Pascal's wager has fascinated philosophers far in excess of its reputation as effective apologetics. Very few of the wager's defenders, in fact, have retained more than an academic interest in its power to persuade. Partly this is a matter of good manners. Pascal is supposed to have pitched his wager at folks who understand only self-interested motivations, and today it is no longer fashionable for defenders of theism to disparage the character of their opponents. But partly the low-key concern with apologetics expresses a philosophical judgement. Pascal's defenders have found the question of the wager's audience to be less philosophically engaging than the logic of its argument. I believe that this assessment is mistaken. The most puzzling feature of Pascal's wager is its invocation of infinite utility. What are finite human beings, theists or otherwise, supposed to make of the idea of an infinitely desirable happiness? There are, I will argue, two sorts of response to this question, and depending on which sort Pascal had in mind, the logic of his wager comes out very differently.

According to a long theological tradition that stretches back at least as far as St Augustine, God's justice and mercy are distinct, and in many ways quite different, character traits. In his great epic poem, Paradise Lost, for example, John Milton goes so far as to suggest a conflict, perhaps even a contradiction, in the very being of God; he thus describes Christ's offer of himself as an atonement this way:

No sooner did thy dear and only Son

Perceive thee purpos'd not to doom frail Man

So strictly, but much more to pity inclin'd,

Hee to appease thy wrath, and end the strife

Of Mercy and Justice in thy face discern'd

Regardless of the Bliss wherein hee sat

Second to thee, offer'd himself to die

For man's offence.

Some scholars have responded to the apparent differences between monistic and theistic mysticisms by emphasizing the role of socio-religious interpretations of the experiences. Both monistic and theistic experiences, they point out, are described as wholly unlike normal sensory events. These mystics claim to go beyond the usual categories of cognition; the experiences are said to be spaceless and timeless realizations which, though not strictly ineffable, defy precise and positive description. Moreover, the mystical exercises – the spiritual training and mental preparation – seem similar for both theistic and monistic mystics. Common mystical means, along with the cessation of normal categories of interpretation during the experiences, suggest that mystics interpret a singular experience type according to their particular theological or philosophical background.

Many Christian theodicists believe that God's creating us with the capacity to love Him and each other justifies, in large part, God's permitting evil. For example, after reminding us that, according to Christian doctrine, the supreme good for human beings is to enter into a reciprocal love relationship with God, Vincent Brümmer recently wrote:

In creating human persons in order to love them, God necessarily assumes vulnerability in relation to them. In fact, in this relation, he becomes even more vulnerable than we do, since he cannot count on the steadfastness of our love the way we can count on his steadfastness… If God did not grant us the ability to sin and cause affliction to him and to one another, we would not have the kind of free and autonomous existence necessary to enter into a relation of love with God and with one another… Far from contradicting the value which the free will defence places upon the freedom and responsibility of human persons, the idea of a loving God necessarily entails it. In this way we can see that the free will defence is based on the love of God rather than on the supposed intrinsic value of human freedom and responsibility.

In what follows I wish to make a contribution to the clarification of the logic of the name ‘God’. I will do so in two stages. In the first stage I will be investigating the meaning of names in general, and how names refer. In the second stage I will attempt to apply the findings of the first stage to the name ‘God’, in light of the way that name functions in religious discourse.

The pluralistic approach to religions has come in for some serious criticism in recent writings. I shall consider two examples in particular. The first is the book Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, edited by Gavin D'Costa. This is a collection of essays offered in response to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, edited by John Hick and Paul Knitter. The second example is an essay by Paul Morris, ‘Judaism and Pluralism: the Price of “Religious Freedom”’, in Religious Pluralism and Unbelief, edited by Ian Hamnett.

God, a being who is good in the best possible combination of ways, loves us. But does he feel sorrow on our behalf? Thomas Aquinas argues that: every passion is specified by its object. That passion, therefore, whose subject is absolutely unbefitting to God is removed from God even according to the nature of its proper species. Such a passion, however, is sorrow or pain, for its subject is the already present evil, just as the object of joy is the good present and possessed. Sorrow and pain, therefore, of their very nature cannot be found in God.

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.