If God loves us and so desires union with us, why is it that so many, who once felt close to God and who have subsequently done nothing to precipitate separation from him, now experience only his absence? A metaphor which has been used repeatedly to answer this question is that separation from God is a kind of spiritual weaning process in which God uses the experience of his absence in order to bring about maturation and greater union with him. After discussing the use of this metaphor in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and John of Cross's poem The Dark Night of the Soul, I discuss the question of how someone's absence could be good for their maturation. I argue that separation has an important role to play in deepening relationships of love – drawing on research in de-adaptation in the psychological and sociological literature, I argue that in order for there to be a union of love, there must be an experience of both dependence and independence. This position can explain why God allows people who engage in the spiritual life to suffer the pain of separation from him.

The traditional problem of evil sets theists the task of reconciling two things: God and evil. I argue that theists face the more difficult task of reconciling God and evils that God is specially obligated to prevent. Because of His authority, God's obligation to curtail evil goes far beyond our Samaritan duty to prevent evil when doing so isn't overly hard. Authorities owe their subjects a positive obligation to prevent certain evils; we have a right against our authorities that they protect us. God's apparent mistake is not merely the impersonal wrong of failing to do enough good – though it is that too. It is the highly personal wrong of failing to live up to a moral requirement that comes bundled with authority over persons. To make my argument, I use the resources of political philosophy and defend a novel change to the orthodox account of authority.

My object in this paper is to consider what relevance, if any, current analyses of probability have to problems of religious belief. There is no doubt that words such as ‘probable’ are used in this context; what is doubtful is that this use can be analysed as other major uses of such words can. I shall conclude that this use cannot be so analysed and hence, given the preponderance of the other uses that can, that it is misleading.

David Hume's greatness depends in large part on how his writings hint at beautiful and coherent theories which are recognizably Humean despite their divergences from the untidy originals. Now, perhaps the clearest vision of a contradiction–free Platonic Form of Hume was had by J. L. Mackie; he described it in such masterpieces as The Cement of the Universe, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, and The Miracle of Theism. How successful is this last in its attack on theism? I shall discuss Mackie's case against theism of a Platonic or Neoplatonic type which replaces ‘God as a person or mind or spirit’ by a more abstract Creative Force or Principle. Mackie sees in it a ‘a formidable rival’ to any theism treating of a divine being; ‘if you demand an ultimate explanation, then this may well be a better one’ (MT, 234–5). But, his chapter thirteen contends, it fares badly in competition with an atheistic, naturalistic approach.

Several recent writers, of whom the most important and accessible, for English readers, are probably K. N. Jayatilleke and W. Rahula, have drawn attention to the fact that Buddhism, unlike many other religious philosophies, regards personal experience as the only valid source of knowledge. The Buddha himself is said to have distinguished between those who base their religion, or world-view, on tradition, those who base it on reasoning and speculation, and those who base it on personal experience, as he does himself:

I am one of those who profess the basis of a religion after finding a final and ultimate insight in this life by gaining a higher knowledge personally of a doctrine among doctrines not traditionally heard of before. (Quoted by Jayatilleke, p. 171)

If the contemporary rebirth of the ontological argument had its conception in Norman Malcolm's discovery of a second Anselmian argument ([2]) it had its full-term delivery as a healthy philosophical progeny with Alvin Plantinga's sophisticated modal version presented in the tenth chapter of The Nature of Necessity ([8]). This latter argument has been the centre of a huge body of literature over the last fifteen years, and deservedly so. One is impressed that this version of Anselm's jewel is valid and sound if any is.

In his Morality and Religion, W. W. Bartley III states that ‘the chief aim of this study is to get clearer about the extent to which morality and religion may be interdependent’ (p. i). After stating various possible alternatives, in terms of the logical relationships of derivability and compatibility, which are relevant to this issue, Prof. Bartley in fact devotes his book to a consid eration of four views:

(1) Morality is reducible to religion.

(2) Religion is reducible to morality.

(3) Morality and religion are in conflict (partly, not wholly).

(4) Morality and religion are inseparable.

John Hick offers a summary account of William James's ‘The Will to Believe’ which is typical of the way that this essay has been understood by many in the one hundred years since it was first published. According to Hick, James argues

that the existence or nonexistence of God, of which there can be no conclusive evidence either way, is a matter of such momentous importance that anyone who so desires has the right to stake one's life upon the God hypothesis.

During the last several years, philosophers of religion have witnessed a long-drawn debate between Nelson Pike and John Fischer on the problems of theological fatalism, Fischer claiming in his most recent contribution to have proved that even if God's past beliefs are ‘nice soft facts’, still theological fatalism cannot be averted. Unfortunately, this debate has not – at least it seems to this observer – served substantially either to clarify the issues involved or to move toward a resolution of the question, but has instead confused matters by its use of misleading terminology and diverted the discussion into unpromising side roads.

In a discussion-note in Mind (July 1958), Father P. M. Farrell, O.P., gave an account, in what he admitted to be an embarrassingly brief compass, of the Thomist doctrine concerning evil. There is one sentence in this discussion which at first glance appears paradoxical. Father Farrell has been arguing that a universe containing ‘corruptible good’ as well as incorruptible is better than one containing ‘incorruptible good’ only. He continues: ‘If, however, they are to manifest this corruptible good, they must be corruptible and they must sometimes corrupt.’ The final words, despite Father Farrell's italics, strike one as expressing, not a self-evident truth, but a non sequitur. The fact that I am capable of committing murder does not entail that I will at some time commit it. It is not immediately obvious that a similar entailment holds in the case of corruption and corruptibility.

Some marble, appropriately worked, comes to constitute a statue: constitution is the relation between the resulting statue and the marble it is made of. Some recent authors use the concept of constitution to explicate or at least provide an analogy for the doctrine of the Trinity. I argue that this won't do, because there is no viable candidate for the role the marble plays in the statue's case.

Tim Mawson argues that the ability to choose what one knows to be morally wrong is a power for some persons in some circumstances, but that it would be a mere liability for God. The lynchpin of Mawson's argument is his claim that a power is an ability that it is good to have. In this rejoinder, I challenge this claim of Mawson's, arguing that choosing a course of action is always an exercise of power, whether or not it is good for one to have that power. I then go on to develop an argument for saying that if (for the reasons presented by Mawson) it is not good for God to have the ability to make evil choices, then it isn't good for us to have it either, in which case the free-will defence is unsustainable.

This article defends a broadly Thomist understanding of the doctrine of divine simplicity from the objection that such a position inevitably leads to a modal collapse. To do so, it draws upon Barbara Vetter's recent dispositionalist account of modality, in which irreducibly modal multi-track powers are the truthmakers of modal claims. Conceiving of God's power on the analogy of these dispositional properties enables us to hold that the divine life is itself the truthmaker of modal truths, without requiring a real distinction between what is necessary and contingent in God that would compromise divine simplicity.

George Berkeley's linguistic account of sense perception is one of the most central tenets of his philosophy. It is intended as a solution to a wide range of critical issues in both metaphysics and theology. However, it is not clear from Berkeley's writings just how this ‘universal language of the Author of Nature’ is to be interpreted. This paper discusses the nature of the theory of sense perception as language, together with its metaphysical and theological motivations, then proceeds to develop an account of the semantics of the perceptual language, using Berkeley's theory of reference for human language as a guide.

Hegel's treatment of the Sublime is both self-consistent and distinctive. He not only defines sublimity, but discovers and ranks its types or stages from one select point of view—the viewpoint of God-world relation; and the way he does this, on the one hand, distinguishes him from many others who have contributed to an understanding of the concept, and, on the other hand, enables him to suggest, if but implicitly, a criterion for distinguishing the sublime from allied concepts. Besides, he discusses the matter in the wide context of diverse cultures, making quite a few insightful references to Eastern literature; and, consistently with his own conception of philosophy, also from the viewpoint of historical necessity, so that the sublime appears, in his Aesthetik, as a specific stage which the evolving story of art must in fact traverse.

In his Institutes 2.2.5 Calvin declares that he ‘willingly accepts’ the distinction between freedom from necessity, from sin and from misery originally developed by St Bernard. It is remarkable that a determinist like Calvin seems here to accept a libertarian view of human freedom. In this paper I set out Bernard's doctrine of the three kinds of freedom and show that all its basic elements can in fact be found in Calvin's argument in chapters 2 and 3 of the Institutes part II. Towards the end of chapter 3, however, Calvin's doctrine of ‘perseverance’ makes him revert to a deterministic view of the divine-human relationship. I show that the considerations which prompt Calvin to this can be adequately met on the basis of Bernard's libertarian concept of human freedom.

In the introduction to his account of the debate concerning religion between Cleanthes, Philo and Demea, Pamphilus remarks that ‘reasonable men may be allowed to differ where no one can reasonably be positive’. Pamphilus goes on to suggest that natural theology is an area that abounds with issues about which ‘no one can reasonably be positive’. Assuming that the beliefs of reasonable men are themselves reasonable, Pamphilus can be interpreted as holding that

(P) If no one is reasonably positive that the proposition p is true or that it is false, a man might reasonably believe that p or might reasonably believe that not p.

If theism is true, then there exists a being to which we appropriately refer with the term ‘God’. This point is analytic. Any object to which we appropriately refer with the term ‘God’ bears certain properties – e.g. omniscience, omnipotence and moral perfection. While the analyticity of this point may be a matter of debate, I find no problem granting its necessary truth, at least for the purposes of this paper. There are properties essential to the appropriate wearing of the title ‘God’. Does it follow from these claims that the object to which we appropriately apply the term ‘God’ bears the properties in question – omniscience, omnipotence, etc. – essentially? Is God essentially God? Or is it possible that the being to whom we refer with ‘God’ exist but not be God? Many would assume that the answers to these questions are obvious – that God is God essentially, or not at all. However, I wish to argue that there may be properties essential to Godhood, but not essential to the being that is God.

I. Professor William L. Rowe begins an interesting paper on the Cosmological Argument by stating that his ‘purpose …is not to resurrect it’ but ‘to uncover, clarify, and examine some of the philosophical concepts and theses essential to the reasoning exhibited in the argument’. (49) However, in the concluding pages of his paper, Rowe is at some pains to show that his discussion does at least demonstrate that the Cosmological Argument is beyond the reach of criticisms levelled against it in the works of its classical critics, Hume and Kant and their modern-day counterparts. To quote his concluding remark: ‘Like most important philosophical arguments, it appears that the Cosmological Argument is neither as good as its supporters have claimed it to be nor as bad as its critics have believed.’ (61) Now I have long suspected that some such estimate of the Cosmological Argument was correct; however I do not think that Rowe's discussions in his paper establish his contention that the reports of the death of the Cosmological Argument have been premature. Nevertheless, Rowe's uncovering of the reasoning that lies behind the argument does have the merit of laying bare the precise point from which, as well as the direction in which, the defence of the argument should proceed if we are to truly make some headway on this hoary topic. In what follows, I will first try to show why I think Rowe's discussion fails to establish his conclusion and thereafter try to give the outline of a more successful strategy for arriving at the same conclusion.

Recently Steven E. Boër gave another turn to the discussion of the free will defence by claiming that the free will defence is irrelevant to the justification of moral evil. Conceding that free will may be of real value, Boër claims that free will could have been allowed creatures without that leading to any moral evil at all. What I shall hereafter refer to as the ‘Boër reform’ is the suggestion that God could have allowed creatures to exercise free choices but have intervened with ‘coincidence miracles’ to prevent all the intended evil from actually occurring. What is important to the free will defence, according to Boër, is the ability to choose freely and not the ability to succeed in effecting what we have intended to accomplish. It is no intrusion on the freedom of our wills for God to prevent us from accomplishing what we tried to do with our free wills as long as we were free to try.