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.

According to Candomblé, axé is present in every living being and is necessary to life. To develop and maintain a sense of well-being, one must maintain a balanced level of axé which is linked to a reciprocal relationship between human beings and orixás (African deities). This article will explore the link between the spiritual force axé and well-being (bem estar) within Candomblé philosophy. Starting with explaining axé within the context of Candomblé and its concept of personhood, the article will reflect in the latter part on the concept of well-being from the perspective of axé and put forward an argument for the inclusion of Candomblé in philosophy of religion.

This article examines a construal of the doctrine of original sin which affirms the cognitive corruption of human faculties but denies that humans carry original guilt for Adam's fall or for cognitive corruption. All humans require Christ's atonement, because they either inevitably commit at least one sin or are rejected by God for other reasons. We go on to identify three problems with this account. The first problem is the ‘inevitability’ of sinning. Here, the defender is forced either to accept a compatibilist analysis of responsibility or provide a libertarian-friendly analysis of ‘inevitability’. The latter option contradicts the Augustinian contention that it is impossible for sinners to lead a life of virtue and holiness. The second problem has to do with the mechanics of the cognitive effects of sin. The cognitive effects of original sin make it very difficult or inevitable for humans to perform meritorious actions and very easy or inevitable for them to commit sinful actions. If the sinner's degree of control over her sinful actions is so low, it seems that she does not deserve divine blame and punishment for failing to commit meritorious actions. Finally, we raised some problems regarding the fate of the non-culpable sinners.

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.

My claim in this article is that the thesis that Buddhism has no God, insofar as it is taken to apply to Buddhism universally, is false. I defend this claim by interpreting a central text in East-Asian Buddhism – The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna – through the lenses of perfect being theology (PBT), a research programme in philosophy of religion that attempts to provide a description of God through a two-step process: (1) defining God in terms of maximal greatness; (2) inferring the properties or attributes that God must have in virtue of satisfying the definition. My argument comprises two steps. First, I argue that, since PBT is a method for providing a description of God starting from a definition of God, any text that contains a PBT ipso facto contains a notion of God. Second, I argue through textual evidence that The Awakening articulates a PBT, concluding that it contains a notion of God. Since the method of PBT leaves open what descriptions are to be inferred, my argument allows me to conclude that a text contains a notion of God without previously committing to any particular conception of the divine, which makes it particularly versatile and powerful.

A number of theistic philosophers have recently denied that God is subject to moral and rational norms. At the same time, many theists employ epistemological and inductive arguments for the existence of God. I will argue that ‘no-norms’ theists cannot make use of such arguments: if God is not subject to norms – particularly rational norms – then we can say nothing substantive about what kind of worlds God would be likely to create, and as such, we cannot predict the likelihood of any particular evidence given theism. What is more, I argue that this lack of constraint on God's creative act raises a serious sceptical challenge for no-norms theism.

This article is a response to Tyler Wunder's ‘The modality of theism and probabilistic natural theology: a tension in Alvin Plantinga's philosophy’ (this journal). In his article, Wunder argues that if the proponent of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) holds theism to be non-contingent and frames the argument in terms of objective probability, then the EAAN is either unsound or theism is necessarily false. I argue that a modest revision of the EAAN renders Wunder's objection irrelevant, and that this revision actually widens the scope of the argument.

You don't know that p unless it's on account of your cognitive abilities that you believe truly that p. Virtue epistemologists think there's some such ability constraint on knowledge. This looks to be in considerable tension, though, with putative faith-based knowledge. For at least on a popular Christian conception, when you believe something truly on the basis of faith this isn't because of anything you're naturally competent to do. Rather, faith-based beliefs are entirely a product of divine agency. Appearances to the contrary, I argue in this article that there's no deep tension between faith-based knowledge and virtue epistemology. Not if we learn to conceive of faith as a kind of extended knowledge.

The great increase of interest in the study of spirituality and mysticism is reflected in the large number of articles that the Encyclopedia of Religion devotes to various aspects of this topic. As one would expect, there are long entries for ‘Mysticism’ and ‘Christian Spirituality’ and ‘Religious Experience’. In addition to these broad categories, attention is given to more specific aspects of spirituality such as ‘Asceticism’, ‘Silence’, ‘Prayer’, ‘Meditation’, and so on. This is complemented by entries on many of the spiritual giants of the Christian tradition, both ancient and modern. I shall begin by discussing these articles on individuals, and go on to examine the more general articles later in the review. I shall suggest that, despite many merits, both sorts of entry display an editorial policy about which serious questions must be raised.

The article begins with the journey towards knowledge of the infinite that is traced out in Descartes's Meditations. Drawing on Levinas's construal of the argument in the Third Meditation, I argue that Descartes's reflections on God as infinite can be a starting point for deepening our understanding of the religious quest – the paradoxical human search for that which, by its very nature, is incomprehensible to the human mind. The second half of the article argues that this search is from first to last structured by desire and longing, and that something prima facie non-cognitive and non-epistemic, namely the desire for God, has a cognitive and epistemic role to play. Perhaps desire can be our human way, or a human way, whereby we can (in Descartes's words) ‘in a certain manner attain to’ the infinite perfection that is God.

One of the problems religious men and philosophers often face is how to convey enlightenment or wisdom to others so that sentient beings can be enlightened or awakened from dogmatic views. This problem is also the question of how truth (the Word of God or Buddha's Dharma) is made known to men. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problem of communicating truth in Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism.

Some people display a general attitude towards God which does not fulfil the criteria of full-blown faith but also does not amount to lack of faith. I argue that in some cases such an attitude, best described as partial faith, is likely to be the all-things-considered best option – even if God exists and the best possible relationship with God is the greatest possible good. This is because, in a universe as religiously ambiguous as ours, some people seem unable to have full-blown faith, and for some others such faith is likely to be possible only at the cost of contradicting some values relevant for the relationship to God. Somehow paradoxically, God-related worries and doubts leading to spiritual struggles and enquiries can improve one's relationship with God, so that, for some people at some times, the advantages of partial faith may override those of full-blown faith. If I am right, it offers some reason to think that partial faith does not deserve the criticism which has traditionally been directed at it. In addition to that, I argue that, independently of the normative assessment, partial faith is a useful descriptive concept, which can throw light on many issues surrounding faith in general and make it easier to describe some themes belonging to continental philosophy of religion in analytic terms.

In his autobiographical-biographical study, Father and Son, Edmund Gosse describes how one evening, during his childhood, while his father was praying at - or, rather, over - his bed, a rather large insect dark and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting insect ought to need, appeared at the bottom of the counterpane, and slowly advanced… I bore it in silent fascination till it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed ‘Papa! Papa!’. My Father rose in great dudgeon, removed the insect (what were insects to him!) and then gave me a tremendous lecture.1

It is difficult to understand Gandhi's philosophy without some kind of idea of what he means by Truth. When I put the question of what he meant by Truth to some of his followers in India the replies I received showed quite clearly that his concept of Truth was linked to the concepts of dharma and rta. What this would seem to point to is that his understanding of Truth is something that is acquired within his own form of life and that his experiments with Truth are ultimately determined by his understanding of the Hindu religious tradition. This is not to say that insights from other religious traditions did not influence his apprehension of Truth: his acknowledgement of those influences is sufficient in itself to substantiate that claim. But it is clear that it would not be possible to understand his concept of Truth without some understanding of the tradition in which he was nurtured and which determined his way of life.

This paper is about a puzzle – I'll call it ‘the Return’ – that puts considerable pressure upon Christians to accept a very robust scepticism about the future. Those familiar with work on so-called ‘lottery puzzles’ will notice much similarity between those puzzles and the Return. However, there is an important difference that renders the Return an especially difficult problem for a Christian who believes that he has much knowledge about the future. After introducing the Return, I'll argue that it is immune to the most promising non-sceptical approaches to more familiar lottery puzzles.

During the past few decades, Zen (Ch'an) Buddhism has been the most popular Buddhist school in the West and many scholars have expounded the essence of Zen. One of the most well–known expositions is D. T. Suzuki's psychological interpretation. Wu–nien in Zen is identified by him with the unconscious, and satori is seen as the psychological leaping of the unconscious. Other scholars contend that Zen has its ontological roots and should be understood ontologically rather than psychologically. Zen Buddhists are said to be pilgrims of the absolute, and Zen is seen as a search for pure being.