There has been a trend within natural theology to present arguments for theism deductively, such that at least one of the premises is likely to be extremely controversial. For those arguments with less controversial premises, the conclusion is usually something short of theism. On these grounds, some have employed probabilistic reasoning to revive classical arguments – to use less controversial premises in achieving a conclusion directly relevant to whether theism is true or not. Here, I formulate the kalam cosmological argument in Bayesian terms, and argue that doing so renders many objections levelled against it obsolete.

If God knows everything he must know the future, and if he knows the future he must know the future acts of his creatures. But then his creatures must act as he knows they will act. How then can they be free? This dilemma has a long history in Christian philosophy and is now as hotly disputed as ever. The medieval scholastics were virtually unanimous in claiming both that God is omniscient and that humans have free will, though they disagreed in their accounts of how the two are compatible. With the Reformation the debate became even more lively since there were Protestant philosophers who denied both claims, and many philosophers ever since have either thought it impossible to reconcile them or have thought it possible only because they weaken one or the other.

Philosophers commonly assume that worship is a universal attitude. Two major approaches see worship as a sui generis attitude or as the specific attitude of respect. This article criticizes the universal assumption and defines worship as a ritual that shapes a person in acquiring the attitude considered appropriate in relating to a superior such as God. Religions differ in their rituals of worship because they disagree on what this appropriate attitude is. This claim is demonstrated by distinguishing the Hebrew Bible's form of worship as bowing down. Biblical worship is shown to be political, forming the worshipper into a loyal servant of God as king. This form of worship is argued to be fundamentally ethical because it teaches that the individual's relationship with God supervenes on human relationships.

God and time play crucial, intricately related roles in Descartes' project of grounding mathematical physics on metaphysical first principles. This naturally raises the perennial theological question of God's precise relation to time. I argue, against the strong current of recent commentary, that Descartes' God is fully temporal. This means that God's duration is successive, with parts ordered ‘before and after’, rather than permanent or ‘all at once’. My argument will underscore the seamless connection between Descartes' theology and his physics, and the degree to which he was prepared to depart from orthodoxy in the former in order to secure an a priori foundation for the latter. As Newton would later do, Descartes freed time from its traditional dependence on bodily motion and so removed an important barrier to making God temporal. Acting in time, God makes the physical world intelligible in a way He could not were He timeless.

According to a widespread tradition in philosophical theology, God is necessarily simple and eternal. One objection to this view of God's nature is that it would rule out God having foreknowledge of non-determined, free human actions insofar as simplicity and eternity are incompatible with God's knowledge being causally dependent on those actions. According to this view, either (a) God must causally determine the free actions of human agents, thus leading to a theological version of compatibilism, or (b) God cannot know, and thus cannot respond to, the free actions of human agents. In the present paper, I argue that one can consistently maintain that God is not causally dependent on anything, even for His knowledge, without being committed to either (a) or (b). In other words, an eternal God can know the free actions of agents even if libertarianism is true.

A noticeable number of contemporary Japanese intellectuals have associated Nichiren (1222–82) with intolerant nationalism and henceforth have viewed him with an air of aloofness, if not of contempt. For these intellectuals, who have come to denounce nationalism and patriotism as a dangerous ideology that led Japan to the tragedy of World War II, Nichiren's passion for Japan runs counter to their decided preference for a man more cosmopolitan in taste, even a man critical of Japan. It is true that the followers of Nichiren attempted to promote Nichiren as a patriotic Buddhist when ultra-nationalistic fervour was steadily advancing Japan as a formidable power in the world through her victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the Russo-Japanese War a decade later.1 The image of Nichiren presented by his ultra-nationalistic followers in early modern Japan and by contemporary intellectuals continues to obscure Nichiren's own teaching. The present paper probes Nichiren's attitude toward Japan in the context of his messianic view of history, which constitutes one of the most salient features of Nichiren's teaching of seven centuries ago.

In this paper I will investigate Nāgārjuna's approach to the problem of the existence of God. Nāgārjuna lived in the second century A.D. and founded Mādhyamika Buddhism.1 He is considered to be one of the greatest thinkers of India2 and his philosophy, ‘the central philosophy of Buddhism’.3 Although there have been some systematic studies and presentations of Nāgārjuna's writings among Eastern and Western scholars during the past six or seven decades,4 many aspects of his teachings have not been adequately treated. One of these aspects is his examination of the concept of God or deity.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that a rite is ‘a formal procedure or act in a religious or other solemn observance’. The word comes into English through the French rite from the Latin ritus. Its original meaning escapes etymologists; and this is a mixed blessing, for we neither can nor must attempt a retrieval of its hidden roots. We are told by respectable etymologists (if such there be) that the word is associated from earliest times with Latin religious usage, but that even in the early Latin it was already extended to ‘custom, usage, manner or way’ of a non-religious sort. [Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary.] So, too, in modern languages the terms ‘rite’ and ‘ritual’ have specifically religious meaning, but they are also used in social and cultural settings that we would not call religious. What first strikes us about the terms ’ and ‘ritual’ is an emphasis upon a certain formality, upon a regular and stable way in which an action or set of actions is to be performed. A ritual is more than a formalism, however, since there are formalisms that are not rites, such as the logical rules for making a valid argument. Moreover, the term is frequently associated with the terms ‘myth’, ‘symbol’ and ‘faith’. These, too, are primarily religious, but are also extended to non-religious contexts. Indeed, there seems to be a network of such terms whose usage touches upon some extraordinary quality in things. Like them, the term ‘ritual’ shares both a wide variety of meanings and a certain hint of impropriety. The variety of ritual forms is notorious, ranging from the most sacred religious liturgies to the absurdities of a fraternity initiation; and the impropriety of the term breaks out whenever we brand a certain action ‘ritualistic’, just as we sometimes refer slightingly to an assertion, saying it is ‘mythical’, ‘merely symbolic’ or ‘credulous’.

Both in the Speeches and in The Christian Faith Schleiermacher offers a comprehensive theory of the nature of religion, grounding it in experience. In the Speeches Schleiermacher grounds religion in an original unity of consciousness that precedes the subject–object dichotomy; in The Christian Faith the feeling of absolute dependence is grounded in the immediate self-consciousness. I argue that Schleiermacher's theory offers a generally coherent account of how it is possible that differing religious traditions are all based on the same experience of the Absolute. I show how Schleiermacher's programme can respond successfully to three related contemporary objections to religious pluralism: (1) different religions make competing truth-claims about the nature of reality and they cannot all be right; (2) differing traditions cannot all be based on a similar religious experience because all experience is interpreted; and (3) the pluralist needs to have criteria in place distinguishing real and illusory religious experience, but such criteria are elusive.

In this brief rejoinder to Talbott's reply, I argue that his clarifications pose a dilemma for him: he must either modify his account of unbearable misery, or give up his claim that all sinners must reach a point where they can resist God no farther.

In the Encyclopedia of Religion the articles on Islam and the religions of Iran prompt very different reactions. On the Islamic side a third are good, a third bad, and the rest either of indifferent quality or merely straightforward, as is natural in a work of reference. But not only are the bad articles extremely misleading: they are cast in a framework which cannot fail to produce a seriously distorted overall perspective. For the religions of Iran, however, we are given an admirable series of contributions by Gherardo Gnoli, and it is a great pleasure for a British reader to find, in English, a balanced summary of the results of recent Continental scholarship in this field.

Many analyses of belief in the soul ignore the soul in the words. Dislocations of concepts occur when words are divorced from their normal implications. The ‘soul’ is sometimes the dislocated utterer of such words. Pictures, including pictures of the soul leaving the body, may mislead us by suggesting applications which they, in fact, do not have. But pictures of the soul may enter people's lives as desires for a temporal eternity. Contrasting conceptions of immortality and eternal life depend on a willingness to say farewell to life. Atheistic denials of temporal eternities, do not appreciate these other possibilities.

Mircea Eliade's book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom has deservedly become a classic, and has reached, as he intended, a far wider audience than the narrow circle of Indologists. The book's popularity may justify the following remarks. It was originally published in French in 1936, then in an enlarged French version in 1954, and in English translation in 1958. There has thus been ample opportunity for revision, and indeed in the second English edition (1969), which we are taking as our text, Eliade notes (p. xi) that he has made ‘numerous minor corrections’. However, the accuracy of his observations on early Buddhism still leaves much to be desired. Let us try to set the record straight.

Methodological naturalism is usually regarded as compatible with a range of religious commitments on the part of scientific practitioners and it is typically assumed that methodological naturalism does not imply metaphysical naturalism. Against this, it has been argued that the cumulative success of the sciences, conducted in conformity with the principle of methodological naturalism, actually provides compelling evidence for the truth of metaphysical naturalism. In this article I assess the argument for naturalism from the history of science and suggest that it is deficient in a number of ways. There may be reasons for adopting naturalism, but the history of science is not the place to look for them.

This is my response to the critical commentaries by Hasker, McNaughton and Schellenberg on my tetralogy on Christian doctrine. I dispute the moral principles invoked by McNaughton and Schellenberg in criticism of my theodicy and theory of atonement. I claim, contrary to Hasker, that I have taken proper account of the ‘existential dimension' of Christianity. I agree that whether it is rational to pursue the Christian way depends not only on how probable it is that the Christian creed is true and so that the way leads to the Christian goals, but (in part) on how strongly one wants those goals. Hasker is correct to say that I need to give arguments in favour of the historical claims of Christianity, and I outline how I hope to do that.

In a recent paper, Dennis Whitcomb argues that omniscience is impossible. But if there cannot be any omniscient beings, then God, at least as traditionally conceived, does not exist. The objection is, roughly, that the thesis that there is an omniscient being, in conjunction with some principles about grounding, such as its transitivity and irreflexivity, entails a contradiction. Since each of these principles is highly plausible, divine omniscience has to go. In this article, I argue that Whitcomb's argument, if sound, has several unacceptable consequences. Among others, it implies that nobody knows that someone has knowledge, that, for most of us, all of our beliefs are false, and that there are no truths. This reductio all by itself provides sufficient reason to reject the argument. However, I also provide a diagnosis of where precisely the argument goes wrong. I argue that Whitcomb's crucial notion of grounding actually covers two distinct relations and that the principle of transitivity is true only for cases in which one of these relations holds rather than both of them.

The notion of omnipotence has proved to be quite recalcitrant to analysis. Still, during the last three decades or so, there has resurfaced a clever argument to the effect that, whatever omnipotence is, it cannot be exemplified in God: an allegedly impeccable and all-perfect being. Scrutinizing this argument, however, I find it less than convincing. Moreover, and more importantly, I venture a positive account of my own: a non-technical and distinctively metaphysical definition of omnipotence which, if true, sidesteps quite a number of well-known pitfalls. Also, by way of introduction, I review some earlier attempts.

Pagan revivalism is a growing trend in the contemporary religious landscape. Is it possible to be a neopagan without disregarding the demands of reason? While outright belief in the old gods seems out of the question, I argue that polytheism represents a live epistemic possibility, and that non-doxastic paganism is therefore a viable option. However, the rational, non-doxastic neopagan should only commit to general polytheism, rather than a detailed, specific pagan pantheon (such as the Greek or Old Norse). I also suggest that the ancient pagan conception of the divine as radically immanent must be rejected.

The Augustinian conception of faith – according to which faith and belief precede knowledge and understanding – appears to entail an epistemic violation. For Augustine, faith is exercised when a testimonial report that P is believed on the basis of that report. This reconfigures the factors involved in assessing whether what is believed on faith is believed rationally. The specific goal of this article is, however, to determine whether believing specifically Christian testimony – and, thus, faith – is rational. Jonathan Adler identifies six forms of background evidence that constitute epistemic reasons for believing testimony. At least five of them appear to be fulfilled for Augustine in the case of believing Christian testimony. Thus, Augustinian faith is supported by epistemic reasons, and should be considered rational.