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.

Donna Haraway, in her ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, issues a warning that in the postmodern world where grand narratives increasingly fail and subjects are seen to be irremediably fragmented, ‘we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making a partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. Epistemology is about knowing the difference’. Such an account of epistemology, which sees its central task to be a knowledge of the significance of difference and a capacity to discern between innocent and oppressive forms of difference, is perhaps not one that would most readily occur to British philosophers of religion. It is, however, an account which has resonances both with many contemporary continental thinkers and with feminist epistemologists. Notwithstanding the many areas of divergence between and among these groups, on two points at least they converge: that the recognition and discernment of difference has become inescapable for epistemology, and that of the differences which must be dealt with, gender difference has a paradigmatic status.

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.

Kenneth Surin has argued that theoretical theodicies of the kind associated with Swinburne and Hick face two major moral criticisms: first that they tacitly sanction evils; second that they display moral blindness in the face of unconditional evils. The paper upholds Surin's criticisms in the light of recent defences of theodicy. It concludes by considering and criticizing Wetzel's arguments for saying that theodicy is unavoidable for those who believe in God.

Is (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?1

William Forgie's negative conclusion concerning the possibility of theistic experience in particular turns on a sophisticated, if idiosyncratic, phenomenology of experience in general. Forgie introduces us to his position by having us imagine two people, Tim and Tom Tibbetts. He then asks us to suppose that Tim and Tom are identical twins who live next door. Imagine that looking over the fence one fine sunny day you have what you take to be a veridical visual experience of someone who looks like one of the Tibbetts. If you were required to rely solely on the content of your experience, says Forgie, and not on any extra-experiential information to which you may be privy (e.g. you know Tom is away at aunt Millie's), there would be no way to identify the object of your experience as Tim, rather than Tom, Tibbetts. An experience of one would be phenomenologically indistinguishable from an experience of the other and there would be, therefore, nothing in the experience itself which guarantees that it's Tim, rather than Tom.

Despite the bad reputation of the legal profession, law remains king in America. A highly diverse society relies on the laws (and especially the Constitution) to maintain a working sense of the dignity and inviability of each individual. And a persistent element in contemporary debates is the fear that naturalistic theories of the human person will erode our belief that we have a dignity greater than that of other natural objects. Thus the endurance of the creation vs. evolution debate is due less to the arguments of creationists, or to the continued influence of the book of Genesis, than to the reading of the evidence provided by Phillip E. Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley, Law School.

The Clarke/Rowe version of the Cosmological Argument is sound only if the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is true, but many philosophers, including Rowe, think that there is not adequate evidence for the principle of sufficient reason. I argue that there may be indirect evidence for PSR on the grounds that if we do not accept it, we lose our best justification for an important principle of metaethics, namely, the Principle of Universalizability. To show this, I argue that all the other justifications of the Principle of Universalizability on offer, including Richard Hare's, are inadequate.

Traditionally God has been considered absolutely simple. Some contemporary philosophers argue that this means that God is His attributes and hence is mere quality, and that all the divine attributes name exactly the same quality, which is incoherent. However, the contemporary debate misunderstands the tradition. God is not quality, He is act. Analogies from human experience can minimize the initial implausibility. There are worrisome corollaries to this doctrine, the most troubling being that God's nature is somehow dependent on the choices of His free creatures. This conclusion, though radical, is not as shocking as it appears.

A virtue is a disposition of character which instantiates or promotes responsiveness to one or more basic goods – where a basic good is one which in itself can provide an agent with a sufficient motivation, and an observer with a full explanation. The basic goods to which faith is a responsiveness are truth and practical hope – the latter being the belief that action according to deliberate choice is not ultimately pointless for me. Now these goods are often in tension for an agent; indeed if there is no God, they will eventually come into irresoluble tension. If God does not exist, there is no single coherent disposition which is a responsiveness to both goods; that is, there is no virtue of faith. So faith is only a virtue if God exists.

I criticize Richard Swinburne's account of the need for and means of atonement in his Responsibility and Atonement. I offer objections to his understanding and use of the notion of ‘the gift of life’ in his account of the need for atonement; and closely related to that, I show that his conclusions about duties to God as a benefactor do not follow from his reasons. Furthermore, when examined closely, these conclusions seem false. In relation to his account of the means of atonement, I argue that the mechanism he provides to explain how Christ's actions benefit sinners does not work.

Let the day perish in which I was born… [Job 3: 3a]1

In The Christian God (hereafter CG), Richard Swinburne offers a series of arguments which a priori support the necessity of the doctrine of the Trinity. If his arguments are successful, he has dramatically narrowed the field of logically possible religious beliefs to (Christian) trinitarianism. I contend that Swinburne's arguments necessitate the existence of more than one quasi-independent divine being; indeed Swinburne's arguments move us in the direction of tritheism rather than orthodox trinitarianism.

Argument is the very life-blood of philosophy and, hence, prima facie one might expect that distinctive phenomenon of the Jewish religious tradition, ‘holy argument’, to be of special interest to philosophers, particularly philosophers of religion. However, there is little to suggest that those engaged in the philosophical approach to religion are even aware that such a phenomenon as a piety of argument exists. But it does. In the philosophical field rational argument conducted according to the established rules of logic is the fundamental tool in the pursuit of truth and understanding or for the clarification of problems, ideas and concepts; in Judaism, rational, legal argument pursued according to recognized principles and processes is the most highly commended path to encounter and engagement with God. Moreover, within this same religious tradition, ‘holy argument’ embraces not only argument about God, about His nature (theology), His ways (theodicy) and His will (halakhah), but also argument with God, putting God on trial and taking Him to task as One who is Himself bound and judged by that same Torah that Israel is obligated to obey. The high value placed upon study and the exercise of the intellect in the Jewish tradition is well known; it is not only a mitzvah and an act of worship but a form of imitatio Dei, for God Himself engages in the study of Torah. But the mode of study in Judaism and the form in which the intellect is exercised is characteristically that of argument and debate, the quintessential activity of philosophy and philosophers.

Toward the end of 1676 Leibniz met Spinoza a number of times. In one of those meetings Leibniz presented a proof of the possibility of God's existence. In his proof Leibniz presupposed that a proposition is necessarily true only if its truth is either demonstrable or self-evident and that the divine perfections are simple and affirmative qualities. I contend that Leibniz's presuppositions undermine, rather than establish, the necessary existence of ‘a God of the kind in whom the pious believe’. My assessment is based upon a consideration of Leibniz's argument in the context of other early papers, works written before the Discourse on Metaphysics in 1686.

It is widely believed to be a fundamental tenet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter the LDS, or Mormon, Church) that a plurality of divine beings inhabits the universe. It has often been pointed out, for example, that according to Mormon doctrine Elohim (the Father), Jesus (the Son), and the Holy Ghost are three distinct Gods.1 The traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity is, thereby, unambiguously rejected. In light of this, it has become commonplace among Christian apologists2 to infer

Belief in life after death is implicated, for the typical ‘Wittgensteinian’, with Cartesian dualism, and the latter seen to entail a private inner subject that cannot survive the anti-private language argument. But Descartes does not really suffer from this defect and belief in life after death is not merely a product of ‘confused’ Cartesian metaphysics. Descartes is presented as an intellectual analogue of the formation of the concept of ‘soul’ in spiritual contexts. Just as metaphysical reflection forces us to conclude, for Descartes, that we are only contingently flesh and blood beings, so it is only under the condition of recalcitrant experience that exemplary practitioners seem forced to forge a distinction between body and soul, thus revising influentially their view of themselves as single beings both conscious and extended.