Understanding ‘responsibility’ in its normal sense of freely fulfilling a role in a collaborative scheme, rather than as a basic agent integrity or prosocial disposition, I argue that the desirability of responsibility is one of the main supporting and constraining factors in the formation of religious thought and practice, with diversely typical manifestations. For those who are disposed to assume responsibility and to be religious, religious beliefs and practices offer a way of maximally enlarging one's responsibility, an intrinsically appealing prospect. The global relevance of religious responsibility is shown by comparing exemplars in a wide range of cultures. Aeneas, Kongzi, Dharmakara, and Miaoshan each embody maximal responsibility in a distinct way that motivates and sets standards for a religiosity.

Any list of important changes in Western religion in the last hundred years would mention the rise ofliberal Protestantism (and the associated ecumenical movement), and the decline in size and influence of the Protestant churches. What has been less obvious is the partial operation of secularization; in Britain and America liberal Protestant churches have declined more than their conservative rivals. In summary one could speak of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries as an era in which liberal Protestantism rose and then declined. This essay will attempt to synthesize, from a variety of sociological ideas, a suggested outline for a comprehensive explanation of that rise and fall. Such an ambitious and necessarily speculative project will require the argument to be conducted at a high level of abstraction but at various junctures details from the biographies of individuals and the careers of organizations will be introduced to illustrate and exemplify the points being made.

Not only during his lifetime but for some years after his death Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling remained a figure of controversy. Few academic philosophers have been more execrated by their opponents, since with him intellectual differences quickly turned into personal animosities. That this was so was not simply his ill–luck; Schelling was always an ‘awkward customer’ to deal with. His vanity, which was inordinate, was no doubt basically temperamental, but it had been stimulated by the remarkable literary success of his early years, in which he appeared before the world as a prodigy. Increasingly touchy and irritable as he grew older, the least criticism struck him as a personal affront and disagreement as intended injury. The bitterness of his response, to intellectual equals and inferiors alike, was almost invariably such as to end in severed relationships. Thus he quarrelled in turn with Jacobi, with Fichte and with Friedrich Schlegel, as well as with lesser lights such as Baader and Eschenmayer, and even with his own pupils –J. J. Wagner, Krause, Stahl, Kohn and others. Those who managed to stay on good terms with him – men like Windischmann, Victor Cousin and his own publisher Cotta – had to learn to put up with his rancour. But of all with whom he fell foul the most eminent was Hegel, whom he regarded as his arch–enemy. The reason, little creditable to Schelling, is not far to seek. Originally fellow–students at Tübingen, they later became colleagues at Jena, where Schelling, the younger of the two, had already acquired national fame. By contrast the future author of the Phenomenology of Spirit was evidently as yet no more than a worthy but hardly scintillating collaborator with his academic senior in running a philosophical journal.

I present Ned Markosian's episodic account of identity under a sortal, and then use it to sketch a new model of the Trinity. I show that the model can be used to solve at least three important Trinitarian puzzles: the traditional ‘logical problem of the Trinity’, a less-discussed problem that has been dubbed the ‘problem of triunity’, and a problem about the divine processions that has been enjoying increased attention in the recent literature.

‘For the inference involved in our knowledge of other minds is not, after all, an inference to them as bodily existences…’ (H. D. Lewis)

In his recent and typically thought-provoking paper, ‘On the Rationality of Radical Theological Non-Naturalism’, Kai Nielsen attacks those who, like Terence Penelhum, believe that ‘there is no good reason to think that we could not, with a little ingenuity, think up some non-theistic statements which would serve, if true, to put some theistic conclusions beyond reason-able doubt’.

In an article in Philosophy (1968, pp. 199–211) R. G. Swinburne set out to argue that none of Hume's formal objections to the design argument ‘have any validity against a carefully articulated version of the argument’ (p. 199). This, he maintained, is largely because Hume's criticisms ‘are bad criticisms of the argument in any form’ (p. 206). The ensuing controversy between Swinburne and Olding1 has focused upon the acceptable/unacceptable aspects of the dualism presupposed in Swinburne's defence of the design argument; upon whether any simplification is achieved by reducing scientific explanation to agent explanation; and upon the problems which arise from taking a man's acting upon his body (or the material universe within his reach) as the analogy for understanding a disembodied agent acting upon matter. In this article I shall refer to the Swinburne-Olding controversy when appropriate but my main concern is to return to Swinburne's original article and argue, seriatim, that Hume's individual criticisms of the design argument are for the most part a great deal more powerful than Swinburne allowed. I shall contend that cumulatively they destroy the design argument as any sort of rational foundation for theistic belief. But first I shall indicate briefly the character of the argument together with one or two of the distinctions and refinements in terms of which it has been found helpful to carry on the discussion in recent years.

When are sentences A and B the same belief? Following Quine, observation sentences A and B are the same belief when they share the same stimulus–meaning, similar patterns of assent and dissent by subjects when the sentences are queried in the presence of the same non–linguistic stimuli. As for non–observation sentences we note a suggestion of Karl Schick: apply linguistic stimuli in the form of utterances of the language, and map the connections between sentences in the language in terms of linguistic conditioned–responses to utterances. The mapping will yield a network of relations between non–observation sentences themselves, and between the latter and observation sentences at the ‘periphery’. Thus, each sentence receives its place in the overall criss–crossing of relations in the network of the language. Out of a commitment to the ‘autonomy of meaning’, we can say that when A and B are non–observational, they are the same belief when they occupy similar places in the network of sentences in a given language, or corresponding places in corresponding networks of two languages. (Since we can identify the place of sentences in the language network, and since the present suggestion identifies the sameness of belief with location identity, it turns out that there needn't be indeterminacy of translocation.)

In this paper I would like to begin following up a suggestion made informally in conversation by Professor Mircea Eliade that someone with an interest in phenomenology of religion take a serious look at the writings of the American anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda. Since the appearance of his most recent book two years ago, there has been a growing bibliography of commentaries on and interviews with this scholar. To my knowledge, however, no one has yet attempted to bring to bear on his works some of the insights derived from the comparative approach of a phenomenology of religion. This paper will only be a step in that direction. It is intended in the first place to set some relatively new material before a group of scholars in order to invite comments from various special disciplines. Throughout, it is prompted by my own personal curiosity and informed, for better or worse, by my own developing understanding of the aims and procedures of a general phenomenology of religion.

Stephen Jay Gould and others have argued that what we know about evolution implies that human beings are a ‘cosmic accident’. In this paper I examine an argument for Gould's view and then attempt to show that it fails. Contrary to the claims of Gould, Daniel Dennett, and others, it is a mistake to think that what we have learned from evolutionary biology somehow shows that human beings are mere accidents of natural history. Nor does what we know about the contingency of evolution give us good reason to reject the view that human beings came to be according to a divine providential plan.

(I). In a number of papers I have sought to discuss and cast some doubt on a certain strategy of response to an argument that purports to show that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. This argument proceeds from the alleged ‘fixity of the past’ to the conclusion that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. William Lane Craig has (rather vigorously) criticized my approach to these issues. Here I should like to respond to some of Craig's claims. My goal is to attempt to achieve a clearer, more penetrating view of some of the issues pertaining to the relationship between God's foreknowledge and human freedom. The focus here will be on a strategy of response to the incompatibilist's argument which is associated with William of Ockham.

This article explores some critical issues pertinent to the practice of ‘global-critical’ philosophy of religion. Here, I focus on two general issues, especially as they have arisen in the production of a textbook and other pedagogical materials for an undergraduate course in philosophy of religion that is globally diverse and critically engaged: (1) how to restructure philosophy of religion with topics and questions suitable for ‘global’ enquiry; (2) how to philosophize about (global) religion in a manner that is ‘critically’ aware of theoretical and methodological issues in the academic study of religion, yet also pursues philosophical questions of meaning, value, and truth.

Vincent Brümmer has recently, by taking his starting-point in the writings of Wittgenstein, defended the idea that the debate about the truth or falsehood of the claim that God exists has no future. I suggest that the arguments Brümmer develops to support this claim fail. This is so because he does not show why any attempt to prove or disprove the truth or falsehood of the belief in the existence of God is circular or how the purported non-provability of the belief that God exists entails that the theism–atheism debate of the truth or falsehood of this belief has no future. In addition, Brümmer does not acknowledge that there are many different religious language-games, that within the theistic language-games the claim that God exists is used in many different ways and that, as a result, it is not true that, within the religious language-game, the belief in the existence of God cannot be doubted, denied, or treated as a hypothesis.

Both Molinism and Anselmianism attempt to preserve libertarian freedom for created agents as well as robust divine sovereignty. The two issues intersect in addressing the puzzle of Christ's freedom: If God is necessarily good, how can God Incarnate be free? Anselm answers: while human agents need options for our choices to be up to us, Christ inevitably chooses rightly with perfect freedom. I defend Anselm's answer against a general criticism and then argue that Anselm's position is preferable to the Molinist solution which has recently been championed by Thomas P. Flint.

To many it seems obvious that any reduction of the nature of man to purely physical components involves an (at least) indirect attack on the doctrine of human immortality. To so reduce human nature, it may be argued, is to eliminate the soul and it is this essential component of man, rather than his body, which is the foundation of his immortality. This seems to me an altogether mistaken notion. My purpose in this paper, therefore, is to clarify the relation of physicalism and immortality and thereby to reveal the error in this alleged incompatibility.

This paper begins by surveying some of the problems facing Swinburne's general approach, finding unfortunate the absence from his tetralogy of a strategy (suggested at the end of the previous trilogy) that might have helped to alleviate them, namely an attempt to show that a traditional Christian creed is more probable than the creed of any other religion. It then discusses certain particular arguments of the tetralogy – arguments offered in defence of the traditional Christian doctrine of the Atonement – which are central to the detailed working out of the approach, concluding that they are unacceptable.

Richard Swinburne's tetralogy on Christian doctrine, together with his earlier trilogy on the philosophy of theism, is one of the most important apologetic projects of recent times. This paper focuses on some difficulties with this project that stem from Swinburne's use of confirmation theory. Arguably, the problem of dwindling probabilities, pointed out by Plantinga, has not been solved. The paper is principally focused, however, on the ways in which Swinburne's confirmation theory contributes to his comparative neglect of the personal, existential dimension of Christianity. A solution for these difficulties is suggested but not elaborated.