This paper explores some implications of the idea that religious thoughts can enter into the sensory appearances of things. I begin by clarifying this idea, using some examples drawn from Roger Scruton's discussion of the phenomenology of architectural experience. Then I consider the bearing of the idea on the case for religious belief in pragmatic and epistemic terms. More exactly, I explore how the idea of an internal relation between religious thought and the sensory appearances of things can be used (1) to state William James's case in ‘The will to believe’ with new nuance, and (2) to set out an epistemic case for religious belief whose central claims seem quite commonly to weigh with believers, but which has not been much discussed by philosophers.

In an incisive critique of Professor Hick's Evil and the God of Love, Professor Puccetti claims to ‘carry the campaign as well as the battle’—i.e. to show that, with respect to evil, theists

‘are either “explaining it away” or saying it cannot be explained at all. And in both cases they are in effect admitting they have no rational defence to offer. Which means that despite appearances they really are abandoning the battlefield.’

Philosophers have paid almost no attention to the baptismal rite. This is puzzling not only because the rite is central to the Christian life but also because the rite itself is very puzzling, making audacious claims about what its performance accomplishes. According to one of these audacious claims, by the performance of the rite the one baptized is transformed, enjoying states such as purification, sanctification, regeneration, and illumination – what I call the regenerate states. But how could this be so? And isn't there good empirical evidence that the imposition of the regenerate states on the one baptized is not accomplished in the vast majority of cases? In this article, I consider an ancient and audacious version of the baptismal rite, namely, that used by Eastern Orthodox Christians. I propose a model for understanding this rite – what I call the process-interpretation – which I believe comes close to being satisfactory, since it implies that the imposition of the regenerate states is not nearly as perplexing as it might seem at first glance.

Despite his persistent polemics against the Hegelian ‘speculative’ philosophy, Kierkegaard recognized his own ‘enigmatic respect for Hegel’, and one of his pseudonyms (Johannes Climacus) even acknowledged that his ‘own energies are for the most part consecrated to the service’ of speculation. Nowhere are Kierkegaard's energies more productively devoted to this service than in the work of his last pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, The Sickness Unto Death. In this essay, I argue that not only are there structural parallels between the anatomy of despair in The Sickness Unto Death and the analysis of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in Hegel's Phenomenology, but that there are striking parallels in terms of the actual content of the respective accounts. I develop these parallels in order, finally, to reconsider the terrain of difference between Kierkegaard's Christian therapeutics of despair and Hegel's phenomenological therapeutics.

This article examines in detail chapters 8–11 of Anselm's Proslogion, in which he addresses the problem whether perfectly just God can consistently spare sinners who deserve eternal condemnation. The article argues that Anselm's discussion is framed by two doctrines that permeate the Proslogion: that God is the being than which none greater can be conceived and that God is ontologically simple. Anselm presents several principles about justice and mercy for consideration, some of which should be modified or rejected. The article offers a sympathetic construction of the perspectival solution he offers to the problem, but concludes that some important questions remain unanswered.

Kirk Durston recently presented an argument aimed against evidential arguments from evil predicated on instances of suffering that appear to be gratuitous; ‘The consequential complexity of history and gratuitous evil’, Religious Studies, 36 (2000), 65–80. He begins with the notion that history consists of an intricate web of causal chains, so that a single event in one such chain may have countless unforeseen consequences. According to Durston, this consequential complexity exhibited by history negatively impacts on our grasp of the data necessary to determine whether or not an evil is gratuitous. He therefore concludes that our epistemic condition poses an insurmountable barrier towards the inference from inscrutability to pointlessness. By way of reply, I contend that Durston's argument is flawed in two significant respects, and thus the evidential argument emerges unscathed from his critique.

The thought of God as transcendent is central to theism. Although the expression ‘divine transcendence’ does not appear to have been used by theologians (as distinct from philosophers) before the nineteenth century,1 the idea itself is very deep-rooted. If we ask where it is ultimately grounded, I think the answer may well be: in the idea of the holy.

God's Own Ethics introduces a number of philosophical subfields into conversation with philosophy of religion and metaethics in an attempt to discern the ethics of God. While its conception of the divine being is itself controversial, I here take issue with the claim that the divine being described in God's Own Ethics would be one worthy of worship and allegiance. Specifically, I argue that a God lacking in moral perfection of the sort familiar to humans is either unrecognizable as God, or is open to the ‘Ivan Karamazov’ objection that such a God deserves neither worship nor allegiance.

A well-known objection to divine will/divine command moral theories is that they commit us to the view that God's will is arbitrary. I argue that several versions of divine will/divine command moral theories, including two of Robert Adams's versions of the DCT and my own divine preference theory, can be successfully defended against this objection. I argue that, even if God's preferences are somewhat arbitrary, we have reasons to conform our wills to them. It is not a fatal objection to divine will/divine command moral theories if they imply that God's will/God's commands is/are arbitrary, to some extent.

As the discipline of philosophy of religion stretches to become a global, cross-cultural discipline, it takes on ethical questions about how one should treat those who participate in religious forms of life one does not share. This article offers a typology of possible ethical positions in a context of religious diversity and argues that the strongest position is one of conditional hospitality. That is, the moral ideal proposed here is one of welcome to the religious other that is conditional on an accurate moral judgement of their practices, beliefs, and institutions.

The fruit of several centuries of rationalistic thought in the West has been to reduce both the objective and the subjective poles of knowledge to a single level. In the same way that the Cogito of Descartes is based on reducing the knowing subject to a single mode of awareness, the external world which this ‘knowing self’ perceives is reduced to a spatio-temporal complex limited to a single level of reality – no matter how far this complex is extended beyond the galaxies or into aeons of time, past and future. The traditional view as expressed in the metaphysical teachings of both the Eastern and Western traditions is based, on the contrary, upon a hierarchic vision of reality, not only of reality's objective aspect but also of its subjective one. Not only are there many levels of reality or existence stretching from the material plane to Absolute and Infinite Reality, but there are also many levels of subjective reality or consciousness, many envelopes of the self, leading to the Ultimate Self which is Infinite and Eternal and which is none other than the Transcendent Reality beyond. Moreover, the relation between the subjective and the objective is not bound to a single mode. There is not just one form of perception or awareness. There are modes and degrees of awareness leading from the so-called ‘normal’ perception by man of both his own ‘ego’ and the external world to awareness of Ultimate Selfhood, in which the subject and object of knowledge become unified in a single reality beyond all separation and distinction.

Many traditional theists have said that

(i) God is propositionally omniscient,

i.e. knows all truths. Many traditional theists also hold that

(2) God is timeless.

That is, these theists hold that though God exists, there is no time at which He exists, and He does not exist earlier or later than anything. Some recent philosophers, among them Arthor Prior, Robert Coburn, Norman Kretz mann, Nicholas Wolterstorfl Richard Gale and Patrick Grim, have argued that

(3) There are truths to whose expression ‘now’ is essential, and that (1)–(3) compose an inconsistent set of propositions. These writers argue that due to the semantics of ‘now’, a timeless God cannot know truths to whose expression ‘now’ is essential. To know a truth, it is claimed, one must be able to mentally token a proposition expressing what one knows. To token a truth to whose expression ‘now’ is essential, one must token ‘now’. ‘Now’ and relevantly similar terms (such as tensed verbs) inter alia locate those who use them in time: if one says truly that it is now 3 p.m., it follows that one exists at 3 p.m. So a timeless being cannot use ‘now’ and relevantly similar terms, and so (it is claimed) cannot know truths for whose expression ‘now’ and its ilk are required.

Let us call the Dependency Theses (DT) the view, first stated by Kant, that certain versions of the cosmological argument depend on the ontological argument. At least two different reasons have been given for the supposed dependence. Given the DT, some of Aquinas' views about God's essence, and about our knowledge of God's existence, can seem, at least at first, to be inconsistent. I consider two different ways of defending Aquinas against this suspicion of inconsistency. On the first defence, based on a widespread understanding of his notion of ‘necessary being’, Aquinas' views fall outside the scope of the DT. The success of this defence is doubtful. There is, however, another defence to be found in Aquinas' work, one directed not to avoiding, but actually to rejecting, the DT. In this second defence, the DT is not a correct assessment even of those views that do fall within its scope. Its success means that Aquinas had available a principled refutation of the DT some five hundred years before it was first formulated.

The philosopher Michael Dummett has argued that a commitment to realism in a given domain must display the following marks: a conception of reality as determinate and mind-independent, the correspondence theory of truth, and a truth conditions theory of meaning. In his own and others' philosophy we see a series of arguments at work in the theory of meaning, in epistemology and in the philosophy of science which converge upon a common rejection of such realism. It is not surprising that in such an intellectual climate we see a rise in non-realist theories of religion. Religious realities are here recognised as projected; theological truth is fixed by pragmatic criteria; and meaning is handled in terms of assertibility conditions. This rise of regulative religion has met with a variety of reactions ranging from a horror of being imprisoned by an alien philosophy to a delight that the true nature of religion has at last been brought into sharper focus.

Many authors claim that certain Indian (Hindu) texts and traditions deny that nature has intrinsic value. If nature has value at all, it has value only as a means to mokṣa (liberation). This view is implausible as an interpretation of any Indian tradition that accepts the doctrines of ahiṃsā (non-harm) and karma. The proponent must explain the connection between ahiṃsā and merit by citing the connection between ahiṃsā and mokṣa: ahiṃsā is valuable, and therefore produces merit, because ahiṃsā is instrumentally valuable as a means to mokṣa. Ahiṃsā is a means to mokṣa, however, because it produces merit. Hence the explanation is circular. Additionally, this view entails that morality is strictly arbitrary – it might just as well be that hiṃsā (harm) produces merit, and ahiṃsā produces demerit. An alternative interpretation that avoids these problems states that the value of ahiṃsā derives from the intrinsic value of the unharmed entities.

Much has been made of the Kierkegaardian flavour of Wittgenstein's thought on religion, both with respect to its explicit allusions to Kierkegaard and its implicit appeals. Even when significant disparities between the two are noted, there remains an important core of de facto methodological agreement between them, addressing the limits of theory and the dispelling of illusion. The categories of ‘nonsense’ and ‘paradox’ are central to Wittgenstein's therapeutic enterprise, while the categories of ‘paradox’ and the ‘absurd’ are central to much of Kierkegaard's attempt (pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous) to dispel religious illusion. Writing of how the ‘urge to thrust against the limits of language’ yields ‘nonsense’, Wittgenstein explicitly appealed to Kierkegaard: ‘Kierkegaard, too, recognized this thrust and even described it in much the same way (as a thrust against paradox)’.1 I want to consider whether Kierkegaard's category of paradox of the absurd is assimilable to Wittgenstein's view of nonsense and paradox. I shall argue that a consideration of Wittgenstein's view of paradox can highlight contrasting strands in Kierkegaard's writings on religious faith, strands which take paradox more or less strictly – in particular, it can clarify several different opinions concerning the status of religious claims. My exploration will bring to the fore some implications of the attempt to make room, in the religious employment of language, for a ‘higher understanding’ of truths which we are said to be able to grasp but cannot express.

The analysis of religious assertions in terms of a language game or in terms of eschotological verification are the two most notable defences today of the factual significance of religious language. But both of these approaches, I believe, are to be found wanting, not only on philosophical grounds, but especially on the grounds of faith. Neither of these approaches reflects ordinary faith, the faith of ordinary believers. And it is in terms of such ordinary faith that we can find the key to a more adequate answer to the challenge of verifiability.

While many philosophical theists have maintained (correctly or not) that there are data accessible to sense-perception – e.g., the ‘orderly processes of nature’, loving and benevolent human actions – which constitute evidence for the existence of God, it seems unproblematic that there could not conceivably occur sense-perceptions of God. Rather, the properties being God and being sense-perceivable are incompatible, i.e., are such that it is inconceivable for there to exist something which coexemplifies them. This being so, it is nothing short of a necessary truth that if God exists, he is unobservable. In what follows, I shall often express this point in the language of necessity de re by noting that being unobservable is a property that God has essentially; for those at home with ‘possible-world’ semantics, this amounts to the claim that being unobservable is a property that God exemplifies at every possible-world at which he exists. One might reasonably account for this, of course, in terms of God's incorporeality; for it seems unproblemetic that being incorporeal is also a property that God has essentially, and that the function ‘X is incorporeal’ entails the function ‘X is unobservable’. Hence, since ‘If God exists, he is incorporeal’ expresses a necessary truth, it should be intuitively clear that the proposition expressed by ‘If God exists, he is unobservable’ is also a necessary truth.

I have meditated regularly, following simple Buddhist procedures, for more than ten years, and that seems just about long enough for me to start to offer some preliminary account of it, despite the limitations of my progress and experience, and the difficulty of describing the more intimate and less explored reaches of the mind. I think I have learned enough to say that through prolonged spiritual practice one arrives at the springs of action and at root attitudes, and is in a position to be possessed of them in a purer, stronger form. It may seem difficult to see how the practice of philosophy can be reconciled with the practice of meditation, but I shall describe how I have tried to do so, and say how I think the one bears on the other. In fact all I can do in the present paper is to attempt a limited discussion of moral psychology, and its relation to the foundations of ethics, a discussion, I must concede now, in which I waver uncertainly in my expression of the key issues. But I think that I cannot delay indefinitely, and if I can sketch out the terrain even roughly, better work on it can come later. My references to mindfulness and to meditation will be elementary and not systematic, though adequate, I hope, to what I want to say about ethics. What I am writing in praise of is mindfulness, or awareness, which I take to be a virtue that is developed through the practice of meditation or some comparable contemplative activity. I am also concerned for the future direction of philosophy. It seems to me that our attaining to this virtue will transform its practice, so that it moves closer to traditional expectations, somewhat disappointed in recent years, though supposedly less so now. If I am not deluded, there is an interior route towards the great questions of metaphysics, and we shall be known for not having taken it. It is a task for a new generation of philosophers, and I for one still scan the horizon for their arrival.