Brian Leftow continues to argue against my use of the constitution relation in explaining the Trinity. I consider his arguments, and have a bit more to say about Leftow's own formulation of trinitarian doctrine.

I defend a new version of the non-identity theodicy. After presenting the theodicy, I reply to a series of objections. I then argue that my approach improves upon similar approaches in the literature.

Could a theory concerning the temporal structure of the universe have any implications for the possibility of a creator? A recent remark by Stephen Hawking suggests that it could. In A Brief History of Time, Hawking writes:

The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary … has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe… So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

I reconsider the idea that there is an analogy between belief in other minds and belief in God, and examine two approaches to the relevant beliefs. The ‘explanatory inductive’ approach raises difficulties in both contexts, and involves questionable assumptions. The ‘expressivist’ approach is more promising, and presupposes a more satisfactory metaphysical framework in the first context. Its application to God is similarly insightful, and offers an intellectually respectable, albeit resistible, version of the doctrine that nature is a book of lessons.

In this article I reply to Jon Robson's objections to my argument that God does not contain any possible worlds. I had argued that ugly possible worlds clearly compromise God's beauty. Robson argues that I failed to show that possible worlds can be subject to aesthetic evaluation, and that even if they were it could be the case that ugliness might contribute to God's overall beauty. In reply I try to show that possible worlds are aesthetically evaluable by arguing that possible worlds are maximally rich representations of possible events. I further argue that nothing in God's being can be aesthetically non-evaluable since God must be maximal beauty – a beauteous maximality which needs no ugliness. Finally I show in what sense Christ's heavenly scars can be beautiful.

Modern analytic philosophy of religion has become increasingly interested in the dogmatic substances of Christian theology. I argue that the doctrine of the Trinity provides an instance of the importance of dogmatic formulation for an appreciation of the philosophical aspect of the Christian concept of God. The starting point of mydiscussion is the recent defence of pantheism by Michael Levine, and his discussion of Neoplatonist and German Idealist models of deity. Both metaphysical theism and the alleged Neoplatonic metaphysical genealogy of pantheism are considered with particular reference to St Augustine's account of creation in the Confessions. Just as it is impossible to distinguish the purely philosophical from the purely dogmatic concept of God, one cannot give an adequate modern account of theism without a rigorous and sensitive treatment of the historical models. The issue of pantheism shows how a misunderstanding of the meaning of concept of ‘unity’ can distort our view of theism as a model of deity.

Over the past century, divine passibility has become the majority view within Christian theology and philosophy of religion. Yet it faces a serious objection from proponents of impassibility that I shall call the Problem of Creepy Emotions. In this article, I shall develop the objection in detail, and explore two ways for divine passibilists to answer this objection. I shall do this in several steps. First, I will offer some brief historical remarks to help readers understand that divine empathy is the watershed issue in the debate over impassibility and passibility. In particular, impassibility denies that God has empathy, whereas passibility affirms that God has empathy. Second, I provide definitions of important concepts for this debate such as impassibility, passibility, emotions, and empathy. I shall articulate Linda Zagzebski's recent account of passibility called omnisubjectivity, or perfect empathy. Third, I shall examine the Problem of Creepy Emotions that arises from the affirmation that God has perfect empathy. Fourth, I shall explore two different strategies that divine passibility can employ to avoid the Problem of Creepy Emotions.

Advocates of the traditional argument from evil assume that an omnipotent and morally perfect being, God, would create a world of the greatest value possible. They dispute that this world is such a world. It is difficult to disagree. They go on to conclude that this world could not have been created by God. It is, however, possible consistently both to agree that God could have guaranteed the existence of a better world than this world and to reject the conclusion that this world could not have been created by God. Specifically, one may argue that this world is not a world of the greatest value God could guarantee, not because there is some other world which is, but because there is no such world. After all, it is plausible that for any possible world, no matter how good, there is another possible world which is even better, that the range of values for possible worlds has no upper limit. If this is correct, then for any world God creates there is a better world God could have created. So the argument from evil collapses, since it is logically impossible even for an omnipotent god to create a particular world which is the best or equal best possible world. God cannot act in accordance with the prescription ‘Create the best world possible!’, since there is no such thing. Nor can God act in accordance with the prescription ‘Create the best world you can!’, since from the perspective of an omnipotent being there is no such thing. This no best world defence has been advanced by Peter Forrest, John McHarry and George Schlesinger.

Julian N. Hartt once observed that Calvin so accentuates divine causation that he denies all secondary agency. A strong statement of God's omnipotence commits Calvin to the position that divine causation is the only connection that has any foundation in reality. And this claim, Hartt noted, places Calvin dangerously close to Spinozism. I have no stake (nor does Hartt) in any analysis that attempts to indicate affinities between Calvin and the Dutch rationalist whom he predates by several generations. But, as Hartt suggested and as I will demonstrate, a persuasive case can be made for Calvin's commitment to a thoroughgoing causal determinism that has God at the helm directing every event. Now one should note at the outset that Calvin has solid theological reasons for stressing the role of God's all-determining will in the course of events. As a Reformation theologian, he is a persistent defender of the utter gratuitousness of grace, thereby denying that the moral, spiritual, and epistemological chasm separating the human and the divine can in any way be reconciled by human being. Yet, for Calvin, grace possesses an omnicompetence – even faith is the gift of grace – which, when examined within the total context of his thought, reveals the radical dependence of the entire created order upon the will of God.

This paper extends the orthodox bounds of explanatory rationalism by showing there can be an explanation of why there are positive contingent truths. A positive contingent truth is a true proposition that entails that at least one contingent concrete object exists. It is widely thought that it is impossible to explain why there are positive contingent truths. For example, it is thought by Rowe that ‘God created the universe’ is a positive contingent truth and therefore cannot explain why there are positive contingent truths. I show, however, that the reasoning behind this orthodox view is unsound and that it is possible to explain why there are positive contingent truths.

The doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine that God has no physical or metaphysical complexity whatsoever, is not a doctrine designed to induce immediate philosophical acquiescence. There are severe questions about its coherence. And even if those questions can be answered satisfactorily in favour of the doctrine, there remains the question why anyone should accept it. Thomas V. Morris raises both sorts of questions about a version of the doctrine which I have put forward. In the following pages I shall respond to what I take to be the most serious of Morris's objections. I shall argue that the doctrine survives Morris's onslaught, but that one observation of his points it in a direction I had hitherto not taken seriously. The bulk of Morris's paper raises questions of the first sort; perforce the bulk of my paper will also. I shall offer, at the end, a reason for thinking that neither of us is yet in a position to pronounce categorically on the second question. My remarks in this paper constitute an interim report on how I think things presently stand with divine simplicity.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of what is sometimes called ‘the literary and dramatic character’ of Hume's Dialogues. This importance is such that not taking this specific character of the Dialogues into account leads to conclusions opposite to the ones Hume, in the special form he gave to his work, was trying to impart to his readers. I will offer my analysis in opposition to the one, voiced by, for instance D. W. Harward, in which ‘the apparent philosophical inconsistencies in the Dialogues are resolved without appeal to Hume's commitment to “literary or dramatic balance,” an appeal few of us find convincing or philosophically interesting’ (Harward, 1976, p. 138). The last part of Harward's statement is of course only of biographical interest; however, the attempt to offer an interpretation of Hume's Dialogues in which the literary character of the work is wilfully set aside, comes to missing a basic understanding for the man and the work. In what follows I will make this explicit by a number of points, each of which shows the importance of this literary and dramatic character of the Dialogues. In each case the result could not be reached without taking this special character into account.

Throughout their long history suffering has been the hallmark of the Jewish people. Driven from their homeland, buffeted from country to country and plagued by persecutions, Jews have been rejected, despised and led as a lamb to the slaughter. The Holocaust is the most recent chapter in this tragic record of events. The Third Reich's system of murder squads, concentration camps and killing centres eliminated nearly 6 million Jews; though Jewish communities had previously been decimated, such large scale devastation profoundly affected the Jewish religious consciousness. For many Jews it has seemed impossible to reconcile the concept of a loving, compassionate and merciful God with the terrible events of the Nazi regime. A number of important Jewish thinkers have grappled with traditional beliefs about God in the light of such suffering, but in various ways their responses are inadequate. If the Jewish faith is to survive, Holocaust theology will need to incorporate a belief in the Afterlife in which the righteous of Israel who died in the death camps will receive their due reward.

Many writers (including professional philosophers) often generalise about mysticism without a sufficiently close analysis of texts. Consequently the generalisations are often invalid. My present aim is to analyse one text and, in the light of this analysis, to offer some observations concerning mysticism in general and Christian mysticism in particular.

Few propositions are so widely affirmed among Christian theists as (1) God is wholly good. We say of God that he is wholly good when we mean to say that God never does evil. One proposed explanation for why God is wholly good, of course, is that (2) God is necessarily good. Although (1) is (I suspect, wholly) uncontroversial among Christian theists, (2) clearly does not enjoy such universal favour. Whereas such prominent theists as St Anselm, St Thomas Aquinas, Alvin Plantinga (1974), and T. V. Morris (1987) have defended the truth of (2), other theists claim to have found good reason to doubt God's necessary goodness. In this paper I will attempt to show that God's goodness is accidental to him. My argument will proceed faithfully along Anselmian lines, i.e. a key premise will concern God conceived of as ‘ the being than which none greater can be conceived’. In addition to this, I will need to activate action-theoretic machinery which will be crucial to the derivation. Rather than detracting from God's greatness, the argument's conclusion, namely (3) God is contingently good, is seen as faithfully articulating one facet of Anselm's core intuition of God as the ‘greatest possible being’. Is God necessarily good? I shall shortly present an argument which gives one good reason to doubt God's necessary goodness. But before I begin, I shall need to develop a backdrop of philosophical theology and action-theoretic machinery from which to suspend the argument in question.

The Dalai Lama is fond of quoting a statement in which the Buddha is said to have asserted that no one should accept his word out of respect for the Buddha himself, but only after testing it, analysing it ‘ as a goldsmith analyses gold, through cutting, melting, scraping and rubbing it’. The Dalai Lama is often referred to as the temporal and spiritual leader of Tibet, but in truth as a spiritual figure His Holiness, while respected, indeed revered by almost all Tibetans, usually speaks from within the perspective of one particular tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, that of the dGe lugs (pronounced ‘Geluk’). Founded in the late fourteenth century by Tsong kha pa, the dGe lugs has always stressed the importance of reasoning, analytic rationality, on the spiritual path. This dGe lugs perspective is by no means shared by all Buddhists, at least not in the form it there takes. Nevertheless it does represent an important direction in Buddhist thinking on reasoning and the spiritual path which can be traced back in Indian Buddhism a very long way indeed, and it is in the light of dGe lugs thought that I want to contemplate two points which seem to be crucial in Raimundo Panikkar's approach to interreligious dialogue and understanding: first, that Reality, Being, transcends the intelligible, the range of consciousness, and second, that understanding this is the only basis for tolerance, not seeking in one way or another to overcome the other.

In a tribute to the work of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff characterizes a form of the analytic tradition in philosophy of religion, which neither he nor Plantinga endorses, as a brand of Kant-rationality. What such rationality aims to achieve is, above all, a universality of rational agreement, or rather ‘a foundation that is acceptable to all rational reflective human-beings’, something that could be acknowledged by ‘all cognitively competent adult human beings’ who had access to the same relevant information or facts.

In the philosophical world Anselm is known almost exclusively for the work in his two earliest writings, the Monologion and Proslogion, which, of course, includes his celebrated ontological argument for the existence of God. It is unfortunate that the rest of his work is not more widely known, for he makes some important contributions to western thought in later treatises that are virtually unknown to present-day philosophers and theologians. One such contribution is his concept of freedom, which he explains and defends primarily in De Libertate Arbitrii (hereafter DLA), written somewhere between 1085 and 1090. Anselm's concept of freedom is important for a number of reasons. First, he argues for a definition of freedom which is significantly different from others found in the history of western thought. Second, in his investigation of freedom he makes use of a methodological procedure which in certain respects has striking similarities (though there are also important differences) to certain analytic techniques well-known today. And finally, the single definition that Anselm provides is intended to include in its compass two major and seemingly different senses of ‘freedom’.

In this paper I first point out that happiness might of its nature be unamenable to the calculating ‘plan of life’ approach, and argue that the incompatible model of a personal search, by no means implying ‘ontological subjectivity’ though, fits in more smoothly with the idea. Secondly, I discuss the arguments assembled by Aquinas for a view of this type. I argue thirdly that although we can show there is some one thing in which all happiness consists, whatever it may be it must be incompatible with temporal life, whether or not any other is possible. Hence a discussion which excludes ‘transcendence’ will not get to grips with the concept of happiness.

In the past few years, the focus of arguments against theism has shifted. Where previously the existence of evil has been thought by many demonstrative of the impossibility of God's existence, now it is frequently purveyed as merely evidence against the existence of a Supreme Being. Even this more modest claim has been forcefully denied by William Alston and Peter van Inwagen. I argue that their arguments are not persuasive. Not only do they suffer logical flaws but, if accepted, actually have pernicious effects on the values of reasoning and religious practice.