In a series of important and influential books, Wilfred Cantwell Smith has convincingly argued that religious traditions are misunderstood if one does not grasp the faith which they express, that these traditions are not static but fluid, and that as a result of greater knowledge and increased contact between members of different traditions, we have entered a period in which it is no longer possible for the traditions to develop in relative isolation. This paper is devoted to an important aspect of Smith's thought – his distinction between faith and propositional belief.

Recently Robert Forman has attempted to muster support for the largely abandoned position that mystical experiences cross-culturally include an unmediated, non-relative core. To reopen the debate he has solicited essays from likeminded scholars for his book, The Problem of Pure Consciousness. Predictably the focus of the volume rests on the refutation of the position most notably expounded by Steven Katz in his influential article of 1978, ‘Language, Epistemology and Mysticism’.

Sceptical theism has been employed by its adherents in an argument aimed at undermining the so called ‘noseeum inference’. Erik Wielenberg (2010) has recently argued that there is an equally plausible argument for the conclusion that sceptical theism implies that we do not know any proposition that has word-of-God justification only. Thus, sceptical theists need to give up their argument against the noseeum inference or accept the conclusion that we do not know any proposition that has word-of-God justification only. I claim that sceptical theists need not face such a difficult choice because the argument that Wielenberg offers is not as plausible as their argument against the noseeum inference.

In response to an earlier paper of mine, T. J. Mawson has argued that omnipotence is logically incompatible with wrong-doing, ‘whilst accepting that there is “a genuine, active power knowingly to choose evil” and thus leaving room for a free-will defence to the problem of evil’. Here, I attempt to show that Mawson is mistaken on both counts – that his argument for the incompatibility of omnipotence and wrong-doing is defective, and that the free-will defence cannot be sustained on the ground marked out by him. Given Mawson's understanding of power and freedom, I argue that it would be possible for God to create persons who are both free and unable to make evil choices.

Iris Murdoch's concept of Good is a central feature of her moral theory; in Murdoch's thought, attention to the Good is the primary means of improving our moral conduct. Unfortunately, her unsystematic presentation of her ideas and the difficulty of the issues being considered make it hard to be sure what she means by the Good, and how we are to attend to it. I will argue that this uncertainty has given rise to three objections which, with some clarification and development of Murdoch's view, are by no means fatal to her position.

For Søren Kierkegaard, ‘How is it possible for one to become a disciple?’ was the fundamental question. The Philosophical Fragments, first published in 1844 under the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, propounds a hypothetical metaphysical framework within which an answer to this question is formulated. This framework is usually construed simply as a general account of what must be the case if Christianity is true. But this has given rise to some perplexity regarding how the Climacian framework is to be interpreted. This is the result of the failure to take into account the specific function which it is meant to serve – namely, as the framework for ascertaining how becoming a disciple is a possibility. My present objective is not to pass any judgement on the adequacy of this framework as a model purporting to represent reality. Rather, I shall simply attempt a consistent elucidation of the framework which Climacus presents; and in so doing, I indicate the way in which, given this framework, the question ‘How is it possible for one to become a disciple?’ is to be answered – what I shall call ‘the Climacian answer’.

Part 1 of this article provides a basic account of the framework by explaining its key concepts and their relationship to one another. I then employ this account as the foundation for the thesis developed in Part 2: namely, that, for Climacus, faith is the condition of discipleship. In conclusion, I outline the answer which, on my interpretation, Kierkegaard's Climacian framework yields to the question ‘How is it possible for one to become a disciple?’

I argue that J. L. Schellenberg's sceptical religion faces two problems of religious adequacy. The first has to do with its relationship to the goal of bringing persons into proper alignment with an ultimate good; the second, with the desideratum of sceptical religion's becoming sufficiently well-established as to be a vehicle for the accomplishment of great things on the stage of history. I argue that actual sceptical religion would need to accommodate itself to the requirements of historical existence, and that such accommodation might well lead to a blurring of the distinctions Schellenberg draws between ‘sectarian’ and sceptical religion.

The first part of the article presents three little arguments from theism to idealism. The second part employs these arguments to make sense of a puzzling doctrine of Jewish mysticism: the doctrine of divine contraction (Heb. tzimtzum).

Three of the most venerable objections to anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine are traceable to Xenophanes and his critique of the early Greek gods. Though suitably revised, these ancient criticisms have persisted over the centuries, plaguing various religious communities, particularly those of classical Christian commitment. Xenophanes complained that anthropomorphism leads to unseemly characterizations, noting that both over the ages, the list of unseemly characteristics has expanded somewhat.

What if doing philosophy across cultures is always implicitly a matter of metaphilosophy – of articulating more clearly the nature of philosophy itself? What if it forces us to ‘stand back’ hermeneutically and map out a ‘view from above’ of the underlying fabric of ideas – in their constitutive concepts, their relations to other ways of thinking, and their potential to be configured in alternative fascinating and fruitful ways?

This article incorporates existing approaches to comparative philosophy within a single scheme of complementary philosophical activities, and a single overarching metaphilosophical project. These approaches are (1) ‘archival’ (exploring parallel but separate philosophical traditions), (2) ‘equivalentist’ (comparing traditions in terms of analogies and contrasts), and (3) ‘problem-solving’ (using multiple traditions to provide philosophical solutions). I situate these within (4) the overarching hermeneutic project of ‘mapping’ concepts and their possibilities. This entails the theory that philosophies drawing on multiple perspectives are always implicitly engaged in mapping out the underlying eidetic structure upon which philosophy does its work, and charting the conceptual possibilities surrounding any idea.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) says that, necessarily, every contingently true proposition has an explanation. The PSR is the most controversial premise in the cosmological argument for the existence of God. It is likely that one reason why a number of philosophers reject the PSR is that they think there are conceptual counter-examples to it. For instance, they may think, with Peter van Inwagen, that the conjunction of all contingent propositions cannot have an explanation, or they may believe that quantum mechanical phenomena cannot be explained. It may, however, be that these philosophers would be open to accepting a restricted version of the PSR as long as it was not ad hoc. I present a natural restricted version of the PSR that avoids all conceptual counter-examples, and yet that is strong enough to ground a cosmological argument. The restricted PSR says that all explainable true propositions have explanations.

It has become fashionable to try to prove the impossibility of there being a God. Findlay's celebrated ontological disproof has in the past quarter century given rise to vigorous controversy. More recently James Rachels has offered a moral argument intended to show that there could not be a being worthy of worship. In this paper I shall examine the position Rachels is arguing for in some detail. I shall endeavor to show that his argument is unsound and, more interestingly, that the genuine philosophical perplexity which motivates it can be dispelled without too much difficulty.

I. Introduction There are still those who think that, if the word ‘miracle’ means a violation of a law of nature, miracles are either impossible or undetectable or a threat to science. I shall take the opposite side and argue that, thus defined, miracles are possible, are detectable in principle, and, again in principle, can be endorsed without compromising legitimate scientific aspirations.

This essay seeks to clarify Gandhi's logic of self-suffering. Its inner accents have not received the attention they deserve. So I propose to emphasize them, though the context of such suffering and its impact on men too must be given due regard.

On what grounds will the rational man become a Christian? It is often assumed by many, especially non-Christians, that he will become a Christian if and only if he judges that the evidence available to him shows that it is more likely than not that the Christian theological system is true, that, in mathematical terms, on the evidence available to him, the probability of its truth is greater than half. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate whether or not this is a necessary and sufficient condition for the rational man to adopt Christianity.

Much recent Kierkegaard scholarship has paid particular attention to various aspects of the literary form of his authorship, such as the significance of his writing under various pseudonyms. The focus has been upon ‘style’ as much as ‘content’; the ‘how’ as much as the ‘what’ of Kierkegaard's writing. Within this context, James Conant has argued, in a series of articles, that there are important parallels between the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (authored by the Kierkegaardian pseudonym Johannes Climacus) and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. However, Conant argues that these parallels have been misunderstood by previous commentators. The main aim of this article is to challenge Conant's argument that the Postscript should be read as containing ‘nonsense...simple, old garden variety nonsense’. This, we shall see, relies upon a particular view of the significance of Climacus's ‘revocation’ of the text. The commentators whom Conant wants to criticize allegedly hold that the Tractatus and the Postscript provide ‘essential preliminary noise’ to the realization that those issues which really matter – in particular, ethics and religion – cannot be spoken of. These commentators, according to Conant, insist on the existence of a kind of speech ‘that lacks sense while still being able to convey volumes’.

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’.

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.

After laying out the claims and motivations of Social Trinitarianism, I develop three new arguments against it. According to the first two, if Social Trinitarianism were true, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would have engaged in wrongful deception via both Old and New Testament revelation. I briefly consider the strength of the arguments and some possible replies to them, concluding that they constitute good reasons to deny that version of Trinitarian doctrine. According to the final argument, Social Trinitarianism is incompatible with two central claims of the New Testament.

Plausibly, if an object persists through time, then its later existence must be caused by its earlier existence. Many theists endorse a theory of continuous creation, according to which God is the sole cause of a creature's existence at a given time. The conjunction of these two theses rather unfortunately implies that no object distinct from God persists at all. What strategies for resolving this difficulty are available?