This article concerns the problem of eternal hell in Islam as an aporetic problem of evil with a focus on Aijaz's description of the Islamic soteriology. I contest his description of Islamic culpability and his claim that all non-Muslims are regarded as kâfir and consigned to eternal hell. First, I aim to illustrate the pitfalls in his line of argumentation such as crude generalizations and selective reading of the Islamic sources, which seem to render his argument a strawman fallacy. I offer a more accurate analysis of the Islamic view, by arguing that only a limited group of people who fight against truth through evil actions are considered as kâfir. Second, building on my analysis of the notion of kâfir, I address the question whether God's perfect love and wisdom are compatible with limited salvific exclusivism. Thus, I aim to elaborate on the rationale behind the prescription of eternal punishment for the kâfir in the Quran in the rest of the article, by arguing that the kâfir is incapable of genuine repentance due to his character formed by his free choices. This, in turn, makes it impossible to achieve retributive justice through a finite punishment concerning the kâfir's evil actions.

I argue on three distinct grounds that the contrast between speaking and revealing is nothing like so sharp as Wolterstorff maintains in Divine Discourse. Speaking may be revealing: in speaking a person may reveal much about himself. Putative divine speaking can only be made intelligible given a background of what I refer to as INIS revelation, and in revealing, or more exactly, in having revealed, God may still speak.

This paper critically examines what Nicholas Wolterstorff has to say in Divine Discourse in response to the two questions in the title. It tries to show that his argument for the conclusion that God can have the obligations of a speaker is defective. It also tries to show that his argument for the conclusion that some actual person is entitled to believe that God has spoken to her is incomplete. The paper's conclusion is that Wolterstorff's arguments fail to establish, or to provide strong grounds for accepting, a positive answer to either of the questions in its title.

In this response to D. Z. Phillips's critique of my interpretation of Wittgenstein's view of magic and ritual, I counter Phillips's claim that I have misrepresented the Wittgensteinian view of ritual, consider the instrumentalist dimension of the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, offer some objections to Phillips's expressivist view that a ritual ‘says itself’, and detect obscurantism in his approach to the study of religion.

In this article three types of objection to a realist account of religious experience are explored: (1) the unusual character of its object; (2) its unusual accompanying conditions; and (3) the conflicting content. In response to (1) it is noted that despite divine freedom not all types of encounter preclude predictability, while parallels are drawn with perception of other complex objects such as persons. At the same time the whole notion of simple perceptions is challenged. In response to (2) parallels to the affective element are found not only in moral and aesthetic experience but more widely. Finally, in response to (3) apparent irreconcilable conflicts are lessened by observing how all such experiences take place within the context of traditions whose surface incompatibility does not necessarily indicate deep divisions.

Both Thomas Talbott and Friedrich Schleiermacher have argued, in somewhat different ways, that in the context of Christian theism the damnation of anyone would render it impossible to extend genuine blessedness to anyone else. I examine both Schleiermacher's and Talbott's version of this argument, which I call the ‘incompatibility argument', and respond to criticisms levelled by Jerry Walls and William Lane Craig. I argue that the argument is more powerful than its critics admit, and that it poses a potentially devastating challenge to what Thomas Talbott calls ‘moderately conservative theism', according to which the damned autonomously choose their own damnation by forever rejecting God's offer of salvation.

Most contemporary general studies on Hinduism affirm the view that this tradition proposes several distinct and independent ways (mārgas) for the attainment of ultimate spiritual freedom (moksha). The methods most often mentioned are karmayoga (the way of detached selfless work), bhaktiyoga (the way of love and worship towards a personal God), and jñānayoga (the way of reason). These studies, however, make little or no attempt to critically assess the assumptions of this thesis or to demonstrate in any convincing detail the relationship between the particularities of a specific method and the attainment of moksha. In spite of the way in which this claim has entered into modern writings on Hinduism, discussion still tends, on the whole, to be vague and generalized.

Atheistic modal realism asserts roughly that there are many concrete possible worlds and that the actual world is entirely godless. Here I will refine this position using the modal realism of David Lewis. For Lewis, all gods (including the Christian God) are contingent superhuman persons, who inhabit non-actual worlds. Although gods are concrete world-bound particulars, atheistic modal realism has room for impersonal absolutes and ultimates (which are not gods). Since no gods are actual, atheism is true. Yet there are infinitely many non-actual gods. Non-actual gods and worlds provide resources for analysing religious beliefs and practices. Lewisian theology provides a powerful new way for atheists to understand religion.

In his The Salvation and The Remarks and Admonitions, Avicenna presents a well-known argument for the existence of God as a necessary being by itself. I will suggest, first of all, that the two pivotal notions employed in the argument, namely those of a necessary being by itself and a contingent being by itself, can be construed in different ways, leading to different versions of Avicenna's argument. I then turn to a specific version of the argument which seeks to show that there is at least one independently existing entity. This version constitutes the core of other versions of Avicenna's argument. Next, I shall explore how one might move from the existence of an independently existing entity to that of a necessary being by itself (variously construed). Finally, I will argue that the Avicennian argument for an independently existing entity suffers from a severe problem in that it fails to take account of the possibility of many-to-one causal relation.

Joseph Baltimore argues that the account of postmortem survival I offered five years ago fails, based on the plausible assertion that identity is a relation that each thing necessarily stands in to itself. I believe that Baltimore is mistaken when he claims that the account I offer violates the necessity of identity, and also mistaken when he asserts that the account I offer cannot satisfy Noonan's ‘only x and y principle’.

Recent developments in the philosophy of logic suggest that the correct foundational logic is like God in that both are maximally infinite and only partially graspable by finite beings. This opens the door to a new argument for the existence of God, exploiting the link between God and logic through the intermediary of the Logos. This article explores the argument from the nature of God to the nature of logic, and sketches the converse argument from the nature of logic to the existence of God.

The opening chapters of Anselm's Monologion contain a ‘proof’ of a perfect being, which has received far less attention than the more famous Proslogion proof, and the ontological arguments derived from it. I wish to rectify this by developing an argument in defence of a crucial premise of the Monologion proof. This premise states that ‘the Good’, i.e. that in virtue of which numerically distinct things may all be good, must itself be a supremely good thing (if it exists). I motivate the argument before considering objections to both premises, as well as putative ‘parodies’ of my argument. Part of the motivation of my argument will involve the claim that the Good, if it is good at all, must be a paradigm good thing. I conclude that theists have a second kind of ontological argument at their disposal.

In this review of articles in the Encyclopedia of Religion I have selected those concerning theoretical issues about the nature of religion and those describing the history and methods of the study of religion as an academic discipline. By any count this collection of papers (over 50) should be of central importance to an encyclopaedia of this nature. Method provides one of the most contentious and thorny sets of issues in contemporary academic debate in the study of religion. A reference work of this sort would perform an invaluable service if it offered a clear and comprehensive guide to these issues. Furthermore, there can be no more important questions for the student of religion than those concerning what kind of phenomenon religion is and how religion is related to human nature. If a reference work in the study of relgion cannot sum up the best of what is thought and known in contemporary scholarship in answer to these questions then, for all the detail it offers on particular manifestations of religion, it will be seriously deficient.

I present an argument for God's existence based on the idea that the possibility of God requires the existence of God as a ground. After setting this argument out, I compare it to other arguments for God, concentrating on an argument from Descartes's Third Meditation. I then address various objections and conclude by setting out a non-theistic version of the argument.