Philosophers of today are easy to stupefy. Try suggesting that some situations, such as enjoying a chess problem, really are in themselves better than others such as being burned alive: in themselves better in the sense that situations of the first sort would be preferable to those of the second if they existed all alone, so that one did not need to take consequences into account, and really better much as Africa is really bigger than Iceland, so that talk of real betterness is not just a genuine, wholehearted act of prescribing, or an expression of personal taste like the remark that mustard really is nasty. You will stupefy many a philosopher.

Despite its loss of intellectual respectability in the nineteenth century, the myth of the fall still haunts modern religion and thought like an unquiet ghost. Discredited in its role as an historical account of human origins, it has retained its vitality as a ‘psychological’ myth, an inexhaustible metaphor for the brokeness and fragmentation of the human spirit. The myth of the fall surfaces in the twentieth century in the form of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, who would not normally spring to mind as someone sympathetic to the myth. Freud is perhaps the most famous ‘demythologizer’ of religion. He traced all religion and myth, including the myth of original sin, back to non-spiritual psychological processes. But although he clearly wished to deconstruct all traditional myth, myth plays an indisputable role in his own psychological theories. Some of his psychological constructs, such as the ‘Oedipus complex’ and the concept of ‘narcissism’, are inspired by Greek myths. Others, like the theory of the death instinct, are founded on scientific speculations which clearly resemble myths. The myth of the primal horde in particular draws its rhetorical power from its similarity to the Biblical account of the fall. Both the Biblical account of the fall and the psychohistorical ‘myth’ of the primal horde attribute the conflicts and imperfections of the human condition in part to an inherited guilt, an inherited guilt which stems from a decisive and fateful historical event in the past.

Once we accept anyone's postulates he becomes our professor and our god: for his foundations he will grab territory so ample and so easy that, if he so wishes, he will drag us up to the clouds. Montaigne

During the last fifteen years, the community of philosophers interested in religion has evinced a waxing concern with the justificatory value of religious experiences for theism. Two parallel but largely discrete debates have appeared in the literature.

This article is not intended to state what I positively believe to be true, but to make a suggestion which I think it well-worth working out. The suggestion is not altogether unfamiliar, but it has certain implications that seem to have been so far overlooked, or at any rate have never been developed. I do not think that it is the duty of a philosopher to confine himself in his publications to working out theories of the truth of which he is convinced.… It is a part of a philosopher's work, as it is of a scientist's, to try out tentative hypotheses and examine their advantages and disadvantages (Ewing 1939, p. 1).

In his book The Existence of God, Professor Swinburne develops a cumulative case for theism. As part of this case, he presents two forms of the argument from design, one form taking as its premise the fact of spatial order, the other proceeding from the fact of temporal order. In this paper, I shall concern myself with the second of these arguments; that is, in Swinburne's terms, I shall concern myself with the argument from regularities of succession.

This paper is exploratory. I shall raise the following questions:

(1) How is it possible that that which is of its nature transcendent should become immanent or incarnate? In the context of Christian Theology: how is it possible for God to become man?

(2) How is it possible for one and the same individual, Jesus of Nazareth, to be both fully God and fully man?

In relation to (I) I shall attempt to give an account of how it is so possible for the transcendent to become fully immanent and yet remain full transcendent by appealing to Professor Geach's account of Aquinas's doctrine of ‘Form’. I do not deny that there are difficulties for my attempted account. Some of these difficulties will be embraced in this paper, but clearly not all. Such would be imposible in an exploratory study.

That is the short title. The long title is: ‘How a deterministic interpretation of quantum theory would, if correct, show that compatibilism is not true; and some implications of this for theodicy’.

Let us start with what people think they mean by freedom who, like myself, reject both determinism and compatibilism. Freedom-fans, we might call them. Better, let us start with what they do not mean, since proponents of determinism too frequently saddle them with views they do not hold. Freedom-fans do not doubt causality.

The critics of Schleiermacher's hermeneutic are legion and its defenders few – due, to a great extent, to the popularity of Gadamer's Truth and Method and its attack on Schleiermacher. I believe that the critics of Schleiermacher have not understood him very well and the failure of his hermeneutics to gain very much respect lies, at least partially, to a lack of understanding of what he had to say. Besides, if we look at contemporary scholars who focus on the study of language and how it functions we will find that they often have views very much like those found in Schleiermacher's discussion of hermeneutics.