According to the Free Will Explanation of a traditional view of hell, human freedom explains why some human persons are in hell. Human freedom also explains its punishment and finality: persons in hell have freely developed moral vices that are their own punishment and that make repentance psychologically impossible. So, even though God continues to desire reconciliation with persons in hell, damned persons do not want reconciliation with God. But this moral vice explanation of hell's finality is implausible. I argue that God can and would make direct or indirect alterations in their character to give them new motivational reasons that re-enable their freedom to repent. Subsequently, I argue that it is probable that each damned person will be saved eventually, because there is a potential infinity of opportunities for free repentance. Thus, if the Free Will Explanation's descriptions of hell and divine love are correct, it is highly probable that each person in hell escapes to heaven.

Relying on inference to the best explanation (IBE) requires one to hold the intuition that the world is ‘intelligible’, that is, such that states of affairs at least generally have explanations for their obtaining. I argue that metaphysical naturalists are rationally required to withhold this intuition, unless they cease to be naturalists. This is because all plausible naturalistic aetiologies of the intuition entail that the intuition and the state of affairs which it represents are not causally connected in an epistemically appropriate way. Given that one ought to rely on IBE, naturalists are forced to pick the latter and change their world-view. Traditional theists, in contrast, do not face this predicament. This, I argue, is strong grounds for preferring traditional theism to naturalism.

The Hindu Divine Mother is revered by millions of religious practitioners in India and elsewhere, yet this goddess rarely receives attention in Western philosophy of religion. Focusing especially (though not exclusively) on her form as Kālī, this article utilizes sources from Hindu goddess traditions to explicate her contrasting characteristics, which include benign maternality and martial aggression. By adapting an embodied theological (or thealogical) approach derived from feminist discourse, the intelligibility of worshipping such a goddess is expounded; connections are delineated between the conceptualizing of divinity as radically ambivalent or multivalent and the lived experience of inhabiting an often hostile world.

If God commanded something that would ordinarily be classified as a terrible evil, would we have a moral obligation to obey? In two previous articles in this journal, I examined and evaluated several different ways in which a divine command theorist might answer this question. Richard Brian Davis and W. Paul Franks have now provided a vigorous rebuttal, in which they argue that my way of handling the relevant counterpossible conditionals is flawed, and that a divine command theorist who avails herself of the metaphysical platform of theistic activism can consistently say that if (per impossibile) God were to command some terrible evil, it would not be the case that we have a moral obligation to do it. In the present article, I clarify my own view and defend it against Davis and Franks's objections. I also argue that the core claim of theistic activism – that there would be nothing at all if there were no God – does not have all the dramatic implications that Davis and Franks claim for it.

F. H. Jacobi (1743–1819), a key figure in the philosophical debates at the close of the eighteenth century in Germany, has long been regarded as an irrationalist for allegedly advocating a blind ‘leap of faith’. The central claim of this essay is that this venerable charge is misplaced. Following a reconstruction of what a charge of irrationalism might amount to, two of Jacobi's most important works, the Spinoza Letters (1785) and David Hume (1787), are scrutinized for traces of irrationalism. Far from being an irrationalist, Jacobi is best read as questioning the analytical-geometrical model of rationality popular among his contemporaries, and of proposing a more naturalistic theory of rationality that situates it more firmly in human psychology, the ultimate import of which lies in a reconceptualization of the relation between faith and reason.

First, I suggest that it is possible to make some further improvements upon the Gödelian ontological arguments that Pruss develops. Then, I argue that it is possible to parody Pruss's Gödelian ontological arguments in a way that shows that they make no contribution towards ‘lowering the probability of atheism and raising the probability of theism’. I conclude with some remarks about ways in which the arguments of this paper can be extended to apply to the whole family of Gödelian ontological arguments.

The recent philosophical literature on religious experience has mostly been concerned with experiences which are taken by the subject of the experience to be directly of God or some other supernatural entity, or to involve some suspension of the subject–object structure of conventional experience. In this paper I consider a further kind of experience, where the sense of God is mediated by way of an appreciation of the existential meanings which are presented by a material context. In this way the paper aims to extend the standard philosophical concept of religious experience so as to take account of phenomenological treatments of sacred place, and to give more prominence to the materially mediated or sacramental character of much religious experience.

In this article we respond to arguments from William Hasker and David Kyle Johnson that free will is incompatible with both divine foreknowledge and eternalism (what we refer to as isotemporalism). In particular, we sketch an Anselmian account of time and freedom, briefly defend the view against Hasker's critique, and then respond in more depth to Johnson's claim that Anselmian freedom is incompatible with free will because it entails that our actions are ‘ontologically necessary’. In defending Anselmian freedom we argue that our ordinary intuitions do not support Johnson's case and that Anselmian freedom is compatible with deliberation.

The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of Natural Selection has been discovered. Charles Darwin

In such a chain too, or succession of objects, each part is caused by that which preceded it, and causes that which succeeds it. Where then is the difficulty? But the WHOLE, you say, wants a cause. I answer, that the uniting of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct counties into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body, is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable, should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts. (David Hume)

One of the most vexing problems in the philosophy of religion is the existence of moral evil in light of an omnipotent and wholly good deity. A popular mode of diffusing the argument from evil lies in the appeal to free will. Traditionally it is argued that there is a strong connection, even a necessary one, between the ability to exercise free will and the occurrence of wrong-doing. Transworld depravity, as characterized by Alvin Plantinga, is a concept which has gone far to explain this relationship. Essentially, the notion of transworld depravity involves the claim that in any world where a person is significantly free that person would, on some occasion, act morally wrongly, or as Plantinga phrases it: ‘If S' were actual, P would go wrong with respect to A’ (where S' is a possible world, P is a person and A is an action). Not only, Plantinga claims, is it possible that there are persons who suffer from transworld depravity, but ‘it is possible that everybody suffers from it’. If transworld depravity obtains, Plantinga notes, God ‘might have been able to create worlds in which moral evil is very considerably outweighed by moral good; but it was not within His power to create worlds containing moral good but no moral evil – and this despite the fact that He is omnipotent’. On this view, God could not instantiate perfect-person essences who would not ever sin. Although Plantinga argues that these instantiated beings are significantly free in that they could have done otherwise (i.e. not sinned), it does seem that his claim about transworld depravity amounts to a claim about transworld depravity amounts to a claim about the existence of a necessary connection obtaining between freedom and evil. For even though it makes sense to claim that an individual may have unactualized dispositions, to claim that everyone, past, present and future, has unactualized dispositions seems to be a significantly different claim. It is therefore difficult to see how this latter claim differs in substance from the claim of a necessary connection obtaining between the capacity for free will and the commission of evil acts.

Christianity affirms, with Judaism and Islam, that God is the omnipotent Creator of all things. But it diverges from them in also affirming that the Creator assumed a human nature in one figure of history, Jesus of Nazareth. Christ thus differs from other men in kind, not merely in degree; he is absolutely, not just relatively, unique. Admittedly many Christian theologians have held that the difference between Christ and other men is only one of degree. Yet the Church's traditional claim, as expressed in the Chalcedonian Definition, is that Jesus was both creature and Creator, both fully man and fully God.

Mysticism and the mystical experience seemingly play little or no part in our Western tradition. Certainly there is no mystical tradition in the West such as Zen Buddhism, nor is there any great understanding of or influence from the writings of Heraclitus, Spinoza, or the mystical passages in the early work of Wittgenstein. Mysticism has been generally misunderstood in the West, and it has even evoked the attacks of philosophers and theologians.1 Mysticism to many conjures up images of monks meditating in caves; it is generally pictured as esoteric, otherworldly, irrational, and at best irrelevant to the daily lives of human beings. If what we say below is correct, it will be seen that mysticism is none of these but is rather a singular human experience that lies at the foundations of civilization.

The issue of free will versus fate can be analysed in three ways in relation to the Bhagavadgīā,: (1) by focusing on those verses of the Gita which address themselves to this question; (2) by focusing on the figure of Arjuna himself who, as will be shown, crystallizes around his person the issue of free will and fate; and (3) by focusing on the Kauravas who are similarly involved in the issue.

An assessment is made of Rudolf Otto's criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher's claim that religious feeling is to be interpreted as essentially involving a feeling of absolute dependence. Otto's criticisms are divided into two kinds. The first suggest that a feeling a dependence, even an absolute one, is the wrong sort of feeling to locate at the heart of religious consciousness. It is argued that this criticism is based on misinterpretations of Schleiermacher's view, which is in fact much closer to Otto's than the latter appreciated. The second kind of criticism suggests that the feeling of absolute dependence cannot play the foundational role assigned to it by Schleiermacher, since it is itself a secondary response. It is argued not only that Otto provides no justification for this criticism, but that Otto's own position is incoherent unless Schleiermacher's view is accepted.

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die in extreme agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, shall be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should will one venial untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse (John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua)

The purpose of this paper is to clear up the long-standing veritable mountain of misinterpretation, perpetuated from critic to critic, concerning the admittedly problematic concept of self-authenticating (i.e. unmistakable) religious experience. While it may well be the case, as many have argued, that a sort of ‘experience’ about which one could not be mistaken is simply a logically impossible state of affairs, this cannot be known to be the case so long as what is under attack is (as I hope to show) a bogus concept, obviously absurd, having nothing whatsoever to do with the correct interpretation of ‘self-authentication’. Hence, my mission herein is essentially that of philosophical analysis or clarification of meaning. Only upon suitable clarification of this concept will we be in a position to consider the question of its possible application, i.e. whether or not there could be an instantiation of such experience. I might point out that my central concern is somewhat more explicatory than historical, though I believe that the account developed in this paper is essentially congenial with the intent of those who have been proponents of the view that there can be self-authenticating religious experience. Let us begin, then, by turning to some representative criticism of the concept in question.

Dale Tuggy argues that his divine-deception argument against Social Trinitarianism remains unscathed, in spite of my recent objections. I maintain that his argument is question-begging and exegetically weak, and does not succeed in refuting Social Trinitarianism.