The problem of evil normally discussed in philosophical theology is concerned with the pain and suffering experienced in this life. Why do so many innocent children die slow, torturous deaths as the result of disease, famine or earthquakes? Why do so many seemingly innocent adults suffer as the result of the greed, indifference or perversity of others? If God is all-good, then he certainly does not want such suffering. If God is all-powerful, he should be able to do away with such evils. Thus, must we not conclude that the existence of such evil counts against belief in the existence of an all-loving, all-powerful God?

Arguments from design in Hume's day were often cast as arguments from analogy. For instance, a very simple version might read like this: ‘The universe resembles a machine; machines are the products of intelligent design; therefore, the universe is (probably) the product of intelligent design.’ Design arguments (usually of a more sophisticated sort) were put forward by some of the greatest scientists of the time, including Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Such arguments were generally thought to be on a par with the conclusions of physics: Hume raised a number of well-known objections to such design arguments. I am going to discuss one of these objections, the claim that the uniqueness of the universe is, in itself, a bar to our drawing any conclusion about its cause or origin. This objection is raised by Hume at the end of ‘Of a Particular Providence’ and in Part II of the Dialogues.

Eliade, the well-known and prolific historian of religion, has himself of late become an object of intense study. In his endeavours he sought to uncover the deeper, trans-historical meaning of religious expression. He introduced the term ‘creative hermeneutics’ in his more recent writings, and was most intent on discovering what the religious phenomena ‘had to say’.

My topic is a long-standing tension in the interpretation of religion. On the one hand, it seems undeniable — seems almost to go without saying — that liturgical and sacrificial practices, sacred dance, divination, procession and pilgrimage are intentional actions undertaken by persons. Yet there is a distinguished tradition in the study of religion according to which religious activity is typically caused by forces over which the agent has little or no control. Visible, latter-day members of this tradition include Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and, in some moods, Wittgenstein, but its roster is by no means limited to the religiously unmusical.

Theism, according to David O'Connor, has in recent centuries been on trial for its life, the charge being that the existence of so much evil in the world is incompatible with belief in a benevolent creator. But this trial, he claims is incapable of producing a reasoned verdict.

At least since Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent (1870), Anglo-American philosophers have been concerned with the role of certitude, or subjective epistemic certainty, in theistic belief. Newman is himself famous for holding that certitude is an essential feature of any sort of genuine belief, including in particular religious belief. As one recent commentator, Michael Banner, notes, for Newman

The doctrine of hell, stated with a little care, entails that some persons never achieve their greatest good, fail to really flourish and never reach the end for which they were created. If that doctrine is true, and it is tragic that persons never achieve their greatest good, then there are tragic states of affairs whose tragedy is never overcome.

The last two decades have seen an unprecedented amount of philosophical work on the topics of divine foreknowledge, middle knowledge, and timelessness in relation to human freedom. Most of this effort has been directed at logical and metaphysical aspects of these topics – the compatibility of foreknowledge with free will, the existence of true counterfactuals of freedom and the possibility of middle knowledge, the conceivability and metaphysical possibility of divine timelessness, and so on. Far less attention, in contrast, has been devoted to the broader theological ramifications of these theories. Yet insofar as they are theological theories, they are properly appreciated and indeed fully understood only when placed in the appropriate theological context.

Some philosophers of mysticism stress the dependence of mystical experience upon the conceptual categories of the mystic. This has been referred to as an intentionalist or constructivist view, where the mystic ‘constructs’ the framework of mystical encounter, or experiences that which was ‘intended’ at the outset of the mystical path. Steven Katz, for example, insists that the beliefs, values and concepts of mystics directly affect the nature of their mystical experiences. He says, ‘the ontological structure(s) of each major mystical tradition is different and this pre-experiential, inherited structure directly enters into the mystical occasion itself’. In contrast to essentialist theories which hold all mystical experience to be phenomenologically the same though subject to varying interpretations, this constructivist view interprets the tremendous differences in mystical descriptions to be evidence of differences in experience type.