What is the self? What is the ‘I’ that appears to be the subject of all ‘my’ thoughts and imaginings, my experiences and desires? This is not simply about problems of identification. How I pick you out or you recognize me are questions related to the problem of what it is to be or you, but they are not the same issue. If our ‘true selves’ are inaccessible to public scrutiny, how we are identified and re-identified publicly will be different from who ‘we’ are. The problem of the self is a genuinely metaphysical question which cannot be reduced to the epistemological one of how we know each other, without further argument.

Augustine tells us in the Confessions that his reading of Cicero's Hortensius at the age of nineteen aroused in him a burning ‘passion for the wisdom of eternal truth’. He was inspired ‘to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly’. And thus he embarked on his arduous journey to the truth, which was at the same time a conversion to Catholic Christianity, and which culminated twelve years later in his experience in the garden in Milan.

In the present context the word ‘explanation’ is taken to mean an identification of the factors which would disclose to us why a phenomenon exists and/or functions as it does, and it is my purpose in this paper to do three things: firstly to argue that explanation as just defined is the supreme goal to which the academic study of religion should direct its investigations; secondly to offer what I consider the most illuminating method of explanation in this context; and thirdly to consider certain problems which arise from that method for our subject as presently conducted. As such, the present essay is also a commentary on and defence of the central methodological ploy in my recent book, Religion and Ultimate Well-Being: An Explanatory Theory (1984), though it can stand on its own quite independently of the book.

A basic thrust behind Alvin Plantinga's position that belief in God is properly basic is an analogy between certain non-religious (and presumably justified) beliefs such as ‘I see a tree’ and theistic beliefs such as ‘God made this flower’. Each kind of belief is justified for a believer, argues Plantinga, when she finds herself in a certain set of conditions. Richard Grigg challenges this claim by arguing that while the non-religious beliefs are confirmed, beliefs about God are not. I wish to explore this challenge, clarify it and suggest that on one understanding it is irrelevant and on another it is false.

David Hume is widely known as a critic of natural theology. Hence he is referred to as ‘the great infidel’. Moreover, when one thinks of Hume's criticisms of natural religion one often thinks of Philo's criticisms of various theistic arguments presented by Cleanthes and Demea in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In his preface to the Hackett edition of the Dialogues Richard H. Popkin writes,

Many consider it the most decisive modern critique of some of the major arguments concerning the existence and nature of God.

The lord whose is the oracle at Delphoi neither utters nor conceals his meaning, but reveals it with a sign.(Heracleitos fragment)

In the eternal truth from which all temporal things are made, we behold the form … and we have within us like a word the knowledge of what we have conceived.(St augustine, De Trin.)

For the invisible things of Him, since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made.(St Paul, Romans i, 20)

Human thought is unable to acknowledge the reality of affliction. To acknowledge affliction means saying to oneself: I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose.(Simon Weil)

Theological deconstructionism written in a Derridean manner typically consists of twin announcements about the religious character, and significance, of contemporary experience and culture. The first is the announcement of the death of both the transcendent God and His latter-day substitutes, such as the transcendental self, which have provided the religious underpinnings for classical and modern culture, respectively.

It is beyond question that most ordinary religious believers would find talk about God as having beliefs strange, puzzling, and objectionable. God doesn't believe things, he knows them, and if some philosophers, overlooking or ignoring this obvious point, still speak of God as having beliefs – well, that says something about those philosophers!

Recently this view of the ordinary believer has received help from an unexpected source, namely William P. Alston, who in his paper, ‘Does God Have Beliefs?’ makes a strong case for a negative answer to its title question. To be sure, Alston's reasons for this conclusion are rather more complex than those we have attributed to the ordinary believer; he specifically eschews a ‘cheap way of winning a victory’ by means of the claim that knowledge excludes belief by conceptual necessity (p. 292). Nevertheless, by a longer train of reasoning he comes to the same conclusion, and since this reasoning involves a new and more adequate conception of divine knowledge, and additionally solves two outstanding problems in thedoctrine of omniscience (the foreknowledge problem, and the problem of divine knowledge of propositions containing essential indexicals), the trip is well worth taking.