The notions of a ‘devotional experiment’ and an ‘experimental faith’ have been unduly neglected in the philosophy of religion. There seems to be a widespread assumption that experiments in spiritual matters are impossible in principle; the hypotheses in question simply do not lend themselves to empirical testing. This is unfortunate, since any discussion of these notions inevitably sheds light on such central issues as the nature of faith and belief, the rational evaluation of belief systems, and the evidential force of religious experiences.

The classical pragmatists were as concerned as any of their modern philosophical predecessors that the moral and religious aspects of human life not be swamped by the successes of the physical sciences. It was John Dewey, after all, who said that

The problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from that life.

Eleonore Stump's solution to the problem of suffering fails to show how God could be justified in permitting persons to suffer the dark night of the soul. In this article, I explain why and offer an amendment. I contend that a person who responds to the dark night in the right way experiences positive feedback between suffering and charity. This feedback not only enables the sufferer ultimately to attain his heart's desire but also explains why God is justified in permitting persons to suffer the dark night.

The main purpose of this paper is to bring out some significant humanistic characteristics of Chinese religious thought. My account is limited to what is originally and typically Chinese. That is to say, it will exclude what has been influenced by Buddhism from India or Christianity from the Western world. Some of the theses of this paper are based on scholarly works, while others are drawn from the author's primary experience.

The challenge was originally put nearly twenty years ago in the concluding sentences of my initial contribution to a discussion in the now defunct journal University; a contribution reprinted in 1955 in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, and in several other places since then. Those sentences read: ‘We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God's (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?”’

In two recent articles in this journal, David Basinger and Nathan Nobis raise objections to my characterization of infant suffering and the problem that it presents to theism. My main theses were that infant suffering to death is not ‘horrendous’ in the technical sense defined, and that a good God need only balance off rather than ‘defeat’ such suffering. Basinger, on the other hand, claims that some infant suffering should be considered horrendous, while Nobis suggests that such suffering must be defeated by God rather than merely balanced off. In this response I will briefly summarize my view and then respond to Basinger and Nobis.

The purpose of this article is to develop a Christian doctrine of the Incarnation in the light of a process philosophy of the type expounded by A. N. Whitehead and E. S. Brightman. Rather than offer at this time a detailed defence either of the idea of incarnation or of process philosophy, I wish to show that the two can be coherently related in such a way that each receives a greater degree of completion and clarity. Of course risks are unavoidable in any attempt to make Athens and Jerusalem respond to one another. But the risks and losses would be even greater if the way of isolation and of mutually ignoring one another were accepted.

A characteristic feature of religious discourse is its tendency to use expressions which are not only metaphorical but ‘irreducibly metaphorical’, that is to say, which have no literal equivalent. Sophisticated believers freely point out theology's tendency toward the ‘symbolical’, ‘analogical’, or ‘mysterious’; while equally sophisticated sceptics complain that faith is ‘anthropomorphic’ or ‘merely poetic’. When this discussion between believers and seeptics is confronted with what we may call the ‘reducibility thesis’, that metaphors should be reducible to literal statements, a philosophical puzzle results: religious metaphors should be reducible, but they are not.

In a recent article (Kraay 2013), I argued that some prominent responses to two important arguments for atheism invoke divine satisficing – and that the coherence and propriety of this notion have not been established. Chris Tucker (2016) agrees with my evaluation of divine satisficing, but disagrees with my exegesis of these responses. He argues that they should be understood as invoking motivated submaximization instead. After reviewing the dialectical situation to date, I assess whether motivated submaximization can be deployed in such a way as to defeat these arguments for atheism. I argue that it's far from clear that it can.

‘A book’, says Lichtenberg, ‘is a mirror. If an ape looks into it, then obviously what looks back out is not an apostle.’ It may be hoped that these reflections on looking into Dr Robinson's book on Christology will not entirely obscure either the sound points he frequently makes in criticism of traditional Christology, or still less, the good intentions that have led him to write his book. I shall simply be trying to point the way towards how God's human face might possibly be revealed still more clearly in Jesus than it is in Dr Robinson's Christ.

New cross-cultural approaches to philosophy of religion seek to move it beyond the preoccupations of Christian theology and the abstractions of ‘classical theism’, towards an appreciation of a broader range of religious phenomena. But if the concept of religion is itself the product of extrapolation from modern, Western, Christian understandings, disseminated through colonial encounter, does the new philosophy of religion simply reproduce the deficiencies of the old, under the guise of a universalizing, albeit culturally and historically particular, category? This article argues that it is necessary to interrogate the secular episteme within which religion is thematized as a discrete topos.

We assess John Bishop's theory of the nature of Christian faith in God, as most recently expressed in ‘Reasonable Faith and Reasonable Fideism’, although we dip into other writings as well. We explain several concerns we have about it. However, in the end, our reflections lead us to propose a modified theory, one that avoids our concerns while remaining consonant with some of his guiding thoughts about the nature of Christian faith in God. We also briefly examine three normative issues Bishop's views present.

This article argues for a cross-culturally pluralistic conception of spiritual exemplarity. Three main modes of exemplarity are identified, distinguished by their underlying aspirations, which I label ‘allegiance’, ‘enlightened insight’, and ‘emulation’. After challenging some attempts to privilege the modes of exemplarity characteristic of theistic religions, I argue that perhaps the fullest example of the aspiration to emulation is the form of Daoism presented in The Book of Zhuāngzǐ. I conclude that what one finds across different cultures and traditions is a plurality of modes of spiritual exemplarity that should be acknowledge and explored, rather than given more reductive analyses that narrow our sense of the variety of ways of living a spiritual life.

It is often objected to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead that if we reject dualism and disembodied existence there is no way even for God to bring it about that a resurrected person is identical with his or her supposed original, rather than just a duplicate. My response is that if God intended all along that people should have two periods of existence, the problem vanishes. In a Test Match, there are long periods when the ground and stands are empty and no play takes place, yet no-one says that the resumed game may only be a duplicate of that of the previous day. The same holds for a resurrection intended from the beginning.

In ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’ Moritz Schlick expressed the following view: ‘Everything is knowable which can be expressed, and this is the total subject matter concerning which meaningful questions can be raised. There are consequently no questions which are in principle unanswerable, no problems which are in principle insoluble.’ (page 56 in Logical Positivism edited by A. J. Ayer.) I will refer to this as Schlick's principle, although it is shared by many others. What it amounts to is the view that all meaningful questions can be answered by rational procedures, that is by logical argument or appeal to evidence. It is this view which I wish to challenge, at the same time relating what I have to say to belief in God. For it follows from Schlick's principle that provided the question ‘Does God exist?’ can be meaningfully asked, it is in principle possible to answer it either affirmatively or negatively. Having done so, we would then know, and not merely believe, that God does or does not exist. I will try to show that provided the question ‘Does God exist?’ can be meaningfully asked, no such consequence need be taken to follow.

In a well-known article,1 John Hick argues that the proposition ‘God (as conceived by Christians) exists' is, in principle, verifiable but is not falsifiable. Essentially, his argument is that while no experience in this life could conclusively disprove the existence of the Christian God, certain experiences one might have in the after-life would conclusively verify the existence of the Christian God. In particular, he argues that post mortem experiences of Christ ruling in the Kingdom of God would constitute a verification of the existence of the Christian God. In this paper, I shall argue that on Hick's own assumptions, the existence of the Christian God turns out to be falsifiable, in principle, as well as verifiable.