If God knows everything he must know the future, and if he knows the future he must know the future acts of his creatures. But then his creatures must act as he knows they will act. How then can they be free? This dilemma has a long history in Christian philosophy and is now as hotly disputed as ever. The medieval scholastics were virtually unanimous in claiming both that God is omniscient and that humans have free will, though they disagreed in their accounts of how the two are compatible. With the Reformation the debate became even more lively since there were Protestant philosophers who denied both claims, and many philosophers ever since have either thought it impossible to reconcile them or have thought it possible only because they weaken one or the other.

One of the most difficult and perplexing tenets of classical theism is the doctrine of divine simplicity. Broadly put, this is generally understood to be the thesis that God is altogether without any proper parts, composition, or metaphysical complexity whatsoever. For a good deal more than a millennium, veritable armies of philosophical theologians – Jewish, Christian and Islamic – proclaimed the truth and importance of divine simplicity. Yet in our own time, the doctrine has enjoyed no such support. Among many otherwise orthodox theists, those who do not just disregard it completely explicitly deny it. However, in a couple of recent articles, William E. Mann has attempted to expound the idea of divine simplicity anew and to defend it against a number of criticisms. He even has gone so far as to hint at reaffirming its importance, suggesting that the doctrine may have a significant amount of explanatory power and other theoretical virtue as part of an overall account of the nature of God, by either entailing or in other ways providing for much else that traditional theists have wanted to say about God. In this paper, I want to take a close look at Mann's formulation of the doctrine and at a general supporting theory he adumbrates in his attempt to render more plausible, or at least more defensible, various of its elements and implications. As Mann has made what is arguably the best attempt to defend the doctrine in recent years, I think that such an examination is important and will repay our efforts.

In looking for criteria by which to assess religious conceptual systems, many philosophers have turned for help to scientific methodology. Perhaps this is because they felt philosophers of science were themselves looking in the right epistemological direction, and had a viable way of describing what they saw. Richard Swinburne has provided a strong, sustained treatment of the application of scientific method to religious truth claims, in The Existence of God. He there makes use of what he sees as ‘the close similarities which exist between religious theories and large-scale scientific theories’ in assessing the epistemic status of belief in God. The goal of this paper will be to give enough of Swinburne's position to see what criteria might be plucked therefrom, to subject both the criteria and the underlying methodology to scrutiny, and to assess where one must go from here in appraising the truth-claims of religion.

In the second of his three prefaces to On Authority and Revelation, Kierkegaard writes: ‘“My reader”, may I simply beg you to read this book, for it is important for my main effort, wherefore I am minded to recommend it’ The question I will put to myself to begin my reflections on the book is: why should Kierkegaard recommend it so strongly? What is Kierkegaard doing in this book? One notices in his recommendation that it is addressed to his reader who, presumably, is not simply the reader of this book but the reader of his other books as well. The Concluding UnscientUc Postscript was being published about the same time (1846), and so the reader may well have been familiar with most of Kierkegaard's main philosophical works. The recommendation then is set in this context. The book is, on the face of it, so unlike the other works, concerned with certain odd claims to a revelation by a Danish pastor named Adler. Much of the book discusses the details of a deposition of Adler given to the local bishop and some details of later defences which Adler gave of his revelation in several works and sermons. It appears to be a local squabble of no general interest and certainly not the sort of thing that had occupied Kierkegaard's philosophical attention to this point. The book, then, stands in need of a recommendation to Kierkegaard's reader who is not otherwise prepared for this genre. But the recommendation does not say, ‘Try this, though quite different, you may like it.’ It says rather that the reader should read it, and later he adds read it carefully, because it is ‘important for my main effort’. So the book is to be seen as of a piece with the other main works of Kierkegaard. This is what I should like to understand in the following discussion: how is this book important for Kierkegaard's main effort?

In this paper I first point out that happiness might of its nature be unamenable to the calculating ‘plan of life’ approach, and argue that the incompatible model of a personal search, by no means implying ‘ontological subjectivity’ though, fits in more smoothly with the idea. Secondly, I discuss the arguments assembled by Aquinas for a view of this type. I argue thirdly that although we can show there is some one thing in which all happiness consists, whatever it may be it must be incompatible with temporal life, whether or not any other is possible. Hence a discussion which excludes ‘transcendence’ will not get to grips with the concept of happiness.

The Tao Tê Ching is probably the world's second most translated and annotated book (after the Bible), yet it remains among the most enigmatic. Of its eighty-one chapters, no one denies that the most important is the first, and many scholars (e.g. Wing-tsit Chan, Chang Chung-yuan) go further to claim that it is the key to the whole work: if it is understood fully, all the rest may be seen to be implied. Unfortunately, the first chapter also happens to be the most ambiguous. But even so, after so much attention can there be anything left to say? It seems to me that an important point has been missed or at least obscured, and that the popularity of certain translations has made this obscuration more prevalent recently. To correct this, I shall offer below a line-by-line explication of this crucial passage. The following interpretation first demonstrates the parallel structure of the first eight lines as signifying two different ways of experiencing: lines one, three, five and seven refer to the experience of Tao, and lines two, four, six and eight to our more usual way of experiencing the world. I shall suggest that the difference between these ways is the difference between our familiar dualistic experience (or understanding of experience) and a much less common nondualistic way of experiencing in which there is no bifurcation between subject and object. Second, we shall see that the parallel structure unfolds dialectically: each succeeding pair of lines elaborates upon the issues that naturally arise in response to the preceding pair. In the process of showing this, I shall take sides on the two main controversies over this chapter: first, whether it should be interpreted cosmologically or ontologically/epistemologically (I have already revealed my preference for the latter), and second, whether lines, five and six should be punctuated to translate yü as ‘desire/intention’. My main thesis is that the traditional understanding of yü as ‘desire’ or ‘intention’ is an essential part of the meaning of the chapter. This is by no means an original claim, but why it is so important does not seem to have been noticed before and provides the reason for this paper. Wing-tsit Chan's criticism of such translations, that ‘intention interrupts the thought of the chapter’, 1 is thus a serious misreading of the text.

Recent articles in Religious Studies have underscored the questions of whether Buddhism presents any empirical doctrines, and whether, if it does, such doctrines are false or vacuous. In what follows I want to sketch an interpretation of Buddhism according to which it does not offer doctrines which are empirically false, on the one hand, or trivially true on the other. In doing so I take my cue from an earlier, and by now classic, paper by H. H. Price. For the exposition of Buddhism I take the Pali Nikāyas, the single most significant collection of texts in the Buddhist tradition. The particular doctrine which is the focus of discussion here is the kammavāda (Pali) or ‘karma view’ of early Indian Buddhism, for it is the focus of much of the recent literature cited above and a doctrine which some have thought amenable to statement in empirical terms.

Symbolism has found spontaneous expression in several religious and secular practices among many different peoples of Africa. These expressions can be seen in religious emblems, ideograms, rituals, songs, prayers, myths, incantations, vows, customary behaviour and personifications. The under-standing of these religious symbols lends itself to rapid comprehensive and compact use; not only that, it also helps understanding and concentration. In fact, Mary Douglas expresses the view that such symbols, especially rituals, aid us in selecting experiences for concentrated attention, creative at the level of performance, and can mysteriously help the co-ordination of brain and body (1966, p. 63). Conversely, religious symbols have their ambiguities, and these could shroud their true meaning to the unwary. A religious symbol could also represent a complex set of ideas at different levels which gives room to diverse theological, philosophical and psychological interpretations. While we may agree with Raymond Firth (1973, p. 32) that an anthropologist is concerned primarily with the public use of the symbolic, and his aim is to separate symbols from referent so that he may describe the relations between them, we are of the view that those who are in the field of psychology of religion will be most concerned with how symbols influence the mind of the believer and thus understand the faith of the devotee better. In fact, it was the non-understanding of traditional African religious symbols and ideas that partly contributed to the way in which some of the early Western and Arab scholars, investigating African thought forms, looked at the African indigenous beliefs in a derogatory manner. As a method of scholarly research, a careful and meaningful study of the religious significance of certain ritualistic elements and behaviour enables us to understand and appreciate the more why certain things are treated in some special way by the believers, and thus helps to deepen our knowledge of that very faith. It helps us to grasp the essence of the religion rather than its incidentals. In order, therefore, to help comprehend some of the practices in African traditional religion attempts will be made in this paper to discuss the central significance of blood in African belief. Although I consulted the works of some anthropologists and theologians on African religions and philosophy of life, the bulk of the ethnographic materials used in this paper are mainly drawn from my fieldwork (1975–82) among some groups of Nigerians; and a great deal of my interpretations are surrounded by the theories propounded by Mary Douglas and Raymond Firth.

He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with. (Antonio Porchia)

Emptiness (Śūnyatā) is probably the most important philosophical and religious concept of Mahayana Buddhism. Its precise meaning has been explained differently by different schools and in different Buddhist cultures, but almost all Mahāyāna Buddhists would agree with the following characterization: Philosophically, emptiness is the term that describes the ultimate mode of existence of all phenomena, namely, as naturally ‘empty’ of enduring substance, or self-existence (svabhāva): rather than being independently self-originated, phenomena are dependently originated (ptatītya samutpāda) from causes and conditions. Emptiness, thus, explains how it is that phenomena change and interact as they do, how it is that the world goes on as it does. Religiously, emptiness is the single principle whose direct comprehension is the basis of liberation from samsāra, and ignorance of which, embodied in self-gasping (ātmagraha) is the basis of continued rebirth – hence suffering – in samsāra.