‘Dialectic’ or ‘dialectics’ has been defined as the ‘art of investigating the truth of opinions, testing of truth by discussion’. What can usefully be said about the art of investigating or testing the truth of religious opinions by discussion?

Do we ever have an obligation to choose to hold beliefs, religious or otherwise? The relations between belief, volition and moral responsibility are the subject of William James' widely discussed essay ‘The Will to Believe’. James first takes up the relationship between volition and belief: Does it make sense to speak of choosing to believe a proposition? His answer is that it does, in the sense that we can choose to act in ways which encourage the production of a believing attitude in ourself. For example, we can be selective in attending to evidence, and we can incline ourselves toward belief by acting as though we already believe. By avoiding certain influences and subjecting ourself to others, we can encourage the development of belief. In so doing, we in effect treat ourself as a third person, and our behaviour is analogous to what we might engage in when encouraging others toward favourable evidence. The question of moral responsibility then becomes appropriate in our own case in a way analogous to that in which it does with respect to our belief-producing actions toward others. Just as the deception of others raises moral questions, so does the deception of ourselves.

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.

One of the problems religious men and philosophers often face is how to convey enlightenment or wisdom to others so that sentient beings can be enlightened or awakened from dogmatic views. This problem is also the question of how truth (the Word of God or Buddha's Dharma) is made known to men. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problem of communicating truth in Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism.

In what follows I argue for two interrelated theses: (1) that early Buddhism is not a form of empiricism, and (2) that consequently there is no basis for an early Buddhist apologetic which contrasts an empirical early Buddhism with either a metaphysical Hinduism on the one hand, or with a baseless Christianity on the other.

To read the Bible ‘like any other book’: that is one of the striking phrases in Benjamin Jowett's sprawling essay – it is over roo pages long – ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’ in Essays and Reviews (1860; cf. pp. 338, 375, 377, 404 of that edition, which is quoted without further reference throughout this article). Another memorable phrase concerned the ‘original’ meaning: ‘the office of the interpreter is not to add another [meaning], but to recover the original one; the meaning, that is, of the words as they first struck on the ears or flashed before the eyes of those who heard and read them’ (p. 338).

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?

In 1968, R. M. Hare gave a series of lectures at the Yale Divinity School, two of which were published subsequently under the title ‘The Simple Believer’.1 In those published lectures Hare enlarged upon and defended the view, which he shares with R. B. Braithwaite, that Christian commitment is best understood as being what I will call a particular world-attitude. In brief, Hare described the Christian world-attitude as consisting, first, of the adoption of a set of practical-normative standards, prescriptions as to what we should do and be, for instance, in our various cognitive and moral endeavours. Central to this overall Christian picture of human flourishing, including cognitive flourishing, is the notion of love (agape). The Christian world-attitude, in addition, involves the belief that the efforts that we make to realize these standards are not pointless in the world as it is. This faith, this refusal to doubt in connection with both moral and cognitive endeavours, is naturally expressed in religious terms, perhaps most obviously in terms of trust in the providence of God.

During the summer of 1981 I had field training in an ‘outreach ministry’ of the United Church of Canada on an Ojibway Indian reserve in southern Manitoba. The Protestant churches first placed white ministers on the Swan Lake Reserve with the undeclared but clear intention to suppress the ‘paganism’ of traditional Ojibway spirituality. But the present policy of the United Church is to support the Band's recovery of self-determination in politics, culture, and religion. Some people in the United Church (and outside it) may worry that this non-proselytizing policy is a betrayal of our Christian duty to tell all the world that Jesus Christ is Lord. But quite the opposite is true. The silent witness given by the outreach minister in serving the needs of the Indians (as they see those needs) is one way to proclaim Christ's Lordship. Indeed it is the only way which is appropriate in our relations with a people whose exploitation has in the past proceeded under His name.

Kierkegaard's leap of faith is one of the most thoroughly explored topics in modern philosophy. What can yet another inquiry into this notion hope to achieve? A number of significant things, I think, of both historical and systematic value.

The main contention of this paper is that the leap of faith, often associated with the emergence of existentialism, is Kierkegaard's response to a problem which is essentially Kantian in origin and structure. Kierkegaard wants to accomodate both the Kantian interpretation of morality as rational command and Kant's insistence on morality as the sole point of access to religion, while rejecting the Kantian moralization of religion and rationalization of faith. The leap of faith is not, as existentialism would have it, an absolute beginning in philosophy or in individual reflection but a transition from morality to religion within an essentially Kantian context.

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.

The argument from evil is an argument which attempts to prove that God does not exist by arguing that the amount of evil (pain, suffering, injustice) in the world is incompatible with the existence ofan all-powerful, all-knowing, and morally perfect being. Theists have traditionally responded to this argument by saying that God is not morally responsible for failure to prevent evil because he cannot do so consistently with maintaining human free agency, because the evil is necessary to build our personal character and develop our talents, because it is necessary to provide a test of our faith, etc.

In The City of God, XI, 10, St Augustine claims that the divine nature is simple because ‘it is what it has’ (quod habet hoc est). We may take this as a slogan for the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS), a doctrine which finds its way into orthodox medieval Christian theological speculation. Like the doctrine of God's timeless eternality, the DDS has seemed obvious and pious to many, and incoherent, misguided, and repugnant to others. Unlike the doctrine of God's timeless eternality, the DDS has received very little critical attention. The DDS did not originate with Augustine, but I am not primarily concerned with its pedigree. Nor am I concerned to ask how the doctrine interacts with trinitarian speculation. I will have my hands full as it is. In Section I of this paper I shall provide a rough characterization of the DDS, indicate its complexity, and focus on a particular aspect of the doctrine which will exercise us in the remainder of the paper, namely, the thesis that the divine attributes are all identical with each other and with God. In section n I shall discuss Alvin Plantinga's recent objections to Aquinas' version of the DDS. I shall then offer a more detailed presentation of what I take to be Aquinas' version (section III), and recast it in terms of a theory of attributes which is significantly different from Plantinga's (section IV). Although the recasting of the doctrine will enable me to rebut Plantinga's objections (section v), it by no means solves all the problems of the DDS. In section vi I shall discuss the chief lingering problem facing a defender of the DDS.

Why does the paradox (i.e. the incarnation) play such a crucial role in Kierkegaard's notion of truth as subjectivity? Richard Schacht explains it as follows:

Eternal happiness is possible for a man only if it is possible for him to relate himself to God. A man, however, is a being who exists in time; and it would not be possible for such a being to enter into a ‘God-relationship’ if God had not also at some point existed in time. Through the ‘leap of faith’ in which one affirms the proposition that God did exist in time, one is able to enter a ‘God-relationship’ and thereby attains ‘an eternal happiness’.

I. Introduction There are still those who think that, if the word ‘miracle’ means a violation of a law of nature, miracles are either impossible or undetectable or a threat to science. I shall take the opposite side and argue that, thus defined, miracles are possible, are detectable in principle, and, again in principle, can be endorsed without compromising legitimate scientific aspirations.

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.

Great philosophical problems are known by their power to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of their own dissolution. Indeed, it may be only thus that we are finally convinced of the enduring significance of a problem. The mind-body problem has been dissolved at least twice in the last fifty years: once by the positivists, and again by the therapeutic analysts. Yet it strongly re-asserts itself, so that it is barely a hyperbole when Wilfrid Sellars says that this problem ‘soon turns out, as one picks at it, to be nothing more nor less than the philosophical enterprise as a whole’.

Notable among the current fashions in philosophical theology is the movement away from the view that the mode of being properly attributable to God is some form of atemporal eternity. It sometimes seems almost to be the case that a consensus is in process of formation in support of the contention that the only rationally defensible interpretation of the divine eternity is in terms of sempiternity, i.e. of beginingless and endless temporal duration. This is true not only of the so-called ‘process theologians’, for leading theistic philosophers throughout the English-speaking world seem to be in something of a rush to espouse this particular cause.

In the philosophy of mysticism, an important and foundational problem concerns the nature of mystical experience. The problem is both significant and basic because an understanding of the nature of mystical experience is a necessary precondition for the evaluation of its epistemological, ontological, and ethical significance, and will in fact influence that evaluation. In other words, our ideas about the nature of mystical experience are premises for our conclusions about the role of mystical experience in human knowledge, about the ‘object (s)’, if any, of mystical experience, and about the value and moral implications of mystical experience.

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.