David Silver has argued that there is an illegitimate circularity in Plantinga's account of how a Christian theist can defend herself against the potential defeater presented by Paul Draper's formulation of the problem of evil. The way out of the circle for the theist, thinks Silver, would be by adopting a kind of evidentialism: she needs to make an appeal to evidence that is independent of the reasons she has for holding theistic belief in the first place. I shall argue that Silver's argument is unsuccessful, mainly because he does not get Plantinga's thought right. Silver's confusion is in taking causes of belief as reasons for belief, and in failing to account for the impact of belief holism and our web of beliefs on the very hope for independent reasons.

In recent years there has been a tendency in some quarters to see an affinity between the views of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on the subject of religious belief. It seems to me that this is a mistake, that Kierkegaard's views were fundamentally at odds with Wittgenstein's. That this fact is not generally recognized is, I suspect, owing to the obscurity of Kierkegaard's most fundamental assumptions. My aim here is to make those assumptions explicit and to show how they differ from Wittgenstein's.

The Free Will Defence has been attacked as being unsound, implausible and, more recently, irrelevant. The first section of the paper returns to a discussion on the relevance of the Free Will Defence, arguing that the case for its irrelevance is inextricably impaled on the horns of a dilemma. In the second section it is shown that Free Will Theodicy, even in a form extended to include natural evil, need not be as implausible as it is sometimes portrayed for it demands no more than that good, on the whole, outweighs evil, on the whole. Finally, some tempting objections to the strategy employed in this argument are considered and rejected, both on the grounds that they are untenable in themselves and on the paradoxical ground that, if valid, the objections would appear to rule out any creation.

This article presents Yeshayahu Leibowitz's conception of Judaism and characterizes his position as typically religious-existentialist. It confronts Leibowitz's conception with Kantian ethics, refutes the analogy made between these two conceptions, and shows that Leibowitz's response to Kant is analogous to that of Kierkegaard, the Christian existentialist thinker. It considers Leibowitz's religious position a Jewish variation of Kierkegaard's notion of faith in the absurd. Such an analogy enables us not only to elucidate Leibowitz's religious conception but also to evaluate the implications of Kierkegaard's religious thought in a broader context.

I reply to William Hasker's ‘The Trinity as Social and Constitutional’, continuing our debate over the use of the metaphysical concept of constitution to explicate the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

Although a personal god of mixed moral character is logically possible, no personal god that has been represented as less than wholly good has gained more than a strictly local appeal. The Judaeo-Christian god is no exception. The god is represented as merciful, kind, longsuffering, forgiving, loving - in a word, wholly good. Of course, representing a god as wholly good is one thing; providing a convincing defence of his goodness is quite another. Indeed, many would contend that of all the defences provided within the Judaeo-Christian system, the defence of the goodness of God is the least convincing.

Whenever the discussion of the relation between religion and science or science and faith arises in circles imbued with various trends of modern thought, immediately the history of the confrontation of the Church with Galileo or of Protestant theology with Darwinianism comes to mind and the problem is viewed from the particular vantage point of the West. Those who have kept pace with the most current speculations of certain scientists in quest of a new world view may point to the fact that there are more recent works which compare the movement of electrons with the Dance of Shiva or speak of the search for the Tao of modern science. But even in such works which are becoming popular, although reference is made to Oriental doctrines, these teachings are usually viewed in separation from the traditional universe to which they belong and the philosophical and scientific framework remain Western. In the modern world the usual background for the understanding of the relation between religion and science continues to be the Western experience from the revolt of modern science against its scholastic theological background during the Renaissance and the seventeenth century to the final abdication by religion from the domain of nature and its surrender to the scientific enterprise and the latter's particular methodology and philosophy for the study of the natural world. Even when certain works step outside the Western world view in search of a rapprochement with certain Oriental doctrines, science remains Western science and the suppositions made upon the nature of Reality do not change in an ultimate way.

Some historians of modern Indian religious thought claim that, in respect of a pure monotheism free from pagan or polytheistic myth and a morality free from taboos and superstition, Rammohun was indebted to the Christian missionaries of his time and more particularly to the Baptists of Serampore. Thus, E. Daniel Potts, in his British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793–1837, observes:

The Brahmo Samaj or Sabha (or Theistic Society) founded by him [Rammohun] in 1828 after he disassociated himself from Adam's Unitarian Association used a congregational form of worship utterly unknown to the ancient form of Hinduism he believed he was restoring; any many of its teachings, particularly ethical, were drawn from those of the Precepts of Jesus. Related organizations to reform Hinduism sprang up in the 1830–s and after, and in the process propagated, though their leaders would not always admit this, the idea of Christian morality – both enterprises begun by Roy's direct response to missionary and particularly Baptist endeavours.’

What has Jerusalem to do with Athens? The everchanging contours of the answer to this question have taken an arresting shape with the confluence of existentialist theology and analytic philosophy. This improbable union has led to an impressive and attractive account of religious belief and its language. Under the influence of Kierkegaard, Buber, and others, existentialist theology has argued persuasively for the non-theoretical, practical character of religious belief; it has, of late, discovered inspiration and assistance for this position in the reflections of recent analytic philosophy on the difficulties involved in speculative philosophy. The resultant theological point of view is one which argues for a ‘practical’ interpretation of religion, one which holds that the meaning of religious language is to be found exclusively in its use. Religion is seen as a self-contained ‘form of life’, and its language is held to have its own peculiar ‘logic’. It follows that religious beliefs and conceptions are intelligible in their own right and do not need to be explicated or justified with the aid of an ontology or metaphysic. I propose in this essay to appraise a recent statement of this position, and, in so doing, explore the broad question of the bearing of analytic reflections on the question of Christian theology's relationship to philosophy.

Accounts of religion, like almost all influential academic and intellectual exercises, as indeed much else, in the last two or three centuries, have generally been the work of Western scholars and intellectuals, often less familiar with, but sometimes simply disinclined to take seriously, non-Western religious traditions. Consequently most of these accounts have tended to be parochial, failing to apply to, say, Eastern religions, not to mention so-called ‘primitive’ religions; and have often given to what should only have been ‘local squabbles’ the appearance of universal religious concern. As a result, even philosophers of religion have largely explicated what might be called the ‘prescriptive grammar’ of religion. With a view to rectifying the situation, I intend to outline what I hope will be a ‘descriptive’ account, i.e. one which will be true of at least the major living religions of the world, e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and their main schools or sects. Inevitably, such a general account will fail to incorporate the unique features of any one religion; but it should have the advantage of restoring the proper perspective in debates concerning religion and religious issues, including those relating to the semantic and/or logical features of religious belief and so-called ‘religious language’.

If one were to investigate the underpinnings of religious studies, or, in other words, to undertake a sort of meta-religious studies (a study which would be twice removed from the actual subject matter of the discipline) one would find that the main contemporary criticisms, by both lay students of religion and the academic community at large, have been primarily twofold. The first stock objection, possibly somewhat more popular twenty years ago, was that ‘religious studies’ was simply not to be considered an autonomous academic discipline worthy of recognition as an independent ‘department’ in a university curriculum. In short, the pejorative implications were clear in the behind-the-back finger-pointing which was conjoined with whispers of ‘interdisciplinary’. The second major criticism of the ‘discipline’ of religious studies has been a polymorphous diversity of twists on the old theme – ‘Oh my God, they are practising what they preach’. The impetus of this criticism is in large measure, the fear, by various sectors for various reasons, that the student of religion is somehow ‘doing’ (as opposed to simply studying) religion and, what's more, doing it inside the hallowed halls of the university.

Christian theists have not normally wished to deny either of the following tenets:

T1 God creates human agents such that they are free with respect to certain actions and, therefore, morally responsible for them.

T2 God is an omniscient, wholly good being who is omnipotent in the sense that he has (sovereign, providential) control over all existent states of affairs.

Can there be a moral philosophy which combines Christianity and consequentialism? John Stuart Mill himself claimed that these positions were, at the least, not mutually exclusive, and quite possibly even congenial to one another; and some recent work by Christian philosophers in America has resurrected this claim. But there is a simple argument to show that consequentialism and orthodox Christianity are not so much as jointly assertible.

The issue between my view and Hasker's concerns a certain principle that he takes to be true, but I hold to be false. The principle in question asserts that failing to do better than one did is a defect only if doing the best one can is possible for one to do. I claim that this principle is false because if an all-knowing, all-powerful being were confronted with an unending series of increasingly better creatable worlds and deliberately chose to create the least good world, that being would thereby show itself to be something less than a supremely perfect world-creator. In fact, I argue that if a supremely perfect world-creator were to exist and create a world, it would have to be a world than which there is no better creatable world.

This article accomplishes two things. First, it explores and defends Kierkegaard's distinctive solution to the Problem of Total Devotion, a problem which has been helpfully identified by Robert Adams. Second, it extends that solution by advancing an interpretation of the command to do all things to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31) according to which we are being commanded to intentionally make every one of our actions such that it simultaneously counts as a divine action: in other words, to act intentionally in all things such that it is God who acts through us.

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.

In the debate over the theology of the soul's origin, there have traditionally been three broad views on origins. These include creationism, traducianism, and Origen's pre-existence view. In the recent philosophy of religion and mind literature, William Hasker posits an alternative view of origins called emergent substance dualism. As a contribution to this discussion, I put forward one novel option as a via media between simple creationism and Hasker's emergent substance dualism, wherein it has relevant overlapping features found in the two contrary positions. I suggest that this view is a variation of creationism like emergentism where the material part (i.e. the brain) has some positive causal role in the soul's coming to be as a discrete effect of one divine cause. I argue that emergent creationism (as I call it) is a viable option deserving the attention of philosophers and theologians.

The word mysticism serves to draw attention to certain similarities in religious experience in both Western and Eastern religion, and it is difficult to find a really satisfactory substitute. What is important is that we should not suppose it to be a simple term, but should recognise that it has many variations. There are varieties of mysticism, recognisable by a certain family resemblance, and it is probably safer therefore to use the word with some qualifying adjective, e.g. Christian mysticism, Jewish mysticism, and so on.