The late Karl Barth once wrote that no one can hope to overcome Ludwig Feuerbach ‘…with whining or with angry criticism of his views of religion.’ This is plainly correct, for Feuerbach's argument that religious language is always anthropological is an argument of great attractiveness—and, apparently, of great explanatory utility to psychologists, historians, and philosophers. Barth's solution to the problem raised by Feuerbach is less satisfactory. It just will not do for Christian believers simply to cleanse Christian theology of anthropological foundations by admitting ‘…that even in our relation to God,… we can lay claim to his truth, his certainty, his salvation as grace and only as grace’. Nor will it do for Christian believers, secure in the promise of divine succour, to ‘… laugh… at Feuerbach’ for his naive view of human possibilities. Even though a cleansing of theology may be helpful to the Church, it will have little (more likely, no) effect upon the widespread popular and scholarly acceptance of Feuerbach's conclusions.

A Divine Command Theory of Ethics is sometimes rejected on the grounds that such a theory is incompatible with human moral autonomy. If we assume that human beings are morally autonomous, the argument goes, then no human being can be obligated to perform any action simply because God (or any other agent) has commanded it. The incompatibility between a Divine Command Ethic and moral autonomy is a corollary of an argument James Rachels uses to deny the very existence of God. He argues that any being which can be denoted by the term God must be a being worthy of worship. But, in order to be a being worthy of worship it must be such that other beings owe it unconditional obedience. Since human beings are morally autonomous and cannot owe unconditional obedience to any other being, nothing can meet the criterion for being God. Hence, there is no possible state of affairs which includes both a being worthy of worship and morally autonomous human agents.

Debate over indigenization of Christianity continues in earnest even after the waning of the missionary zeal of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, set afire in no small measure by the wave of Great Awakening that swept New England and beyond. The context in which the Gospel of Christ is to be heard anew has ceased to be the God forsaken lands of heathens but is now one in which new challenges have emerged, ranging widely from Marxism and Islam, scientific scepticism and technological revolution, to urbanization and the rise of the ‘Third World’. In a country where since the early seventeenth century the Christians have scarcely numbered more than half of one percent of the population, the Gospel continues to intrigue the inquiring minds and the tired souls of the Japanese, particularly among the educated for many of whom the initial exposure to Christianity was through schooling or personal cultural enrichment. While many have regarded Christianity as a passage to Western culture and civilization when Japan still held the West in awe, worthy of emulation, others have taken upon themselves a more sobering, if troubling to some, task of inquiring whether the teaching of Christ could be the spiritual and social force to redeem and to transform the Japanese without relinquishing, if possible, but rather affirming the integrity of their own heritage. In no other country has a religious tradition exerted influence so far out of pro-portion to its membership as has Christianity in modern Japan.

To many Western students of India, svarāj and mokṣa have often seemed to represent two very different ideals of freedom, the former social, political, and modern; the latter individual, spiritual, and traditional. It is not surprising that the Hindu ideal of spiritual freedom is most commonly known by the term mokṣa (liberation), for it is this word that is usually listed as the fourth and supreme goal in the famous four ends of man (puruṣārtha). The first three ends, desire (kāma), success (artha), and morality (dharma), find their fulfillment within society, while mokṣa, it is generally said, takes one beyond society. It is pertinent to note, as Ingalls and others have pointed out, that mokṣa is a relatively late term, which came to be added to the older, first three goals of man. As a noun, mokṣa does not appear until the latest of the Upanisads, and then only three times, in Śvetāśvatara 6.16 and Maitrī 6.20 and 30. In addition, some orthodox schools did not accept the ideal of mokṣa for several more centuries, the Mīmāṁsā denying it until the eighth century A.D.

The ‘traditional’ view among philosophical (and many other) theologians, that God is eternal not merely in the sense of being everlasting but in the sense of being outside time altogether, has come under sharp criticism in recent years, both from biblical theologians and from philosophers. It is against the latter form of attack, particularly as represented by the detailed criticisms of Professor Nelson Pike, that I wish to try and defend the notion of a divine timelessness.

Philosophical Studies Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 163, l. 24 for ‘Pocreon’ read “Creon’ and p. 165, l.4 for “Nereus” read “Nessus”, l. 16 for “Corrolate” read “Correlate” and l. 27 for “Trachinae” read “Trachiniae”. Proffessor Mackinnon should also have been described as Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

The ontological argument appears in a multiplicity of forms. Over the past ten or twelve years, however, the philosophical community seems to have been concerned principally with those versions of the proof which claim that God is a necessary being. In contemporary literature, Professors Malcolm and Hartshorne have been the chief advocates of this view, both men holding that God must be conceived as a necessary being and that, as a result, his existence is able to be demonstrated a priori. This claim has not gone unchallenged; indeed, numerous writers have argued that neither Malcolm nor Hartshorne has exercised due care in his use of ‘necessary’. That is, critics charge that the arguments of both men have only the appearance of validity, for in their reasonings the defenders of the a priori proof have tacitly assumed that God is a logically necessary being. Whether or not a being can be logically necessary, however, is a quaestio disputata. In fact, until recently the question was not in dispute at all—virtually all ‘competent judges’ agreed that only propositions could be spoken of as logically necessary, and thus that God must be defined as a physically or factually necessary being. But is the statement, ‘a physically necessary being exists’, logically true? Critics of the ontological argument think not; and in support of this view they offer analyses of ‘physical necessity’ which, they feel, not only give meaning to the phrase, but also show that a physically necessary being's existence can be proven only by some kind of a posteriori investigation.

Someone may ask what the reasons are for putting religious experience and transcendence together. My answer is the following. My general philosophical position is empirical by nature. I am of the opinion that everything that is said about reality must in some way or other, in order to be true or probable, be related to or grounded in reality. If God is thought to be real in some sense of the word and if he is said to have the quality of being transcendent, there must be some sort of empirical reasons for it. Experience is generally - at least in its objective variant - a usual way of motivating propositions about reality. There is therefore reason to ask: Is there anything in religious experience that motivates giving God the predicate of transcendence? And on the other hand: What conditions would there have to be in our world of experience to justify a consideration of a theory of Transcendence?

Traditional theology asserts that God is omnipotent. I wi11 argue that there is no way that a person could be justified in believing that God is omnipotent. It follows that one cannot know that God is omnipotent, since knowledge requires justified belief.

My argument will be that our understanding of human beings, which is what I take the Christian doctrine of man to be concerned with, will benefit considerably from an examination of two different but related clusters of human attitudes which can be found respectively under the headings ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’. There are many pitfalls in the way of such an enterprise, and occasionally some prejudices to be overcome. For example L. E. Loemker in the relevant articles in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes a fairly lengthy discussion with the rather terminal judgement:

In spite of many claims by people who have had the kind of mystical experiences that I want to discuss, such experiences do not reveal any reality beyond the experience itself; nor does the experience itself constitute a cosmic principle such as the Godhead, Absolute, One or Chaos. These experiences are in the last analysis merely subjective experiences. I say ‘merely’ here only to deny that the experiences have any significance for the cosmologists; not to deny that the experience has significant value for the experiencer. It may be that the experiences are the ultimate goal attainable by human beings. Their value does not depend on their being the ultimate truth.

I am grateful to Philip Quinn for his thorough and penetrating critique of my paper on classical theism and pantheism. He has given me much to think about, and it would be philosophically remiss of me not to acknowledge that – in the light of his remarks – the argument which I employed in defence of the thesis that classical theism implies a version of pantheism might well benefit from some amendment. However, the purpose of this brief counter-rejoinder is to establish that the nexus of my argument has emerged from his commentary in reasonably robust health, i.e., to demonstrate that if the argument of my former paper is to be rejected, it will take something more than Professor Quinn's critique to make that clear. Very concisely, then, my response is as follows:

(1) At a preliminary point, Professor Quinn claims that my argument ‘merits careful scrutiny’ because, if it succeeds, ‘something shockingly at variance with received views’ will have been established (p. 290). I find this to be somewhat odd. For it seems clear that St Paul was a ‘classical theist’, indeed a very special one in so far as the shaping of Christian theism is concerned. And while his famous and oftcited dictum that God is the One in Whom ‘we live, move, and have our being’ may be such that it is permissible to construe it in ways which do not imply any version of pantheism, it clearly seems unjustified to maintain that pantheistic doctrines are ‘shockingly at variance’ with that most intriguing statement of St Paul's.

Q: If necessity is the mother of invention, whence necessity?

A. (Thesis): The matrix of necessity in God-talk is religious experience, philosophically interpreted. The interpreters, theists and non-thesists, have indeed been inventive.

Three very different assessments of the rationality of theistic belief have emerged from Oxford University in recent years. Richard Swinburne argues that theism is rationally demonstrable, producing a trilogy and more of books building an evidential case for theism. The late John Mackie, on the other hand, argued persistently that theism is not supported by the evidence usually offered for it and is controverted by our best evidence. The most rational course of action, according to him, is to be an atheist. Anthony Kenny, meanwhile, takes an agnostic position, arguing on personal grounds (but ones presumably available to any rational person) that he neither has adequate reason to accept theism nor adequate reason to embrace atheism. Although he says this issue is one on which it is important to have a view and one on which he formerly held a view, he unhappily finds himself in the position of being agnostic.

The problems that arise over the concept of the miraculous are of continuing importance for the philosophy of religion, and because of their relation to issues such as the nature of explanation, and of scientific laws, they are of considerable interest to philosophy in general.

Eleonore Stump insightfully develops Aquinas's theodicy to account for a significant source of human suffering, namely the undermining of desires of the heart. Stump argues that what justifies God in allowing such suffering is benefits made available to the sufferer through her suffering that can defeat the suffering by contributing to the fulfilment of her heart's desires. We summarize Stump's arguments for why such suffering requires defeat and how it is defeated. We identify three problems with Stump's account of how such suffering is defeated and offer solutions to each. We defend and strengthen Stump's response to the hardest cases for her view, and explain what her view demands of God.

In this paper, I consider various arguments to the effect that natural evils are necessary for there to be created agents with free will of the sort that the traditional free-will defence for the problem of moral evil suggests we enjoy – arguments based on the idea that evil-doing requires the doer to use natural means in their agency. I conclude that, despite prima facie plausibility, these arguments do not, in fact, work. I provide my own argument for there being no possible world in which creatures enjoying this sort of freedom exist yet suffer no natural evil, and conclude that the way is thus open for extending the free-will defence to the problem of natural evil.

In my Contemporary Critiques of Religion and in my Scepticism, I argue that non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God do not make sense. By this I mean that we do not have sound grounds for believing that the central truth-claims of Christianity are genuine truth-claims and that we do not have a religiously viable concept of God. I argue that this is so principally because of three interrelated features about God-talk. (I) While purporting to be factual assertions, central bits of God-talk, e.g. ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves man-kind’, are not even in principle verifiable (confirmable or disconfirmable) in such a way that we can say what experienceable states of affairs would count for these putative assertions and against their denials, such that we could say what it would be like to have evidence which would make either their assertion or their denial more or less probably true. (2) Personal predicates, e.g. ‘loves’, ‘creates’, are at least seemingly essential in the use of God-talk, yet they suffer from such an attenuation of meaning in their employment in religious linguistic environments that it at least appears to be the case that we have in such environments unwittingly emptied these predicates of all intelligible meaning so that we do not understand what we are asserting or denying when we utter ‘God loves mankind’ or ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and the like. (3) When we make well-formed assertions, it appears at least to be the case that a necessary condition for such wellformedness is that we should be able successfully to identify the subject of that putative statement so that we can understand what it is that we are talking about and thus understand that a genuine statement has actually been made. But, where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically, we have no even tolerably clear idea about how God, an infinite individual, occupying no particular place or existing at no particular time, and being utterly transcendent to the world, can be identified. Indeed we have no coherent idea of what it would be like to identify him and this means we have no coherent idea of what it would be like for God even to be a person or an it. He cannot be picked out and identified in the way persons and things can.

Process theology is far less prominent in Britain than in its country of origin, but its central doctrine of a developing God would prove, I think, to be held by many British theologians if one made enquiry. Professor Keith Ward may show which way the wind is blowing when he writes in his recent book Rational Theology and the Creativity of God: ‘only if God is temporal, can he be the free creator of a universe of free creatures; only if he is eternal, can he possess that necessity which is the foundation of the world; only if he is dipolar, can he be both’. To that extent he accepts the Whitehead-Hartshorne position. Why has the the absolute timelessness of God seemed obvious so regularly to thinking religious people down the ages? It must be, I shall say, that they have felt themselves in touch somehow with another world, or rather another state, in which time is absolutely transcended. But I am not concerned only with that in this article. My business is to suggest that process theology is important for a number of reasons. I shall return to Ward's book at the end.