Among the questions facing the religious there is one that is becoming particularly pressing in our contemporary world of mingled cultures. Expressed as religious people sometimes put it to themselves, it is: How does my religion relate to other religions? There are two very different answers abroad. One is: mine is true and all others, to the extent that they depart from mine, are false and are to be rejected. The other is: mine is valid-for-me, and those of others are valid-for-them. The first answer has the virtue of being utterly straightforward and not mealy-mouthed, but it seems parochial and myopic, for, as John Hick points out:

In the great majority of cases, the tradition within which a religious person finds his relationship to the Real depends to a very great extent upon where and when he or she is born…In view of this situation, can one be unquestionably confident that the religion which one happens to have inherited by birth is indeed normative and that all others are properly to be graded by their likeness or unlikeness to it?

The penultimate chapter of Alvin Plantinga's Warrant and Proper Function attacks metaphysical naturalism through an argument which concludes that only a supernaturalistic worldview can accommodate the indispensable concept of proper function. I make the case that this argument, which I dub ‘the argument from proper function’, suffers from two major flaws. First, it underestimates the naturalist's ability to ground natural proper function ascriptions in the concept of health. Second, it relies upon an overly stringent standard for successful conceptual analysis; ironically, the naturalist can undercut the argument by adopting Plantinga's own recommended model for analysing concepts.

A striking feature of the Eastern Orthodox liturgies is how much movement and touching occurs during their performance. For example, when participants in these liturgies enter into a church building, they do not simply look at the icons; they typically venerate them by kissing them. Call events such as these scripted movement-touching sequences. The question I pursue in this article is why movement-touching sequences play such prominent roles in the performance of the Eastern liturgies. The answer I offer is that the performance of these actions has religious worth. I then consider two models that attempt to explain why the performance of scripted movement-touching sequences has religious worth. After exploring and rejecting what I call the instrumentalist model, I develop what I term the authorization-appropriation model of the composition of the church's liturgies. According to this model, the religious worth of scripted bodily liturgical action lies (in part) in the fact that God has both authorized the composition of and appropriated the liturgical scripts that prescribe the performance of such actions.

Although the basic ideas of the ontological argument can be found in Aristotle and Philo Judaeus (cf. AD pp. 141 ff.), the argument received its classical formulation in Anselm's Proslogion and his Reply to the objections raised by Gaunilo. During the succeeding nine centuries the argument has had a chequered career. It was supported by some scholastic theologians but rejected by Aquinas. Descartes and Leibniz offered their own versions of the proof but Kant's refutation of the argument has generally been accepted as conclusive during the past century and a half. Nevertheless, interest in the proof has never completely disappeared—perhaps provoked by Aquinas' suggestion that the proof may be valid for God even though it cannot be valid for us because of the inadequacy of our knowledge of God. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the ontological argument. J. N. Findlay put the argument into reverse to show the necessary non-existence of God in an article in 1948 (Can God's existence be disproved?) but in later writings he has suggested that the argument may have positive significance. In 1960 Norman Malcolm published a paper in which he distinguished two basically different forms of the ontological argument in the Proslogion and defended the possible validity of the second of them.

Despite the bad reputation of the legal profession, law remains king in America. A highly diverse society relies on the laws (and especially the Constitution) to maintain a working sense of the dignity and inviability of each individual. And a persistent element in contemporary debates is the fear that naturalistic theories of the human person will erode our belief that we have a dignity greater than that of other natural objects. Thus the endurance of the creation vs. evolution debate is due less to the arguments of creationists, or to the continued influence of the book of Genesis, than to the reading of the evidence provided by Phillip E. Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley, Law School.

One would be hard pressed to deny the ordinary man's trust in the moral deliverances of his conscience. Joseph Butler put the case for the infallibility of conscience, when he remarked: ‘Had it strength, as it had right; had it power, as it had manifest authority; it would absolutely govern the world’ (Fifteen Sermons, ii, 13, 14). I think it obvious, in retrospect, that Butler underestimated its ‘strength’ and ‘power’, while overextending its ‘right’ and ‘authority’. Perhaps it is too rash a claim to maintain that conscience serves as an inadequate guide in our moral deliberations, but, to be sure, it can hardly be defended as a sufficient guide to moral conduct.

Agnostics often hold that, since there is not a clear preponderance of evidence either in favour of theistic belief or against it, their position of suspended belief is more rational than either theism or atheism. I would like to examine an objection raised recently by Clement Dore against the agnostic's reasoning on this matter.

Much contemporary philosophy of religion is preoccupied with highly general problems about the nature of religious belief and of religious language, rather than with how to interpret, in detail, specific religious beliefs or forms of religious discourse. Among the matters of dispute there seem to be two of overriding importance. The first concerns the relation between religious beliefs and experience and centres on the question, what sorts of experience are relevant to the acceptance or rejection of religious beliefs. The second concerns whether or not religious beliefs have an explanatory function. Discussion of both these themes in relation to theistic belief is still largely dominated by conceptions of God and of his relation to the world which have been developed by natural theologians, particularly, though not exclusively, those who have worked within traditions significantly influenced by Thomas Aquinas. Thus the idea that religious beliefs have an explanatory function is commonly associated with the view that they present answers to questions raised by those alleged traits or features of the world which have been the concern of natural theologians and which have been described by means of concepts of ‘contingency’, ‘purposiveness’, ‘order’, and ‘design’. Consequently, the sort of experience often held to be relevant to the acceptance or rejection of theistic belief is that which is relevant to the application of these problematic concepts.

According to Simple Trinitarianism, God is mereologically simple, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not identified with any entities in our ontology. Thus the Simple Trinitarian is able to avoid conflating Persons or multiplying Gods, and does not have to identify the Persons with minor entities or entities partly disjoint from God. However, to maintain that Trinitarian sentences are nonetheless true, the Simple Trinitarian will need a non-standard semantics. I explore one option for this, involving taking ‘the Father’, ‘the Son’, and ‘the Holy Spirit’ to be empty names. By adopting a positive, Free Logic, we can take these names to make semantic contributions and play roles in true sentences, while blocking problematic inferences.

In two recent articles Grace M. (Dyck) Jantzen has argued that an embodied God could be both a being worthy of worship (in the Judaeo-Christian tradition) and omnipresent. In arguing for neither of these claims has she attempted to prove that God (if he exists) is embodied, or even that God (if he exists) must be embodied. Rather, she has urged acceptance of the more modest claim there is no good reason for denying the possible embodiment of God (if he exists) on grounds either connected with his being a worthy object of worship or in terms of a supposed entailment of incorporeality on God's omnipresence. Yet contemporary thinkers with as radically divergent views about God as Kai Nielsen and Father Copleston forward ‘the argument that an embodied God is inadequate for sophisticated theism’; and, Jantzen avers, there is a ‘widespread belief that if God is indeed omnipresent, as we are clearly taught in Scripture, then that doctrine of omnipresence entails immediately that God must be incorporeal’. The purpose of my remarks in this note is not to dispute Jantzen's conclusions, but to question the strength and/or satisfactoriness of some of her arguments for those conclusions. Perhaps the most pervading misgiving arises over her unquestioned equating of ‘embodiment’ with ‘having a body’. Surely at first blush such synonymy appears both obvious and innocuous. But where the notion of embodiment itself is the crux of the issue, careful reflection needs to be given to just what the notion involves. Yet she simply accepts the synonymy ‘without any further ado, as though it were just obviously true’, just as she accuses Findlay of doing regarding ‘the claim that only a being who exists necessarily would be worthy of our worship’.

Despite being emphatically ascribed to God in Scripture, holiness is little examined in the current literature on the divine attributes. This article defends a normative theory of holiness, taking as its point of departure Rudolf Otto's classic account of the phenomenology of the experience of holiness as that of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. To be holy is to merit this dual response, that is, to merit both the overwhelming attraction and distinctive sort of repulsion that is characteristic of the experience of holiness. It is plausibly an implication of this account that a supremely holy being – one who is holy, holy, holy – must be the most perfect possible being.

Joanna Leidenhag's claim in her book, Minding Creation, that panpsychists should (a) abandon naturalism and (b) adopt traditional theism is evaluated and critiqued. It is argued that panpsychism is compatible with naturalism and does not commit one to any metaphysic of the divine, including traditional theism.

One of the widely held philosophical doctrines of this century in the English speaking world is that there is no logical bridge between fact and value, between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Human nature may be such that all or most of us approve common states of affairs. That is, there seem to be experiential or psychological ways of bridging the gap. But, on this view, no value judgment is ever inconsistent with any description of the world or of part of the world. Describe the world as you will, there is no logical reason to move on to any specific value judgment about the event or events under the given description.

This paper has been prompted by the conviction that a number of ethical and political doctrines in Plato remain obscure and somewhat unintelligible unless related to the contemplative experience of the Platonic philosopher.1 I shall concentrate here on one such doctrine, the distinction between philosophic and popular virtue, especially as it appears in the Phaedo and the Gorgias. But in order first to clarify our conception of the relationship between contemplation and virtue, I shall examine the fourteenth-century English classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, which is mainly concerned with the practice of contemplation and only remotely connected with Plato.2 One finds in The Cloud a perceptive account of the contemplative's acquisition of ‘perfect’ virtue which enables us to see the distinction between philosophic and popular virtue in Plato in a fresh light. After discussing the important passage in the Phaedo (69A–C) where the distinction is drawn, I shall criticise the account of virtue in Plato given by D. Z. Phillips and H. O. Mounce in Moral Practices where the contemplative context is minimised by their endeavour to see morality wholly in terms of conventions (albeit, for Plato, ‘non-conventional’ conventions).3 In this section, the argument between Socrates and Polus in the Gorgias will be discussed in light of the way Phillips and Mounce distinguish their respective ethical positions. The object of the paper is not only to point to the significance of contemplation in Plato's ethics which has been overlooked by many modern philosophers, but also to note the way our understanding of the dialogue form in Plato depends on the unique perspective of the contemplative philosopher.

One of the most interesting works on Christology to appear in recent years is Wolfhart Pannenberg's Grundzüge der Christologie. The reviewer in the Scottish Journal of Theology could speak of it as ‘a theological thriller’ and ‘very satisfying on account of its erudition, constant confrontation with Roman and Protestant, German and non-German theologians of the past and present’. Certainly we have here a Christology based on a striking knowledge of Scripture, the Councils, the Fathers and a large range of theologians and philosophers, both ancient and modern. Its originality consists perhaps most of all in the way it understands Christ's role as Revealer.