My intent in this paper is to give an account of Aquinas' analysis of the nature of Christian faith, to indicate some difficulties to which it seems to me, and has seemed to others, to give rise, to try to evaluate the degree to which his analysis can suggest answers to those difficulties, and then to conclude with some general comments about the sources of those perplexities that still remain.*

The cognitive science of religion seeks to find genuine causal explanations for the origin and transmission of religious ideas. In the cognitive approach to religion, so-called intuitive and counter-intuitive concepts figure importantly. In this article it is argued that cognitive scientists of religion should clarify their views about the explanatory and semantic role they give to counter-intuitive concepts and beliefs in their theory. Since the cognitive science of religion is a naturalistic research programme, it is doubtful that its proponents can remain neutral on important ontological questions.

The Judaeo-Christian belief in the general resurrection has long been troubled by the issue of personal identity, but prior to the advent of such concerns there existed a cognate concern about the identity not of the resurrected person, but of the resurrected person's body. Although this latter issue has exercised scholars of various ages, concern with it was particularly keen in early modern times. In this paper I chart the various ways bodily identity was conceived by early modern thinkers in connection with the resurrection, as well as the key objections their contemporaries developed in response.

As a preliminary, I shall clarify the kenotic position by arguing that a position which is often called kenotic is actually a quasi-kenotic version of the classical account, according to which Jesus had normal divine powers but chose not to exercise them. After this preliminary, I discuss three problems with the strict kenotic account. The first is that kenosis conflicts with the standard list of attributes considered essential to God. The second problem is posed by the Exaltation, namely the resumption by Jesus of normal divine powers after his life on Earth. Finally there is the problem of how it was possible for Jesus to be the same person as the pre-incarnate Word. My solutions to these problems constitute my defence of a strict kenotic account of the Incarnation.

In ‘The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions’ (Religious Studies 32, June 1996) Gavin D'Costa argues that ‘pluralism must always logically be a form of exclusivism and that nothing called pluralism really exists’ (225). He sees himself as doing a ‘conceptual spring cleaning exercise’ (225). However the result is to obscure clear and useful distinctions by confused and confusing ones. Some further spring cleaning is therefore called for.

The religious pluralism that D'Costa is referring to is the view that the great world religions constitute conceptually and culturally different responses to an ultimate transcendent reality, these responses being, so far as we can tell, more or less on a par when judged by their fruits. And the religious exclusivism to which he refers holds that one particular religion – in his case Christianity – is alone fully true and salvific, the others being either wholly misleading, or inferior imitations of or inferior approximations to the one ‘true’ religion.

Through the Manichaeans, the Islamic world, and the Christian East, the story of the Buddha became known to the Christian West. If the teachings of the Buddha reached the West in an attenuated form, his life and the ascetic ideal which it symbolized were a positive force in the spiritual life of Christendom. It is one of the vicissitudes of history for which Christianity and Buddhism can both feel grateful. For the Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat demonstrates powerfully the intimate connections between these two traditions to the extent that they both pursue the spiritual life and the ascetic ideal. As Max Müller has aptly put it

Whatever we may think of the sanctity of saints, let those who doubt the right of Buddha to a place among them read the story of his life as it is told in the Buddhist canon. If he lived the life which is there described, few saints have a better claim to the title than Buddha; and no one either in the Greek or in the Roman Church need be ashamed of having paid to Buddha's memory the honour that was intended for St Josaphat, the prince, the hermit, and the saint.

One of the most difficult and perplexing tenets of classical theism is the doctrine of divine simplicity. Broadly put, this is generally understood to be the thesis that God is altogether without any proper parts, composition, or metaphysical complexity whatsoever. For a good deal more than a millennium, veritable armies of philosophical theologians – Jewish, Christian and Islamic – proclaimed the truth and importance of divine simplicity. Yet in our own time, the doctrine has enjoyed no such support. Among many otherwise orthodox theists, those who do not just disregard it completely explicitly deny it. However, in a couple of recent articles, William E. Mann has attempted to expound the idea of divine simplicity anew and to defend it against a number of criticisms. He even has gone so far as to hint at reaffirming its importance, suggesting that the doctrine may have a significant amount of explanatory power and other theoretical virtue as part of an overall account of the nature of God, by either entailing or in other ways providing for much else that traditional theists have wanted to say about God. In this paper, I want to take a close look at Mann's formulation of the doctrine and at a general supporting theory he adumbrates in his attempt to render more plausible, or at least more defensible, various of its elements and implications. As Mann has made what is arguably the best attempt to defend the doctrine in recent years, I think that such an examination is important and will repay our efforts.

This article assesses J. L. Schellenberg's account of propositional faith and, in light of that assessment, sketches an alternative that avoids certain objections and coheres better with Schellenberg's aims.

William Lane Craig's defence of the kalam cosmological argument rests heavily on two philosophical arguments against a past-eternal universe. In this article I take issue with one of these arguments, what I call the ‘Hilbert's Hotel Argument’ – namely, that the metaphysical absurdity of an actually infinite number of things existing precludes the possibility of a beginningless past. After explaining this argument, I proceed to raise some initial doubts. After setting those aside, I show that the argument is ineffective against proponents of presentism. The remainder of the article considers and rejects possible replies on Craig's behalf.

In this paper we investigate composition models of incarnation, according to which Christ is a compound of qualitatively and numerically different constituents. We focus on three-part models, according to which Christ is composed of a divine mind, a human mind, and a human body. We consider four possible relational structures that the three components could form. We argue that a ‘hierarchy of natures’ model, in which the human mind and body are united to each other in the normal way, and in which they are jointly related to the divine mind by the relation of co-action, is the most metaphysically plausible model. Finally, we consider the problem of how Christ can be a single person even when his components may be considered persons. We argue that an Aristotelian metaphysics, according to which identity is a matter of function, offers a plausible solution: Christ's components may acquire a radically new identity through being parts of the whole, which enables them to be reidentified as parts, not persons.

Subsequent to the fifth century until modern times all theologians agreed that God the Trinity is constituted by three persons (in Boethius's sense of ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’) who have a common divine essence, and are individuated only by their relations to each other. Having that essence entailed each being omnipotent and so perfectly good. In virtue of his perfect goodness the Father necessarily produces the Son (in order to have one equal whom to love and be loved by) and the Spirit (in order that the Son have one equal other than the Father to love and be loved by). There cannot be more than three divine persons because three persons are sufficient for the existence of unselfish love, and so any fourth divine person would be produced by an act which none of the three needed to produce, and so would not exist necessarily and so could not be divine. Necessarily if there is one divine person, there are three and only three divine persons.

Alvin PlantingaWarranted Christian Belief(New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2000).

In the two previous volumes of his trilogy on ‘warrant’, Alvin Plantinga developed his general theory of warrant, defined as that characteristic enough of which terms a true belief into knowledge. A belief B has warrant if and only if: (1) it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly, (2) in a cognitive environment sufficiently similar to that for which the faculties were designed, (3) according to a design plan aimed at the production of true beliefs, when (4) there is a high statistical probability of such beliefs being true.

Thus my belief that there is a table in front of me has warrant if in the first place, in producing it, my cognitive faculties were functioning properly, the way they were meant to function. Plantinga holds that just as our heart or liver may function properly or not, so may our cognitive faculties. And he also holds that if God made us, our faculties function properly if they function in the way God designed them to function; whereas if evolution (uncaused by God) made us, then our faculties function properly if they function in the way that (in some sense) evolution designed them to function.

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.

This article responds to one of Thaddeus Metz's criticisms of the theory that the meaning of life is to fulfil a purpose assigned by God. In particular, it addresses the argument that only an atemporal God could ground meaning but that an atemporal God could not assign a purpose. In order to do this, the article first argues that Metz's criticisms misread the relevant sense of purpose. It then argues that on a more plausible reading of ‘purpose’, we can see that it is in fact the kind of thing that an atemporal God could assign.

The metaphysics of time, though almost always diverting, is rarely discomforting. I can wonder what time is, come up only with conundrums, and yet still feel intimately acquainted with time by way of my mundane experience. Familiarity in this case breeds contempt of metaphysics. If I were to pose the question of time as Augustine posed it, however, I would find no refuge in time's familiarity, for time's familiarity is part of what has come into question. My ordinary experience of time may not be of time after all. Facing such a possibility is discomforting, but it may also be the beginning of wisdom. In Augustine's hands, metaphysical questions turn back upon their owners. What I ask of time I ask of myself. The wisdom comes, if it comes at all, in coming to understand the demand knowledge of the world has made upon my self-knowledge. There is nothing worth knowing that does not in some way transform the knower. Augustine hints at the transformation called for in the knowledge of time. It is disturbingly profound.

William Rowe and others argue that if ours is a possible world than which there is a better, it follows that God does not exist. If this is correct, then if there is no best possible world, it is not so much as possible that God exist. I reject the key premise of Rowe's argument. The key to seeing that it is false, I suggest, is seeing that God is subject to something fairly called moral luck. In this first part of the article, I set up Rowe's argument, indicate my strategy, introduce the notion of moral luck and show how it bears on Rowe's claims.

In Part I of this paper, I took up a challenge posed by Alston (1991), Wainwright (1981), Yandell (1993), and other theists who hold the rather natural view that mystical experiences provide perceptual contact with God, roughly on a par with the access sense experience affords to the natural world. These theists recognize, at the same time, that the plausibility of this view would be significantly compromised by the possibility of scientifically explaining mystical experiences – especially if a scientific explanation were incompatible with, ruled out, or made unlikely the supposition that God has anything special to do with the occurrences of these experiences.

This inquiry is motivated by the question: if atheism is true, is it nevertheless the case that holiness or sacredness is exemplified? I believe the answer to this question is affirmative, and that the path to its affirmation lies in the rejection of the traditional assumption that holiness is a single and simple property of a divinity that eludes analysis. The opposite view, that there are several complex properties comprising holiness, makes it manifest that there are holy beings, even a holy ‘supreme being’, even if there is no God and no gods.

This article argues that – despite the value of distinguishing between insiders and outsiders in a contingent and relative sense – there is no fundamental insider–outsider problem. We distinguish weak and strong versions of ‘insiderism’ (privileged versus monopolistic access to knowledge) and then sociological and religious versions of the latter. After reviewing critiques of the sociological version, we offer a holistic semantic critique of the religious version (i.e. the view that religious experience and/or language offers sui generis access to knowledge). We argue that all evidence for mental states is overt, public, and observable, and, hence, that there can be no significant difference in the access to knowledge of insiders and outsiders.

Several writers have argued for the implausibility of there being naturalistic explanations of mystical experience. These writers recognize that the evidential significance of mystical experiences for theism depends upon whether explanations that exclude supernatural agency can be discounted; but they seem unaware of some of the best scientific work done in this area. Part I of the present paper introduces the theory of I. M. Lewis, an anthropologist, and tests it against the case of St Teresa. I use Teresa because of her prominence, and because we have considerable biographical data for her. I conclude that Lewis's approach, suitably supplemented, is strikingly successful in explaining this case.