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.

One standard criticism of the doctrine of continuous creation is that it entails the occasionalist position that God alone is a true cause and that the events we commonly identify as causes are merely the occasions upon which God brings about effects. I begin by clearly stating Malebranche's argument from continuous creation to occasionalism. Next, I examine two strategies for resisting Malebranche's argument – strong and weak concurrentism – and argue that weak concurrentism is the more promising strategy. Finally, I argue that weak concurrentism requires a necessitarian approach to secondary causation.

In On Liberty, Mill says that ‘the same causes which make … [a person] a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin’. Despite Mill's not having drawn it out, there is an argument implicit in his comments that is germane to both externalist and internalist understandings of the epistemic justification of religious beliefs, even though some of these understandings would not wish to use the term ‘epistemic justification’ to refer to whatever it is that they suggest must be added to true belief for it to count as knowledge. In this paper, we shall articulate this argument; examine how it challenges those religious believers who would wish to claim their religious beliefs as knowledge; and consider what they may do to meet this challenge.

I argue that the problem of religious luck posed by Zagzebski poses a problem for the theory of hell proposed by Buckareff and Plug, according to which God adopts an open-door policy toward those in hell. Though escapism is not open to many of the criticisms Zagzebski raises against potential solutions to the problem of luck, escapism fails to solve the problem: it merely pushes luck forward into the afterlife. I suggest a hybrid solution to the problem which combines escapism and the claim that God gives enough grace to those in hell to cancel out any bad moral luck.

There is much more said in the Critique of Pure Reason about the relationship between God and purposiveness than what is found in Kant's analysis of the physico-theological (design) argument. The ‘Wise Author of Nature’ is central to his analysis of regulative principles in the ‘Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic’ and also appears in the ‘Canon’, first with regards to the Highest Good and then again in relation to our theoretical use of purposiveness. This paper will begin with a brief discussion of the physico-theological argument before moving on to the Appendix and the Canon. Finally, it will consider some changes to the role of the Wise Author in the Critique of Judgement.

Is the no-minimum claim true? I have argued that it is not. Andrew Cullison contends that my argument fails, since human sentience is variable; while Michael Schrynemakers has contended that the failure is my neglect of vagueness. Both, I argue, are wrong.

A number of years ago, James Rachels presented an argument for the necessary non–existence of God. It was based upon a supposed inconsistency between worship and what might be called ‘autonomous moral agency’. In Rachels' view, one person's being the worshipper of another is partially determined by the way in which it is appropriate for the first to respond to the commands of the second. In brief, a worshipper's obedience to commands should be ‘ unqualified ’. Rachels thought that there was some kind of incoherence in the requirement that an autonomous moral agent respond to commands in this way. He concluded that there could be no being who, like God, was alleged necessarily to be a fitting object of worship.

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 this paper I explore the relationship between the idea of possible worlds and the notion of the beauty of God. I argue that there is a clear contradiction between the idea that God is utterly and completely beautiful on the one hand and the notion that He contains within himself all possible worlds on the other. Since some of the possible worlds residing in the mind of the deity are ugly, their presence seems to compromise God's complete and utter beauty.

This paper takes issue with remarks by Brian Clack on the manner in which Wittgensteinian philosophers have interpreted religion. Clack attributes an expressivist interpretation of religion to Wittgensteinians. By reference to my own writings, and to those of Rush Rhees, I show how wide of the mark is this gloss on the Wittgensteinian tradition's approach to religion. In particular, the view that magico-religious rituals are cathartic is demonstrated to be one that Wittgensteinians have been keen to attack, rather than defend. The conclusion of the paper emphasizes the point that Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians have been concerned with denying the appropriateness of producing a general theory of religion or magic. Hence, they have no need of an expressive theory.

In this symposium on God's Own Ethics, Erik Wielenberg, Kristen Irwin, and Paul Draper raise important criticisms of the arguments of that book. I respond to these criticisms.

The basic position of Otto in The Idea of the Holy2 may be stated as follows:

All religions involve and rest on experience of the numinous, which affords a positive knowledge of the central object of religion - God. This position is what may be called a Theory of Religion: like Freud's explanation of religion in terms of father figures, and Durkheim's claim that religion is society's celebration of itself, it claims to give an explanation of the phenomenon of religion - the fact that men belong to religions etc. Unlike some of its rivals, this Theory of Religion does not explain religion away; the explanation is intended to be compatible with religious belief; the explanatory concepts are supposed to be concepts from within religion. If Otto had just argued that religion was, or some religions were, true, his claims would have been only of theological interest. But what makes his writings especially important is that he looks at religion not merely as a theologian, but also as a phenomenologist; he is concerned to explain religion and religions as they are; even to explain the diversity of religions (with a version of evolutionism). It would be over-simple, but not entirely wide of the truth, to say that he first looks at religions in the sensitive but neutral manner of the phenomenologist, to decide what are the central phenomena of religion; and then puts forward a theological explanation of these phenomena. At least, this is what for much of his book he aims to do.

Do all religions worship the same God? Sometimes this question is answered positively, sometimes negatively. Various reasons are given. In the first four sections of this paper we will analyse arguments which affirm or deny that all religions worship the same God. We will see that different types of argument are used. Some authors base their answers to our question on their theological insights (section 1); others defend their thesis with reference to the results of studies in comparative religion (section 2); a third type of argument derives from the philosophy of religion (section 3) and a fourth from philosophical views regarding the ultimate unity of the world (section 4). After this survey we will deal with the structure of the various arguments given. What kind of argument is decisive? I will also make some comments on each of these arguments in order to develop my own. We will then draw our conclusion as to the kind of arguments which are appropriate to our theme (section 5). In the last section I will elaborate my own view.

God's knowledge of individuals becomes an issue only in the face of a Pantokrator, and it remains an issue in each of the monotheistic religions familiar to us. If one seldom finds it raised in more recent times, that can only represent collective prudent counsel, for the history of each tradition records, one after another, the shipwrecks of those who essayed it, as well as bitter aftermaths in their respective religious communities. The more bitter, I believe, as certain stages of this inquiry lead one to dilemmas so harsh that atheism alone could offer plausible rest to the spirit.

I. The argument from design or ‘teleological argument’ purports to be an inductive proof for the existence of God, proceeding from the evidence of the order exhibited by natural phenomena to the probable conclusion of a rational agent responsible for producing that order. The argument was severely criticized by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and it was widely conceded that Hume's objections had cast serious doubt on the adequacy of the teleological argument, if not destroyed its credibility entirely. However, there has been a recent reappraisal of this claim by R. G. Swinburne, who maintains that none of Hume's criticisms have any validity against a ‘carefully articulated version of the argument’. Using an analogical argument based on temporal regularities rather than on spatial regularities (or arrangement of parts), Swinburne claims to have shown that the teleological argument is a legitimate inference to the best explanation whose force depends only on the strength of the analogy and on the degree to which the resulting theory makes explanation of empirical matters simpler and more coherent. Moreover, he claims to have shown that the argument provides support for the Christian monotheistic hypothesis and not merely for the weak claim that the universe was designed (somehow). This is an important claim since it has long been thought that Hume's most devastating blow was dealt when he showed that the teleological argument (if it is admitted to have any force at all) provides just as much support for the negation of certain propositions considered essential to Christian monotheism as it does for their affirmation.

The chief, but far from only, thinker to shape the modern discussion of miracles was David Hume. Ever since, his collaborating off-spring (both those who defend and those who reject the coherence of the idea of miracles) have routinely made several (false) assumptions about the laws of nature and the idea of miracles, which, together with the rich and varied debate arising from them, constitute what I shall refer to as the Humean tradition.

In what follows I argue for two interrelated theses: (1) that early Buddhism is not a form of empiricism, and (2) that consequently there is no basis for an early Buddhist apologetic which contrasts an empirical early Buddhism with either a metaphysical Hinduism on the one hand, or with a baseless Christianity on the other.

Alston's overall aim in Perceiving God is to show that we are rationally justified in believing that our apparent direct perceptions of God's presence (called ‘M-experiences’) are reliable and thus for the most part veridical, the objective, existentially-committed beliefs based on these experiences thereby being prima facie justified, subject to defeat by certain overriders supplied by some background religion. It is argued that our rational justification for believing this is of both an epistemic and pragmatic (or practical) sort, in which an epistemic reason for believing a proposition is truth conducive, rendering the proposition probable, while a pragmatic one concerns the benefits which accrue from belief. We will begin by considering the pragmatic justification, since the case he makes out for epistemic justification is built on its back.

In this article I develop a new problem for the doctrine of the Trinity that I call the Problem of Triunity. Rather than proceeding from the fact that God is one and the persons are many, as the traditional problem of the Trinity does, the problem of triunity proceeds from the fact that, in one sense or another, God is many, and yet each divine person on his own is just one.