Western Buddhology, the responsible scholarly study of Buddhist languages, history and ideas, is now more than a century and a half old. For most of that time scholars working in this field have been primarily concerned to understand and expound their sources, not to criticize or assess the views found therein, much less to make any attempt at deciding whether the central views of Buddhist philosophers are likely to be true statements of the way things are. There are good reasons for this restriction; before a given set of philosophical views can be assessed it must be understood, and in the case of Buddhism the gaining of such understanding has involved the collective philological labours of several generations of scholars and is still in many respects in its infancy. What is the case for the scholarly community as a whole is magnified for the individual working in this field; the effort involved in becoming competent in several Buddhist canonical languages and in becoming familiar with a range of philosophical ideas and preconceptions which are in many respects alien to one's own culture tends to mean that the Buddhologist's apprenticeship is long, his publications so clogged with jargon as to be inaccessible to any non-specialist, and his appetite for truth stifled by Sanskrit syntax and Tibetan declensions. There is the added problem that the Western intellectual who makes the study of Buddhism his avocation is likely to be, in some more or less well defined sense, a Buddhist; and the dangers of making religious commitment the major motivation for scholarly study have been so amply illustrated by Christian history that they scarcely need rehearsing here.

A member of a religious community might have occasion to ask of the teachers in his community: What do we have to say about other religions? What is the value of their beliefs and ways of life as compared with ours? How are we to regard other religous people? How are we to act towards them?

That the study of religion can be pursued and, as a matter of fact, has been pursued, from a variety of standpoints - some overt and some covert - is today something of an uncomfortable commonplace to those involved in teaching Religionswissenschaft and Religionsgeschichte in Western university departments of Religious Studies. In thus exhibiting a diversity of approach the study of religion is, however, not alone among the humane disciplines: the study of history, of politics, of society, of art and of literature are equally beset by problems of Problematik and of methodology that take up much of the time and much of the energy of their practitioners. The student of each of these disciplines must confront, both at the outset of his studies and continually throughout their pursuit, questions relating to point, purpose and meaning, and in the study of any of the disciplines I have mentioned - of history, literature, art, politics, society and, today, we must add, of science also - there is in the contemporary Western world little, if any, agreement among those involved in the pursuit of learning in these areas either on the Problematik - that is, on the questions to be put to the material that forms the subject matter of the discipline concerned, or about the methods to be employed in describing, understanding, analysing and ultimately synthesising the material of these disciplines into a coherent and meaningful whole.

A great deal of modern Protestant theology looks very much like an attempt to conduct a salvage operation which is designed to make clear how it is possible to retain belief in Jesus Christ, and at the same time remain intellectually honest. For the same sceptical challenge which faces the secular historian also faces the theologian. If Christians are correct in arguing that the locus of God's revelation to man is in Jesus of Nazareth, then in order to know about this supposed revelation, it is necessary to know about a period of time in the past; it is necessary to know the history of the man's life and actions. Theologians are therefore faced with the question: how, if at all, is it possible to bridge the logical gap between statements describing what Jesus of Nazareth said and did, and statements describing the evidence for what Jesus of Nazareth said and did. The solution found to this question by theologians tends to be determined by their conscious and unconscious philosophical presuppositions; just as it did in the examples discussed above of secular critical philosophies of history.

In The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume argues that there can in principle be no good reason for believing a miracle has occurred. Recently, Richard Swinburne has disagreed, arguing that there could be good reason to believe a miracle has occurred. I will argue that both Hume and Swinburne are correct. So long as we accept Hume's notion of a miracle, his argument against the rationality of belief in such events stands firm. In this respect, Swinburne's attempted refutation fails. In a deeper sense, however, Swinburne's project succeeds. Hume's critique of miracles turns on a truncated understanding of the supernatural. Making use of suggestions drawn from Swinburne's unsuccessful argument, the concept of miracle can be reformulated so as to allow for the possibility of rational belief.

Recently Steven E. Boër gave another turn to the discussion of the free will defence by claiming that the free will defence is irrelevant to the justification of moral evil. Conceding that free will may be of real value, Boër claims that free will could have been allowed creatures without that leading to any moral evil at all. What I shall hereafter refer to as the ‘Boër reform’ is the suggestion that God could have allowed creatures to exercise free choices but have intervened with ‘coincidence miracles’ to prevent all the intended evil from actually occurring. What is important to the free will defence, according to Boër, is the ability to choose freely and not the ability to succeed in effecting what we have intended to accomplish. It is no intrusion on the freedom of our wills for God to prevent us from accomplishing what we tried to do with our free wills as long as we were free to try.

Many philosophers have written in the past as though it were nearly obvious to rational reflection that the existence of evil in this world is incompatible with the presumed properties of the Christian God, and they have assumed a proof of incompatibility to be easy to construct. An informal underpinning for this line of thought is easy to develop. Surely God in his benevolence finds evil to be evil, and hence has both the desire and the means, provided by his omnipotence and omniscience, to eradicate it. But it remains a brute fact that evil exists. While this seems plausible enough at first glance, and seems damaging to the rationality of Christian belief, attempts to pin down a definite proof of incompatibility have encountered difficulties. The root difficulty is perhaps that the surface plausibility of incompatibility is ultimately mistaken. In what he calls a Free Will Defence against natural atheology, Alvin Plantinga has presented what seems a definitive proof, on rather modest assumptions, of the logical compatibility of God's nature and the existence of evil. Logic alone can neither prove nor disprove God's existence, since the defence rests on the empirical assumption that evil exists in this world. What Plantinga shows, put very simply, is that God may have created a world as good as any that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent being might have created given that human beings must exist in that world. Whether Christianity ought to court logical rationality may seem highly dubious, but on the supposition that it does, Plantinga's proof that the existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of evil seems to me to (provisionally) settle the issue of whether Christianity is a possible object of rational belief, at least insofar as the problem of evil is considered the major obstacle to rationality of belief. Perhaps it is now clear that I do not intend here to attack the validity or the significance of Plantinga's proof. At the same time, I think it possible to argue for Plantinga's conclusion on other grounds, grounds that seem to me philosophically more appealing, and grounds that are manifestly compatible with the Biblical record. After briefly summarizing Plantinga's argument, I shall propose an alternative free will defence that circumvents some of the presuppositions of his arguments, an alternative that may be attractive to philosophers who are not interested in an ontology involving Plantinga's conception of possible worlds.

The common notion of ‘immortality’ presupposes a ‘dualism’ of mind and body, with the former alone surviving death. Such eminent Muslim thinkers as al-Kindi (A.D. 801–873), known as the Father of Muslim philosophy; al-Farabi (870–950) called ‘The Second Teacher’; ibn Sina (980–1037), that encyclopaedic genius of the Muslim world; and ibn Roshd (1126–1198), have all advocated a very strict kind of ‘dualism’, anticipating Descartes, the Father of modern philosophy, down to the present-day realist-idealists led by Professor H. D. Lewis of the University of London. The dualistic position, however, made even Descartes realize the difficulty of explaining ‘interaction’, or for that matter any kind of relation, which we experience between mind and body in our everyday life - a problem which he and his followers found hard to solve. As every student of modern Western thought knows, Descartes resorted to –interactionism’, Spinoza (like ibn Roshd) took refuge in ‘parallelism7rsquo;, while Leibniz advocated ‘pre-established harmony’ implied in the position of Asharites. Iqbal argues against any such view, ‘I am inclined to think that the hypothesis of matter as an independent existence is perfectly gratuitous. It can only be justified on the ground of our sensations of which matter is supposed to be at least a part-cause other than myself’ (a position taken up by both Locke and Kant). Iqbal contends against the Cartesian hypothesis that ‘We cannot find any observable facts to show how and where exactly their interaction takes place, and which of the two takes the initiative’. Against both ‘parallelism’ and ‘pre-established harmony’ his contention is that they reduce ‘the soul to a mere passive spectator of the happenings of the body’. Thus, Iqbal rejects both ‘interactionism’ and ‘parallelism’ as unsatisfactory.