A good deal has already been written on the possible relevance of Niels Bohr's principle of ‘complementarity’ to various theological issues. Bohr, himself, suggested that the concept might be useful in discussions concerning the relation of intra-mundane causality and divine providence, or that of human freedom and divine sovereignty. These suggestions have been taken up and developed by C. A. Coulson and D. M. Mackay, but they have also seriously been criticized, notably by I. G. Barbour. The principal difficulty encountered in regarding God and the world as ‘complementary’, in Bohr's sense of the term, is that Creator and creature are generally thought to be two distinct ‘entities’, in Christian ‘theism’, rather than two ‘modes’ of a single entity as ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ are two ‘complementary’ modes of an atomic object in physics.

In this essay, moral anti-theodicy is characterized as opposition to the trivialization of suffering, defined as the reinterpretation of horrendous evils in a way the sufferer cannot accept. Ambitious theodicy (which claim goods emerge from specific evils) is deemed always to trivialize horrendous evils and, because there is no specific theoretical context, also harm sufferers. Moral anti-theodicy is susceptible to two main criticisms. First, it is over-demanding as a moral position. Second, anti-theodicist opposition to least ambitious theodicies, which portray God's decision to create as an ‘all-or-nothing’ scenario, requires a moral commitment to philosophical pessimism. Thus anti-theodicists should not be quick to take the moral high ground. However, this should not encourage theodicists, since theodicies may well be self-defeating in so far as they attempt to provide comfort.

What sorts of things are there in the world? Clearly enough, there are concrete, material things; but are there other things too, perhaps nonconcrete or non-material things? Some people believe that there are such things, which are often called abstract; purported examples of such objects include numbers, properties, possible but non-actual states of affairs, propositions, and sets. Following a long-standing (but somewhat misleading) tradition, I shall describe persons who believe that there are abstract objects as ‘platonists’. In this paper, I shall not directly address the plausibility of platonism, as compared with its rivals; instead, I shall confine my attention to one way in which some people have tried to combine platonism and theism. More specifically, I shall concentrate upon the claim that abstract objects depend upon God ontologically (hereafter just ‘DEP’); I shall argue that platonistic theists should reject DEP in favour of the claim that abstract objects exist independently of God (hereafter just ‘IND’). In order to evaluate the relative merits of DEP versus IND, it will be helpful to examine in some detail a particular articulation of DEP. When it comes to recent work on DEP, we can do no better in this regard than to examine the recent work of Thomas V. Morris and Christopher H. Menzel. According Morris and Menzel, there is a sense in which God literally creates such abstracta through engaging in intellective activities.

It is argued that miracles are best understood as natural events with supernatural causes and that such causal interaction is logically possible. Such miracles may, or may not, involve violations of natural laws. If violations of laws are possible, Humean supervenience views of laws are best avoided. Where miracles violate laws, it shows that what is naturally impossible may be actual and what is naturally necessary may not be actual. Whether or not miracles actually occur, this demonstrates that the nomic modalities differ from the logical. The theory contrasts favourably with competitors and allows, contrary to an interpretation of Aquinas, that Creation would have been a miracle.

Rudolf Otto is often spoken of as continuing the tradition of reflection on the nature of religion inaugurated by Schleiermacher. I argue that, on the contrary, there are important differences between Schleiermacher's and Otto's accounts of religion. Otto opposed naturalistic analyses of religion which threatened Christianity's claims to truth, and saw Schleiermacher as providing insufficient resources for resisting such analyses. Otto's grounding of his own religious epistemology in the work of Jakob Friedrich Fries provided him with an explicitly supernatural ‘religious a priori’, and thus provided a universal legitimating ground for religion which resists naturalistic analysis. Schleiermacher, in contrast, explicitly ruled out the sort of ‘experience of the holy’ postulated by Otto by denying both the ‘givenness’ of God in experience and supernatural intervention in the natural order. Further, Schleiermacher's appreciation of humanity's embeddedness within ‘the system of nature’ led him to embrace the view that religion, like any natural phenomenon, is an appropriate subject for scientific investigation.

Although it is commonly accepted that Darwinian evolution could select for true common-sense beliefs, it is altogether less certain that the same can be said for other classes of beliefs, such as moral or religious beliefs. This issue takes centre stage in debates concerning evolutionary debunking arguments against religious beliefs, where the rationality of beliefs is often dependent upon their production by an evolved faculty that is sensitive to truth. In this article, we consider whether evolution selected for true religious beliefs. We begin by highlighting the relevance of this question for broader philosophy of religion, then present a dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments for and against the proposition that true religious beliefs generate pragmatic success and hence can be selected for by evolution.

In this essay I propose to offer some observations in due course on how Christian thought and practice in general (though some reference will be made to the Indian context) might profit from a central theme in the theology of Rāmānuja, a Tamil Vaisnava Brahmin whose traditional date straddles the eleventh and twelfth centuries of the Christian era. The central theme I have in mind is expressed in Rāmānuja's view that the ‘world’ is the ‘body’ of Brahman or God. We shall go on to explain what this means, but let me state first that my overall aim is to further inter-religious understanding, especially between Christian and Hindu points of view. In professing a concern for inter-religious dialogue I know that I reflect a longstanding interest of Professor H. D. Lewis. I shall seek to show that the Christian religion can profit both from the content and the method of Rāmānuja's body-of-God theology. To this end this essay is divided into two sections. Section I is the longer: it contains an analysis of what Rāmānuja did (and did not) mean by his body-of-God theme – doubtless unfamiliar ground for most of the readers of this essay – and serves as a propaedeutic for what follows in section 2. In section 2 I shall attempt to ‘extrapolate’ Rāmānuja's thinking into a Christian context, with dialogue in mind. Section 2 cannot be appreciated for the promise I hope it holds out without the (sometimes involved) detail of the first section.

I discuss some trends in recent philosophy of religion, focusing on J. L. Schellenberg's Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion. I pay special attention to Schellenberg's dual emphases on ‘the Ultimate’ as metaphysical object of inquiry and various non-doxastic states (‘faith that’, ‘faith in’) as psychological objects of inquiry. This view is contrasted throughout to what might be called a ‘liturgical’ orientation in philosophy of religion.

The doctrine of the Trinity says that there is just one God and three distinct divine persons, each of whom is God. This would seem to imply that there are three divine persons, each a different person the other persons but the same God as the other persons. If we accept what I believe is the most popular account of identity current among logicians then we must hold that this apparent consequence is contradictory. We see this as follows (it will suffice to consider just the relation of Father and Son): logicians generally treat relativized identity expressions of the form ‘is the same A as’ (here ‘A’ stands in for a term which relativizes the identity) as being analysable in terms of absolute (or unrelativized) identity according to the following equivalence schema, (E):

(E) a is the same A as b if and only if a is identical to b and a is an A and b is an A.

The view under consideration affirms the following three sentences:

(1) The Father and the Son are persons.

(2) The Father is not the same person as the Son.

(3) The Father is the same God as the Son.

This essay examines a conflict between God's omnipotence and His omniscience. I discuss our intuitions regarding omnipotence and omniscience and describe a method by which we can decide whether a being is omnipotent. I consider the most promising versions of omnipotence and argue that they produce a genuine conflict with omniscience. Finally, I suggest that we can take the example of omniscience and generalize it to several of God's essential properties and thereby reveal incompatibilities that result even from sophisticated conceptions of divine attributes.

Let the day perish in which I was born… [Job 3: 3a]1

Pantheism claims: (1) there exists an all-inclusive unity; and (2) that unity is divine. I review three current and scientifically viable ontologies to see how pantheism can be developed in each. They are: (1) materialism; (2) Platonism; and (3) class-theoretic Pythagoreanism. I show how each ontology has an all-inclusive unity. I check the degree to which that unity is: eternal, infinite, complex, necessary, plentiful, self-representative, holy. I show how each ontology solves the problem of evil (its theodicy) and provides for salvation (its soteriology). I conclude that Platonism and Pythagoreanism have the most divine all-inclusive unities. They support sophisticated contemporary pantheisms.

One of the most striking facts about Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is the fact that it has been subject to so many mutually contradictory interpretations. It is not, to be sure, unusual that a complex philosophical work be capable of a variety of interpretations. The case of the Dialogues is, however, surely an exceptional one, for the contradictory interpretations concern what is clearly the main subject of the book: the justifiability of world-hypotheses, and specifically the justifiability of the religious world-hypothesis. According to some commentators, Hume's point in the Dialogues is that no world-hypothesis whatever is justifiable, perhaps none is even intelligible. According to others, Hume not only does not deny the possibility of a justified world-hypothesis, but actually proposes some particular hypothesis as the most reasonable one. Those who agree that Hume defends some world-hypothesis, however, differ radically about its content. For some, Hume's preferred hypothesis is that the explanation of order in the universe is a deity immanent in the universe. For others, Hume subscribes to a deity distinct from the universe whose order he explains, and possessing many, at least, of the traditional attributes of God, including wisdom, power, and benevolence. Still others hold that Hume's God, while distinct from the universe, possesses only the natural, not the moral, attributes traditionally assigned to him. Some commentators have even argued that Hume's purpose in the Dialogues is to employ scepticism in defence of religious faith. How, one must ask, is it possible that so many mutually contradictory interpretations have been proposed? How is this striking fact about the Dialogues to be explained?

In response to Buckareff, I agree that it is indeed impossible intentionally and directly to acquire a belief one judges not to be supported by one's evidence. But Jamesian doxastic venture does not involve any such direct self-inducing of belief: it is rather a matter of an agent's taking to be true in practical reasoning what she already, through some ‘passional’, non-epistemic, cause, holds true beyond the support of her evidence. To deny that beliefs may sometimes have passional causes is, I argue, purely a rationalist dogma. I do concede to Buckareff, however, that a venture of faith might sometimes be sub-doxastic, in the sense that full practical commitment is made to faith-propositions without actual belief. That concession requires only a minor modification, however, to a doxastic-venture model of faith.

An argument is given showing that, on the assumptions of Molinism, human beings must bring about the truth of the counterfactuals of freedom that govern their actions. But, it is claimed, it is impossible for humans to do this, and so Molinism is involved in a contradiction. The Molinist must maintain, on the contrary, that we can indeed bring about the truth of counterfactuals of freedom about us. This question turns out to depend on whether the counterfactuals of freedom are, or are entailed by, part of the causal history of the world. A further argument is given that these counterfactuals are entailed by events intrinsic to the world's history. If this is so, then we cannot bring about the truth of these counterfactuals; the anti-Molinist argument succeeds, and Molinism is refuted.

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.

What happens when you assume that the world is a dream in the mind of God, or that the world's history is a story that God is spinning? Focusing on the role that this assumption plays in the thought of Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1801–1854), at least as it is understood by Rabbi Herzl Hefter, I argue that this assumption generates interesting solutions to old riddles in the philosophy of religion and interesting insights into the nature of religious language.

Alston's perceptual account of mystical experience fails to show how it is that the sort of predicates that are used to describe God in these experiences could be derived from perception, even though the ascription of matched predicates in the natural order are not derived in the manner Alston has in mind. In contrast, if one looks to research on shared attention between individuals as mediated by mirror neurons, then one can give a perceptual account of mystical experience which draws a tighter connection between what is reported in mystical reports and the most similar reports in the natural order.

The methodological implications of the motives that underlie the study of religion and, more particularly, the academic study of religion have not, I think, received the attention they deserve. They are of the utmost importance, however, for the differences of motivation between the study of religion legitimated by the modern university and the scholarly study of religion that antedates it, sponsor radically different, if not mutually exclusive, approaches to its study. In asking why the study of religion is undertaken as an academic exercise – which is, after all, a comparatively recent development – I shall be attempting to delineate, to some extent, the relation of motive to method in what has come to be called Religious Studies. In clarifying that relation I hope also to show that Religious Studies – that is, the academic study of religion – must be a vocation in very much the same sense that Max Weber speaks of science as a vocation and, therefore, that such study must take as merely preliminary a ‘religious studies’ that is concerned only to ‘understand’ rather than to explain the phenomenon of Religion.

Can the persistence of a human being's soul at death and prior to the bodily resurrection be sufficient to guarantee that the resurrected human being is numerically identical to the human being who died? According to Thomas Aquinas, it can. Yet, given that Aquinas holds that the human being is identical to the composite of soul and body and ceases to exist at death, it's difficult to see how he can maintain this view. In this paper, I address Aquinas's response to this objection (Summa Contra Gentiles, IV.80–81). After making a crucial clarification concerning the nature of the non-repeatability principle on which the objection relies, I argue that the contemporary notion of immanent causal relations provides us with a way of understanding Aquinas's defence that renders it both highly interesting and philosophically plausible.