Religion has in the past, it may be truefully admitted, done more than its share of fostering the spirit of ‘we’ over against ‘they’. Economic and political factors have unfortunately, throughout history, clogged the channels of communication between men of one faith and those of another. The most unhappy aspect of the relation between religion and society has been the way in which the former has fostered the distinction between the insider and the outsider. Typical of this is the fact that most religious communities have a word which describes the religious outsider and the word is never a flattering one. That there should be religious diversity in the first place should occasion no surprise. Diversification is the order of things in the biological realm and we would not expect to find a sudden departure from this, that is, a move towards convergence, in the sphere of religion. But unless diversification is matched with understanding and with communication we face the future at our peril. It is for this reason that the question of inter-religious communication, the ground of its possibility, can be regarded not only as the most pressing of problems for the student of comparative religion (for unless there is prior understanding and communication where indeed are the data to be compared?) but as a matter of pressing urgency for all.

In a recent paper Anthony Flew gives an argument which can be outlined as follows:

1. Any attempt to give a ‘free will defence’ (to rebut the argument from evil against God's existence) must be based either on a compatibilist notion of free will or a libertarian, incompatibilist, notion of free will.

2. A free will defence based on a compatibilist notion of free will must fail, for on a compatibilist view of free will, God could make creatures who were free but never chose evil.

3. A free will defence based on a libertarian notion of free will might have other difficulties, but on a libertarian view of free will God could not both leave men free and bring it about that they never chose evil.

4. But a free will defence based on an incompatibilist, libertarian notion of free will can be rejected, since:

(a) It is not clear that the ordinary use of such key terms as ‘action’ and ‘choice’ carry any implications of libertarian free will.

(b) If such terms did carry the implication of libertarian free will it becomes hard to see how anyone could be in a position to know that a choice had been made or an action performed.

(c) The possession of libertarian free will by created beings seems to be incompatible with the essential theistic doctrine that all created beings are always utterly dependent on God as their sustaining cause.

5. Therefore the free will defence fails.

Among Western scholars there has been a growing interest in Buddhist philosophy, especially in the philosophical teachings of the Mādhyamika. Mādhyamika philosophy is considered to be ‘the most important outcome of Buddha's teaching’ and to represent ‘philosophical Buddhism par excellence’. The main message of Mādhyamika Buddhism is the doctrine of emptiness. Yet scholars, as well as students of Buddhism, have often been puzzled about this teaching and have misinterpreted it. The chief purpose of this paper is to expound the Mādhyamika philosophy of emptiness as presented in Chinese San–lun sources and to clarify misconceptions about this important philosophy of Buddhism.

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.

Recently, Erik Baldwin and Tyler McNabb have brought Madhva's epistemological framework into active dialogue with Alvin Plantinga's religious epistemology and have argued that individuals within Madhva's tradition cannot make full use of Plantinga's epistemology, according to which, Christian belief resists de jure objections and can also have warrant. While I do not contest this specific claim, I demonstrate that an analysis of Madhva's epistemological framework reveals that this framework has its own resources through which it can resist de jure objections. I address various objections to the rationality of Mādhvic belief and conclude that there are no de jure objections to Mādhvic belief that are independent of de facto objections.

Of fundamental importance for any epistemology is what philosophers today call ‘semiotics’ which entails a consideration of the issues of semantics, logical syntax, and pragmatics. Semantics has to do with the significations or meanings of the terms or expressions in any particular language. It concentrates on the expressions and their designata. Syntactical analysis is concerned with the rules governing the formal relations among the signs of the language such as in inference or the relation of derivability. And pragmatics is concerned with the meanings the speaker intends to convey by his use of language.Obviously, linguistic and logical nonsense and/or failure to take into account the context of the concrete world, especially that of human interests and intentions, and the issue of applicability would produce a death blow for any attempt at an epistemology.

John L. Austin believed that in the illocution he had discovered a fundamental element of our speech, the understanding of which would disclose the significance of all kinds of linguistic action: not only proposing marriage and finding guilt, but also stating, reporting, conjecturing, and all the rest of the things men can do linguistically.2 We claim that the illocution, the full-fledged speech-act, is central to religious utterances as well, and that it provides a perspicuity in understanding them not elsewhere provided in the work of recent philosophy of religion. In particular we hold that understanding religious talk through the illocution shows the way in which the representative and affective elements are connected to one another and to the utterance as a whole. There may, further, be features in such an analysis which can be extended to other forms of discourse than religious.

In his recent book, Evil and the God of Love,1 Dr John Hick examined various Christian responses to the problem of evil. He traced two related, but in important respects different, paths of thought, which correspond to the two main ways in which the genesis or origin of evil have been understood: either as a capacity for goodness which has not yet been realised (with life, therefore, as a ‘vale of soul-making’), or as an original defect which has vitiated all subsequent life. The former is a ‘minority’ report, which Dr Hick called ‘Irenaean’, since the first person of renown to put it forward in reasonably articulate form was Irenaeus. The latter is the dominant, or majority, report, which Dr Hick called ‘Augustinian’, since Augustine's formulation of it became deeply and profoundly influential in subsequent Christian thought. The differences are not absolute, but the contrasts are clear: ‘Instead of the Augustinian view of life's trials as a divine punishment for Adam's sin, Irenaeus sees our world of mingled good and evil as a divinely appointed environment for man's development towards the perfection that represents the fulfillment of God's good purpose for him.’2

In Ethics in the Sanctuary, Margaret Battin argues that traditional evangelism, directed to promoting religious belief, practice, and affiliation, that is proselytizing, is morally questionable to the extent that it involves unwarranted paternalism in the interests of securing other-worldly benefits for potential converts. I argue that Christian evangelism is justified in order to make the this-worldly benefits of religious belief and practice available to everyone, to bring about an increase in religious affiliation for the purpose of providing a more supportive social environment for Christians, and to promote the survival of the institutional Church, which benefits Christians and nonChristians alike by maintaining church property, providing access to church buildings and doing liturgy visibly and publicly for the sake of all people.

This article presents a discussion of the concept of ‘non-belief’, focusing on a variety of difficulties it raises for the theist. After considering how the notion of ‘non-belief’ may be construed, I catalogue five major problems facing the theist who insists on maintaining the traditional notion of ‘non-belief’. Those theists who insist on maintaining this traditional notion sometimes appeal to the ‘sin defence’ in an attempt to defend their position. I critique this defence and conclude with a mention of how rejecting the traditional notion of ‘non-belief’ will lead us towards revisionary theologies.

This brief introduction outlines the main themes and arguments of Roman Faith and Christian Faith.

Recent developments in the philosophy of logic suggest that the correct foundational logic is like God in that both are maximally infinite and only partially graspable by finite beings. This opens the door to a new argument for the existence of God, exploiting the link between God and logic through the intermediary of the Logos. This article explores the argument from the nature of God to the nature of logic, and sketches the converse argument from the nature of logic to the existence of God.

The claim that a miracle is a violation of a law of nature has sometimes been used as part of an a priori argument against the possibility of miracle, on the grounds that a violation is conceptually impossible. I criticize these accounts but also suggest that alternative accounts, when phrased in terms of laws of nature, fail to provide adequate conceptual space for miracles. It is not clear what a ‘violation’ of a law of nature might be, but this is not relevant to the question of miracles. In practice, accounts of miracle tend to be phrased in terms of God's act not in terms of laws of nature. Finally, I suggest that the a priori argument reflects an intellectual commitment that is widely held, though wrongly built into the argument itself.

In rejecting Plantinga's ‘reformed epistemology’, Jeremy Koons has argued that no beliefs are epistemically basic, since even perceptual beliefs arise from observations that are theory-dependent. But even if all observations are theory-dependent, not all theories are alike. Beliefs that are dependent on uncontroversial bodies of theory may be ‘basic’ in the sense that they play a foundational role in the acquisition of knowledge. There is, however, another problem with reformed epistemology. It is that even if Christian beliefs were basic in this sense, they could face evidential challenge, for the epistemic status of a ‘basic’ belief depends, in part, on its probabilistic or explanatory relations to our other beliefs. It follows that Christian faith remains vulnerable to evidential arguments, such as Paul Draper's argument from evil.

Atheistic modal realism asserts roughly that there are many concrete possible worlds and that the actual world is entirely godless. Here I will refine this position using the modal realism of David Lewis. For Lewis, all gods (including the Christian God) are contingent superhuman persons, who inhabit non-actual worlds. Although gods are concrete world-bound particulars, atheistic modal realism has room for impersonal absolutes and ultimates (which are not gods). Since no gods are actual, atheism is true. Yet there are infinitely many non-actual gods. Non-actual gods and worlds provide resources for analysing religious beliefs and practices. Lewisian theology provides a powerful new way for atheists to understand religion.

The opening chapters of Anselm's Monologion contain a ‘proof’ of a perfect being, which has received far less attention than the more famous Proslogion proof, and the ontological arguments derived from it. I wish to rectify this by developing an argument in defence of a crucial premise of the Monologion proof. This premise states that ‘the Good’, i.e. that in virtue of which numerically distinct things may all be good, must itself be a supremely good thing (if it exists). I motivate the argument before considering objections to both premises, as well as putative ‘parodies’ of my argument. Part of the motivation of my argument will involve the claim that the Good, if it is good at all, must be a paradigm good thing. I conclude that theists have a second kind of ontological argument at their disposal.

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Professor P. W. Gooch attempts to wean the orthodox Christian from anthropological materialism by consideration of the question of the nature of the post-mortem person in the resurrection. He argues that the view that the resurrected person is a psychophysical organism who is in some physical sense the same as the ante-mortem person is inconsistent with the Pauline view of the resurrected body; rather, according to him, Paul's view is most consistent with that which affirms the disembodied survival of the person. ‘I want to argue’, he writes, ‘for the thesis that a Pauline resurrection body may well be ontologically the same as a disembodied person (204).’ I intend to show that Professor Gooch has failed to provide any support for this view and indeed that his own view falls prey to the criticisms which he has raised against other views.