase ‘to atone for’ means the undertaking of a course of action designed to undo the consequences of a wrong act with a view to the restoration of the relationship broken by the wrong act.

The Christian doctrine of the Atonement has been interpreted in several ways. In Responsibility and Atonement, Richard Swinburne offers us a version of the sacrificial account of Christ's redemptive work. This version claims that in the life and death of Jesus we have a gift of great and fitting value, which God himself has made available to us, and which we can in turn offer to God as reparation and penance for our sins. My paper has two main parts. In the first I shall argue that his account is conceptually incoherent; in the second that it is morally flawed. I then briefly suggest that the exemplary theory can capture, better than can the reparation theory, those features which Swinburne believes to be desirable in any account of the Atonement. I take Swinburne's account as my target because it is the best modern exposition of the theory, but my argument is intended to have wider significance.

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.

The problem of evil normally discussed in philosophical theology is concerned with the pain and suffering experienced in this life. Why do so many innocent children die slow, torturous deaths as the result of disease, famine or earthquakes? Why do so many seemingly innocent adults suffer as the result of the greed, indifference or perversity of others? If God is all-good, then he certainly does not want such suffering. If God is all-powerful, he should be able to do away with such evils. Thus, must we not conclude that the existence of such evil counts against belief in the existence of an all-loving, all-powerful God?

The unique philosophical problems of Christianity derive from the fact that it is not a philosophy, but a gospel. That is to say, its teaching and institutions are distinctively what they are by virtue of their relation to particular divine acts rather than because they are primarily a general teaching or philosophy. Whatever general teaching there is is rooted in particularities. It is not, then, difficult to come to a provisional understanding of the reference of the ‘particular’ in the title. Christianity as a particular religion, distinct from other religions and philosophies, is a distinctive way of appropriating what is believed to be salvation, deriving from a centre in a specific pattern of divine action. That centre, to be sure, gives rise to a range of conceptions of salvation sharing a family resemblance, but is none the less common to all those that are recognisably within the Christian fold.

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.

Arguments from design in Hume's day were often cast as arguments from analogy. For instance, a very simple version might read like this: ‘The universe resembles a machine; machines are the products of intelligent design; therefore, the universe is (probably) the product of intelligent design.’ Design arguments (usually of a more sophisticated sort) were put forward by some of the greatest scientists of the time, including Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Such arguments were generally thought to be on a par with the conclusions of physics: Hume raised a number of well-known objections to such design arguments. I am going to discuss one of these objections, the claim that the uniqueness of the universe is, in itself, a bar to our drawing any conclusion about its cause or origin. This objection is raised by Hume at the end of ‘Of a Particular Providence’ and in Part II of the Dialogues.

From at least the time of the writing of The Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard's work takes a special interest in both the transition from unbelief to faith and the character of the life of true faith. Trained in Lutheran dogma and convinced of the radical nature of human freedom, his work on this subject demonstrates a profound concern for and grasp of Lutheran orthodoxy, as well as a remarkable degree of subtlety. After all, it is no simple task to give an account of the central features of the Christian life that is faithful to both a libertarian conception of human freedom and the doctrines of the church founded by the author of The Bondage of the Will. This paper proposes to accomplish two things: first, to state a problem that lies on the surface of Kierkegaard's account of the transformation involved in Christian conversion and second to present a resolution of the problem that is faithful to Kierkegaard's intentions.

Eliade, the well-known and prolific historian of religion, has himself of late become an object of intense study. In his endeavours he sought to uncover the deeper, trans-historical meaning of religious expression. He introduced the term ‘creative hermeneutics’ in his more recent writings, and was most intent on discovering what the religious phenomena ‘had to say’.

As a matter of historical fact, most philosophers and theologians who have defended traditional theistic views have been moral realists. Some ‘divine command’ theorists have held that the good is constituted by the content of divine approval – i.e. that things are good because, and insofar as, they have divine approval. However, even amongst those theists who hold that the good is independently constituted – i.e. those who hold that God's pattern of approval is explained by the fact that he approves of all and only that which is good – the dominant meta-ethic has been strongly realistic.

Does anyone ever survive his or her bodily death ? Could anyone? No speculative questions are older than these, or have been answered more frequently or more variously. None have been laid to rest more often, or — in our times — with more claimed decisiveness. Jay Rosenberg, for instance, no doubt speaks for many contemporary philosophers when he claims, in his recent book, to have ‘demonstrated’ that ‘ we cannot [even] make coherent sense of the supposed possibility that a person's history might continue beyond that person's [bodily] death’.

As Milton reminds us, the first thing God named not good was loneliness. In proclaiming it not good for man to be alone, was God but projecting his own loneliness? In the words of James Weldon Johnson, God stepped out on space, looked around and said, ‘I'm lonely’.Johnson's concept of God may be very ‘spaced-out’ but the notion of a monotheistic God as lonely is far from preposterous. A God endlessly immersed in the contemplation of its solitary perfection (à la Aristotle, for example) would be an isolation anything but splendid. Such a being might be perfect as an abstract essence, but it would be perfectly alone.

My topic is a long-standing tension in the interpretation of religion. On the one hand, it seems undeniable — seems almost to go without saying — that liturgical and sacrificial practices, sacred dance, divination, procession and pilgrimage are intentional actions undertaken by persons. Yet there is a distinguished tradition in the study of religion according to which religious activity is typically caused by forces over which the agent has little or no control. Visible, latter-day members of this tradition include Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and, in some moods, Wittgenstein, but its roster is by no means limited to the religiously unmusical.

Human beings make sense of their world by employing symbol systems which pick out, organize and arrange elements of their experiences. With these symbol systems, they sort and order the world, make predictions, give explanations and venture new insights. In this process, a number of identifiable ways of understanding have emerged, ranging from the scientific and mathematical through the artistic, musical and literary to the religious and mythical, each with its own body of knowledge, methodology and focus, and each expressed in its own ‘language’, that is, its own semantically and syntactically differentiated symbol system.

The anthropic principle or the associated anthropic coincidences have been used by philosophers such as John Leslie (1989), William Lane Craig (1988) and Richard Swinburne (1990) to support the thesis that God exists. In this paper I shall examine Swinburne's argument from the anthropic coincidences. I will show that Swinburne's premises, coupled with his principle of credulity and the failure of his theodicy in The Existence of God, disconfirms theism and confirms instead the hypothesis that there exists a malevolent creator of the universe.

Ever since the Proslogion was first circulated (c. 1077), critics have been bemused by St Anselm's brazen attempt to establish a matter of fact, namely, God's existence, from the simple analysis of a term or concept. Yet every critic who has proposed to ‘write the obituary’ of the Ontological Argument has found it to be remarkably resilient (cf. McGrath, 1990: 212). At the risk of adding to a record of failures, I want to venture a new method for attacking this durable argument. Neither the common version of Anselm's argument from Chapter II of the Proslogion nor the previously unrecognized modal version uncovered by Norman Malcolm from Pros, III (1960: 52) can possibly get under way without Anselm's celebrated assertion that

(1) God is that than which no greater can be conceived.

D. Z. Phillips thinks that the religious concept of immortality should necessarily be construed as not involving any idea of the self existing after death. In this paper it will be argued that his attempt to support this view on the basis of a descriptive analysis of the self-renouncing character of faith is inadequate. The notion of the finality of death is not essential to, nor inseparable from, a religious conception in which the nothingness of the self is stressed. That this is so is suggested by the existence of religious notions of the nothingness of the self which are religious, in a sense comparable to that implied by Phillips, only in combination with a view of death as not being a termination of the self.

The classical pragmatists were as concerned as any of their modern philosophical predecessors that the moral and religious aspects of human life not be swamped by the successes of the physical sciences. It was John Dewey, after all, who said that

The problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from that life.

The principle that

(P1) One cannot deliberate over what one already (prior to deliberating) knows is going to happen,

when suitably qualified, has seemed to many philosophers to be about as secure a truth as one is likely to find in this life.Fortunately, (P1) poses little restriction on human deliberation, since the conditions which would trigger its prohibition seldom arise for us: our knowledge of the future is intermittent at best, and those things of which we do have advance knowledge (e.g. that the sun will rise tomorrow) are not the sorts of things over which we would deliberate in any case. But matters appear to stand otherwise with an all-knowing agent such as God is traditionally conceived to be; for what an omniprescient deity ‘already knows is going to happen’ is everything that is going to happen; and if He cannot deliberate over such things, there is nothing over which He can deliberate.

Theism, according to David O'Connor, has in recent centuries been on trial for its life, the charge being that the existence of so much evil in the world is incompatible with belief in a benevolent creator. But this trial, he claims is incapable of producing a reasoned verdict.