The justification of a wholly non-Humean conceptual scheme, based upon the idea of enduring individuals with powers, rests in part on the success of such a scheme in resolving the problems bequeathed to us by the Humean tradition and in part must be achieved by a careful construction of the metaphysics of the new scheme itself. By this we mean a thorough exposition of the meaning and interrelations of the concepts of the new scheme. It is to the latter task that we turn in this paper, being satisfied that the power of the scheme to give a rational account of science has been shown, and that its effectiveness in resolving the Humean problems and dilemmas has been amply demonstrated.

Every age has its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago, we used to accept Marx and Freud together, and then wonder, like the chameleon on the tartan, why life was so confusing. Today there is similar trouble over the question whether there is, or is not, something called Human Nature. On the one hand, there has been an explosion of animal behaviour studies, and comparisons between animals and men have become immensely popular. People use evidence from animals to decide whether man is naturally aggressive, or naturally territorial; even whether he has an Aggressive or Territorial Instinct. On the other hand, many sociologists and psychologists still seem to hold the Behaviourist view that man is a creature entirely without instincts, and so do existentialist philosophers. If so, all comparison with animals must be irrelevant. (To save space, I have had to simplify both these party lines here, but if anyone thinks I am oversimplifying the behaviourist one, I can only ask him to keep on reading New Society). On that view, man is entirely the product of his culture. He starts off infinitely plastic, and is formed completely by the society in which he grows up.

It is fortunate for my purposes that English has the two words ‘almighty’ and ‘omnipotent’, and that apart from any stipulation by me the words have rather different associations and suggestions. ‘Almighty’ is the familiar word that comes in the creeds of the Church; ‘omnipotent’ is at home rather in formal theological discussions and controversies, e.g. about miracles and about the problem of evil. ‘Almighty’ derives by way of Latin ‘omnipotens’ from the Greek word ‘pantokratōr’; and both this Greek word, like the more classical ‘pankratēs’, and ‘almighty’ itself suggest God's having power over all things. On the other hand the English word ‘omnipotent’ would ordinarily be taken to imply ability to do everything; the Latin word ‘omnipotens’ also predominantly has this meaning in Scholastic writers, even though in origin it is a Latinization of ‘pantocratōr’. So there already is a tendency to distinguish the two words; and in this paper I shall make the distinction a strict one. I shall use the word ‘almighty’ to express God's power over all things, and I shall take ‘omnipotence’ to mean ability to do everything.

In Morality and Art Mrs Foot characterizes the formalist position about morality as holding ‘that a man can choose for himself, so long as he meets the formal requirements of generality and consistency, what his ultimate moral principles are to be’, and says, quite rightly in my opinion, that it is indefensible, ‘implying as it does that we might recognize as a moral system some entirely pointless set of prohibitions or taboos, or activities such as clapping one's hands, not even thought as harmful, aggressive, treacherous, cowardly by the community in which the prohibitions exist’. Then she adds:

A moral system seems necessarily to be one aimed at removing particular dangers and securing certain benefits, and it would follow that some things do and some do not count as objections to a line of conduct from a moral point of view.

Self-realizationist theories are among the classical attempts to develop a comprehensive normative ethical theory. Plato and Aristotle, in giving classical statements of such theories, argue that a man's distinctive happiness, a man's distinctive flourishing, will only be realized when he realizes himself, i.e. when he achieves to the fullest possible degree his distinctive function. And to achieve one's function is to develop to the full those capacities which are distinctive of the human animal. In doing this we are being most truly ourselves and in doing this we are doing what it is our own nature to do. Men who cultivate to the fullest that which men and only men have will be the happiest men and in so acting they will realize themselves most fully; they will achieve their maximum potential or their fullest distinctively human growth. To so realize oneself is the final end of all moral activity. It defines what is to constitute ‘the good life’ and what is to count as ‘a good man’.

The title I have chosen naturally suggests the question: What are you saying omnipotence is irrelevant to? I reply: This doctrine is irrelevant to worthwhile discussion of the problem of evil. By this phrase I understand: the problem how the existence of a God with the attributes traditionally ascribed to him in Christian belief can be reconciled with the occurrence of the sorts of evil that we find in the world.

I wish to ask what it is for something to be normal, what ‘normal’ means. In one sense we all know, since we freely use conceptions of normality in our everyday talk about things and people. Normality is what the conservative hopes to return to and the progressive hopes to establish. Normal weather is what we usually get at a given season; a normal day is one that is unrelieved by great strokes of either good or ill fortune. In some contexts, to be normal is to be upright; in others to be average or mean. A normal person is one who is not diseased or crooked or mad, can learn and may forget, sleeps well, performs some job of work adequately, is not unbearably sensitive or thick-skinned, and so on. Sometimes a normal person is one who doesn't stand out from the crowd. Often, normal is what I am, and what you are if you are lucky enough to resemble me in certain respects (for any value of ‘I’).

In Chapter VI of his powerful study God and Other Minds Dr Alvin Plantinga deploys what—following a suggestion of mine—he calls ‘The Free Will Defence’. He presents his case there as a reaction to two earlier attempts to overcome that defence. I propose to take this chapter in Plantinga as my starting point here; and, as far as can be, to ignore, though not by that token to repudiate, those by now rather ancient earlier essays.

1. The scientific study of sleep has recently been stimulated by comparisons between people and advanced computers, whose normal activities need to be suspended periodically for reprogramming. I quote from a popular account by Dr Christopher Evans, which appeared in the Sunday Times during 1969:

Sleep is of course the state in which the brain-computer is ‘off-line’, during which time the vast mass of existing programmes are sorted, outdated ones revised in the light of recent experiences and useless ones or the remnants of modified ones cleared and eliminated. These processes take place for a substantial part of the night, but because the brain is ‘off-line’ and consciousness suppressed, we are mostly not aware of them. However, if for some reason our sleep is disturbed or when we wake in the morning, as the conscious mind ‘comes to’ it catches the programme operations at work, and for a moment has no way of knowing whether the events are internal or external in origin. It sets to work therefore to try to make sense of the programme or fragments thereof that are being run through, and the result is what we call a dream— though we should presumably call it an interrupted dream.

Darwinism is ‘much more than a theory’, said the German botanist Albert Wigand in 1875; ‘it is a frame of mind which dominates thought, a resuscitated “Naturphilosophie”, in which the terms “Polarity”, “Totality”, “Subject”, “Object” are replaced by terms such as “Struggle for Existence”, “Inheritance”, “Selection”, and so on.’ Subsequent events have indicated that Wigand had a point. But it is not clear to us yet what exactly the point is. Interest in Man's Place in Nature, and in his alleged biological uniqueness as a language-user and tool-maker, is as great now as it was in 1871 when Darwin's Descent of Man was first published. We now have access to well over a hundred years' worth of material sparked off by The Origin of Species, linking Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to almost every field under the sun. Yet the precise status of his theory is still the subject of vigorous controversy in philosophy of science.

Fr. Bernard Lonergan's writings have not so far received much discussion in British philosophical journals, although they contain one of the most fully-developed contemporary presentations of Catholic Christianity and have a substantial and distinctive philosophical content. They have not lacked theological commentators, both in print and in conferencediscussions. The present article has three aims: to draw attention to Lonergan's work and its philosophical relevance; to notice the publication of his latest book, Method in Theology, and to venture some critical comments on certain arguments about the intelligibility of being, being and the good, and God, in his book Insight (published first in 1957). These arguments are central to Lonergan's account of theism, a theism which, in its orthodox Roman Catholic form, is presupposed by Method in Theology. The books are organically interrelated. One admirer of Lonergan described the newer book (before its appearance) as ‘the book [Lonergan] originally set out to write’.

Certain unwise, careless, or as we say, ‘self-destructive’ actions often bring in their train consequences unpleasant to the agent according to natural law. If an agent through folly or otherwise acts in a way which shows that he has ignored or forgotten predictable or possible consequences people will say ‘it serves him right’, meaning ‘he ought to have foreseen that’. Sometimes they will even say ‘he got what he deserved’. For these reasons such consequences can be called punishment, or a kind of punishment.