Paul Tillich borrows central motifs in his trinitarian theology from Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century German mystic. Tillich draws a picture of divine life as embroiled in a conflict of opposites between the abyss and the light of the Logos. Boehme also depicted divine life as engaged in inner turmoil. But, unlike Tillich, Boehme's experience and imagery suggest that the eternal divine self-contradiction could only be solved in human consciousness and history. The paper suggests that trinitarian thinkers such as Tillich cannot give to creation and its processes the same seriousness as does Boehme who implicates humanity in the redemption of divinity through the task imposed on it as the sole locus in which the divine opposites can be differentiated and consciously integrated.

In God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga presents a new form of the ontological argument for the existence of God. Though he has reservations concerning its evangelical efficacy, Plantinga considers the proof both valid and sound, and presents it as a defence of the rational acceptability of theism.

My title is of course a variation on Professor H. D. Lewis' well-known Our Experience of God. There he expounded a variety of religious intuitionism, which stands in the line of Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto and Martin Buber. These and other writers have characteristically made ‘the move to experience’, as a new blend of natural and revealed theology. The move makes a great deal of sense. On the one hand it grounds belief at a time when the older natural theology apparently had crumbled. On the other hand, it points to the dynamics of religious inspiration and gave a new perspective on revelation. It softens both reason and faith, of course, but it also provides a defence against skepticism. It fits well with a liberal attitude to scriptures and tradition. So there are manifest advantages of the move to experience, for those who wish to make it in the context of the Western theistic tradition. The writers I cited above, and Professor Lewis himself, have discussed religious experience from a mainly Western and theistic angle – even Otto with his great comparative concerns did so; and more needs to be said about the nature of religious experience in the broader context of Eastern and other religions. Lewis, however, paid attention to this wider problem, for instance in his 1963 article ‘Buddha and God’. In some respects this issue of the relationship of apparently non-theistic religions to theism is the most important one in contemporary crosscultural philosophy of religion.

I begin this essay by articulating an argument in support of the claim that theistic citizens ought not to support coercive policies for which they lack an adequate secular rationale. That argument employs various claims regarding God's nature to show: (i) that theistic citizens should expect to discern secular corroboration for each religiously grounded moral truth to which they adhere; and (ii) theistic citizens should doubt any religiously grounded moral claim for which they cannot discern an adequate secular rationale. I dispute both (i) and (ii) and conclude that theistic citizens may reasonably reject the claim that they ought not to support coercive policies for which they lack an adequate secular rationale.

In this paper I shall discuss a certain theodicy, or line of argument in response to the problem of evil, viz, the so-called ‘free will defence’. What I propose to do is defend this theodicy against an objection that has been made to it in recent years.

The world in which we find ourselves is religiously ambiguous. It is possible for different people (as also for the same person at different times) to experience it both religiously and non-religiously; and to hold beliefs which arise from and feed into each of these ways of experiencing. A religious man may report that in moments of prayer he is conscious of existing in the unseen presence of God, and is aware - sometimes at least - that his whole life and the entire history of the world is taking place within the ambience of the divine purpose. But on the other hand the majority of people in our modern world do not participate in that form of experience and are instead conscious of their own and others' lives as purely natural phenomena, so that their own experience leads them at least implicitly to reject the idea of a transcendent divine presence and purpose. If they are philosophically minded, they may well think that the believer's talk is the expression of what Richard Hare has called a blik, a way of feeling and thinking about the world which expresses itself in pseudo-assertions, pseudo because they are neither verifiable nor falsifiable and are therefore factually empty.1 The religious man speaks of God as a living reality in whose presence we are, and of a divine purpose which gives ultimate meaning to our lives. But is not the world the same whether or not we suppose it to exist in God's presence; and is not the course of history the same whether or not we describe it as fulfilling God's purposes? Is not the religious description thus merely a gratuitous embellishment, a logical fifth wheel, an optional language-game which may assuage some psychological need of the speaker but which involves no claims of substance concerning the objective nature or structure of the universe? Must not the central religious use of language then be accounted a non-cognitive use, whose function is not to assert alleged facts but to express a speaker's, or a community of speakers', emotions within the framework of a factually contentless blik, ‘slant’, or ‘onlook’?

In this essay I will try to show that there are what would appear to be some unnoticed consequences of the doctrine of divine foreknowledge. For the purposes of this discussion I will simply assume that future events (while future) are possible objects of knowledge and, hence, that foreknowledge is possible. Accordingly, I will not be concerned with discussing such questions as the status of truth-values for future contingent propositions or whether knowledge is justified true belief. Furthermore, I will not be concerned with the issues involved in the claim that the doctrine of divine foreknowledge conflicts with doctrines concerning the properties of created beings, e.g., the doctrine of voluntary human action.

This is a new argument to the effect that religions are not truth-oriented. In other words, it is not a fundamental function of religion to represent the world accurately. I compare two hypotheses with respect to their likelihood (in A. W. F. Edwards's technical sense). The one which entails that religion is not truth-oriented is a better explanation than its competitor for a number of empirical observations about religion. It is also at least as probable. I point out that, once one has established that religions are not truth-oriented, it is possible to argue that religions are false and it is possible to run a sound ad hominem argument against religious believers who advance religious claims. I suggest that the results are early ones and that what matters is evaluating religion in the way I illustrate in this paper. The ad hominem argument shows that the question of whether religion is truth-oriented is particularly important.

There are five main claims that may be made about life after death:

(a) We are reincarnated in the self-same body we had in life.

(b) We are reincarnated in another body. (For my purposes in this paper it is a matter of indifference whether this is thought of as reincarnation in anotherworld, or as reincarnation in this world: the arguments I shall be examining apply equally to either case. Throughout the paper the term ‘reincarnation’ used without qualification should be taken to mean ‘reincarnation in a different body’.)

(c) We are revived, or continue to live (or to have conscious existence) in a disembodied form.

This essay presents a theistic account of deontic properties that can lay claim to many of the advantages of divine command theory but which avoids its flaws. The account, divine attitude theory, asserts that moral properties should be understood in terms of divine attitudes, such that an action is morally wrong just in case God would be displeased with the performance of that action. Among the virtues of this account is its ability to explain the modal status of fundamental moral truths, something that divine command theory cannot do.

The most important recent philosophical treatment of Ghristology is that of Thomas V. Morris in The Logic of God Incarnate, defending the high-orthodox position that ‘Jesus of Nazareth was one and the same person as God the Son, the Second Person of the divine Trinity’ (p. 13) against the charge that the characteristics of deity and humanity are non-compossible in one person at one time, so that it is a contradiction to attribute both sets of qualities to the historical Jesus of Nazareth. I believe that Morris's defence, impressive though it is, does not succeed but on the contrary provides yet another illustration of the thesis that any attempt to spell out the idea of divine incarnation as a metaphysical theory, rather than as religious metaphor or myth, is bound to be unacceptable or, in traditional terminology, heretical.

Many philosophers as well as many non-philosophers assume that there is no problem about just what religious belief is. They assume that it is something its adherents would like treated along the lines of (if not wholly in the same way as) any other form of belief. But because religious belief does not relate to any empirical entity or person then the belief element in it is conceived of as directed to some trans-empirical or metaphysical realm.

Both Tolstoy and Wittgenstein conceived of religious belief in a very different way from this. They conceded, I believe, that some forms of religious belief do seem to be directed at some apparently trans-empirical Being. However, for them, the genuine religious spirit involves something else. We can best appreciate their shared conception in terms of what I shall call an ‘authentic orientation to the world’.

My purpose in this paper is to elucidate just what this ‘authentic orientation’ consists of and to show how it can be said to be something that both Tolstoy and Wittgenstein had essentially the same view of.

This article seeks to get clear on an important feature of a theistic way of life: namely, the appeal to ‘deep desires’ as part of an ethical and spiritual life-orientation. My main thesis is that such appeals should primarily be seen as pertaining to our acquired second nature and the space of meaning it makes possible, rather than first nature or innateness. To appeal to the ‘depth’ of a desire, on this account, is to say something about its normative importance: it is something of profound significance for our human fulfilment about which we ought to be concerned, and it correlates with the normative ‘height’ of the object of desire. Thus, our deepest desire correlates with what is seen as the highest or most worthy object of our desire (or love), which the theist claims is God. This view is contrasted with subjectivist accounts where desires are seen as ‘deep’ in that they structure our identity. My account affirms that deep desires structure our identity, but they do so because of their perceived objective normative importance. I also seek to show how we should affirm Alasdair MacIntyre's claim that ‘the deepest desire of every [human] being, whether they acknowledge it or not, is to be at one with God’.

Paul Draper has recently developed an account of intrinsic probability according to which a theory's intrinsic probability is determined by its modesty and coherence. He employs this account in an argument that Source Physicalism (SP) and Source Idealism (SI) are equally intrinsically probable. Since SP and SI are not exhaustive, and Theism is one very specific version of SI, it follows that the intrinsic probability of Theism is very low. I argue here that considerations of fundamentality show that more work needs to be done to defend the claim that P(SP) = P(SI).

According to Marilyn Adams, hell poses the principal problem of evil for Christians. In this article, I show that the problem of hell can be eliminated, or solved, but not by any of four favoured theistic solutions (i.e. traditional, escapist, annihilationist and universalist) that have been provided. Rather, I argue that there is another theistic solution to the problem of hell, a morally realistic solution, which, by drawing on ethical theory, can be shown to be morally preferable to these other solutions.

The attempt to study religion objectively (Religionswissenschaft) has been part of the academic scene in the West for a century. Such men as F. Max Mueller, Edward Tylor, W. Brede Kristenson, Raffaele Peettazzoni, and Joachim Wach worked to develop such a truly scientific study of religion. They held that a study of religious data could reveal what religious life means for people who participate in it if methods are used which prevent a superimposition of the investigator's personal value judgments. At the same time, there has been the recognition by some scholars, including some of the above, that there is something about religious life that cannot be investigated by normal empirical methods. This sense of the uniqueness of religion is symbolised in Rudolf Otto's book The Idea of the Holy, where he maintains that in order to understand religion in its innermost core, an investigator must recognise ‘a unique “numinous” category of value and of a definitely “numinous” state of mind’. Our concern here is to examine one problem arising from the claim that religious life must be studied in terms of its own intention, or category of value; and yet studied through an inductive method which allows for the distinctive character of different historical expressions of religion.

Mr Olding's recent attack on my exposition of the argument from design gives me an opportunity to defend the central theses of my original article. My article pointed out that there were arguments from design of two types—those which take as their premisses regularities of copresence (spatial order) and those which take as their premisses regularities of succession (temporal order). I sought to defend an argument of the second type. One merit of such an argument is that there is no doubt about the truth of its premisses. Almost all objects in the world behave in a highly regular way describable by scientific laws. Further, any scientific explanation of such a regularity must invoke some more general regularity. (We explain the gas laws by Newton's laws.) The most general regularities of all are, as such, scientifically inexplicable. The question arises whether there is a possible explanation of another kind which can be provided for them, and whether their occurrence gives any or much support to that explanation. I urged that we do explain some phenomena by explanation of an entirely different kind from the scientific. We explain states of affairs by the action of agents who bring them about intentionally of their own choice. Regularities of succession, as well as other phenomena may be explained in this way. Explanation of this kind I will term intentional explanation. Intentional explanation of some phenomenon E consists in adducing an agent A who brought E about of his own choice and a further end G which, he believed, would be forwarded by the production of E. (When an agent brings about E ‘for its own sake’, E will be the same as G.)

To the student of the recent history of theological ideas in the West, it sometimes seems as though, of all the ‘new’ subjects that have been intro duced into theological discussion during the last hundred or so years, only two have proved to be of permanent significance. One is, of course, biblical criticism, and the other, the subject which in my University is still called ‘comparative religion’—the (as far as possible) dispassionate study of the religions of the world as phenomena in their own right.

In this paper, I shall be concerned to show: (1) that Winch believes that there can be different conceptions of ‘agreement with reality’; (2) that Wittgenstein agrees with this, but emphasizes the difficulty of understanding such conceptions; (3) that Winch realizes this difficulty, and yet still tries to gain understanding of primitive social institutions in terms of their sense of the significance of human life, in terms of the limiting notions of birth, death and sexual relations; (4) that such a notion of the significance of human life cannot be made sense of without an understanding of the concept of agreement with reality which undergirds it; (5) that Winch's position is internally incoherent.

This article explicates and defends the attitude of hope as a distinctive religious attitude that cuts across the standard trichotomy of atheism, agnosticism and theism.