Is it ever reasonable to accept the claim that a miracle has occurred? At least for fairly traditional Christians, this question has a special point, since their faith is centred upon acceptance of a miracle, the resurrection of Jesus from death. If it is unreasonable to accept any claim to the occurrence of that miracle, then their faith is ipso facto unreasonable. J. L. Mackie has recently propounded an argument, based closely on David Hume's essay on miracles, in part 10 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, which provides, he says, ‘a very powerful reply to any claim that a miracle has been performed’ (The Miracle of Theism, 26). My aim is to examine his argument, and to make some comments on his understanding of the notion of miracle and its place in religious belief.

If Purgatory is given a role at all in modern conceptions of the after–life, it is likely to be at most of the kind found in Hick and Rahner, in providing a second chance for those of whom it might be argued that they have had no proper opportunity in this life. Apart from its intermediate character, however, this account has very little in common with the traditional conception, whereas it seems to me that philosophical reasons, partly conceptual and partly moral, compel assent to something very much more like the traditional view. This I take to have had two essential features: (a) that it was a place of moral preparation (not trial) for those whose lives and decisions had already destined them for Heaven and (b) that this moral preparation involved some kind of purgatorial (i.e. purifying) pain that was seen as a necessary consequence of the rectification of moral wrong–doing. Three arguments in defence of (a) are offered below. These will help to provide an appropriate framework for the brief defence of (b) which then follows. For convenience these three arguments may be labelled the temporal argument, the identity argument and the self–acceptance argument.

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die in extreme agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, shall be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should will one venial untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse (John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua)

If God knows everything he must know the future, and if he knows the future he must know the future acts of his creatures. But then his creatures must act as he knows they will act. How then can they be free? This dilemma has a long history in Christian philosophy and is now as hotly disputed as ever. The medieval scholastics were virtually unanimous in claiming both that God is omniscient and that humans have free will, though they disagreed in their accounts of how the two are compatible. With the Reformation the debate became even more lively since there were Protestant philosophers who denied both claims, and many philosophers ever since have either thought it impossible to reconcile them or have thought it possible only because they weaken one or the other.

In recent years a number of arguments have been advanced to show that there are conceptual difficulties with a variety of divine attributes. Some have claimed that there is an inherent inconsistency in the notion of omnipotence, others that omnipotence was logically incompatible with omniscience or omnibenevolence, and yet others that omniscience is irreconcilable with immutuability.

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man – but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen).

The hell–fire of life consumes only the select among men. The rest stand in front of it, warming their hands (Erich Heller, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: Unphilosophical Notes’).

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.

At the beginning of his book, Principles of Christian Theology, John Macquarrie says that theology ‘implicitly claims to have its place in the total intellectual endeavour of mankind’. The question I want to discuss is this: in what terms, if any, can that claim be justified?

When are sentences A and B the same belief? Following Quine, observation sentences A and B are the same belief when they share the same stimulus–meaning, similar patterns of assent and dissent by subjects when the sentences are queried in the presence of the same non–linguistic stimuli. As for non–observation sentences we note a suggestion of Karl Schick: apply linguistic stimuli in the form of utterances of the language, and map the connections between sentences in the language in terms of linguistic conditioned–responses to utterances. The mapping will yield a network of relations between non–observation sentences themselves, and between the latter and observation sentences at the ‘periphery’. Thus, each sentence receives its place in the overall criss–crossing of relations in the network of the language. Out of a commitment to the ‘autonomy of meaning’, we can say that when A and B are non–observational, they are the same belief when they occupy similar places in the network of sentences in a given language, or corresponding places in corresponding networks of two languages. (Since we can identify the place of sentences in the language network, and since the present suggestion identifies the sameness of belief with location identity, it turns out that there needn't be indeterminacy of translocation.)

In looking for criteria by which to assess religious conceptual systems, many philosophers have turned for help to scientific methodology. Perhaps this is because they felt philosophers of science were themselves looking in the right epistemological direction, and had a viable way of describing what they saw. Richard Swinburne has provided a strong, sustained treatment of the application of scientific method to religious truth claims, in The Existence of God. He there makes use of what he sees as ‘the close similarities which exist between religious theories and large-scale scientific theories’ in assessing the epistemic status of belief in God. The goal of this paper will be to give enough of Swinburne's position to see what criteria might be plucked therefrom, to subject both the criteria and the underlying methodology to scrutiny, and to assess where one must go from here in appraising the truth-claims of religion.

One of the more popular bedtime stories in our house just now is Horton Hears a Who by Dr Seuss. Horton is an elephant, and unlike the other animals in the jungle, he is capable – thanks doubtless to his large ears – of hearing the faint sounds made by some minute beings called Whos, who live in a town called Whoville on a tiny speck of dust. The other animals think Horton is mad when he talks to the Whos: they take the speck of dust from him and attempt to get rid of it. After a series of adventures Horton retrieves the speck of dust, gets the Whos to shout loudly enough to be heard by the other animals, and so everyone lives happily ever after. In the course of the story, before the speck of dust is taken from him, Horton is walking along and worrying:

‘Should I put this speck down?…’ Horton thought with alarm.

‘If I do these small persons may come to great harm.

I can't put it down. And I won't! After all

A person's a person, no matter how small.’

Among the questions facing the religious there is one that is becoming particularly pressing in our contemporary world of mingled cultures. Expressed as religious people sometimes put it to themselves, it is: How does my religion relate to other religions? There are two very different answers abroad. One is: mine is true and all others, to the extent that they depart from mine, are false and are to be rejected. The other is: mine is valid-for-me, and those of others are valid-for-them. The first answer has the virtue of being utterly straightforward and not mealy-mouthed, but it seems parochial and myopic, for, as John Hick points out:

In the great majority of cases, the tradition within which a religious person finds his relationship to the Real depends to a very great extent upon where and when he or she is born…In view of this situation, can one be unquestionably confident that the religion which one happens to have inherited by birth is indeed normative and that all others are properly to be graded by their likeness or unlikeness to it?

My text for this paper is taken from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. It is that well–known passage where Alice is having a frustrating conversation with the White Queen. Alice responds to some of the Queen's absurd statements by saying, ‘One can't believe impossible things.’ At which point the Queen snaps back: ‘I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half–an–hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

Romans 7: 14 if. has traditionally been one of the most frequently discussed passages in the whole of the Pauline Corpus. Nevertheless, this pericope has attracted attention more because it is consistently regarded as a crucial part of Paul's theology, than because of its intrinsic exegetical problems. The main issue is whether the ‘split personality’ and the weakness of will (to which explicit reference is made in verse 19: ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’) should be regarded as essential to the life of the believing Christian; or, rather, as characteristic for those who are not ‘in Christ’ and therefore beyond the power of his Spirit. For the systematic theologian, the question of whether the first person singular in these verses should be understood in an autobiographical sense is a subordinate one. However this particular question is answered, we are still confronted by the main issue.

I shall argue that the question ‘Can we speak literally of God?’ is fundamentally an epistemological question concerning whether we can know that God exists. If and only if we can know that God can exist can we know that we can speak literally of God.

In the second of his three prefaces to On Authority and Revelation, Kierkegaard writes: ‘“My reader”, may I simply beg you to read this book, for it is important for my main effort, wherefore I am minded to recommend it’ The question I will put to myself to begin my reflections on the book is: why should Kierkegaard recommend it so strongly? What is Kierkegaard doing in this book? One notices in his recommendation that it is addressed to his reader who, presumably, is not simply the reader of this book but the reader of his other books as well. The Concluding UnscientUc Postscript was being published about the same time (1846), and so the reader may well have been familiar with most of Kierkegaard's main philosophical works. The recommendation then is set in this context. The book is, on the face of it, so unlike the other works, concerned with certain odd claims to a revelation by a Danish pastor named Adler. Much of the book discusses the details of a deposition of Adler given to the local bishop and some details of later defences which Adler gave of his revelation in several works and sermons. It appears to be a local squabble of no general interest and certainly not the sort of thing that had occupied Kierkegaard's philosophical attention to this point. The book, then, stands in need of a recommendation to Kierkegaard's reader who is not otherwise prepared for this genre. But the recommendation does not say, ‘Try this, though quite different, you may like it.’ It says rather that the reader should read it, and later he adds read it carefully, because it is ‘important for my main effort’. So the book is to be seen as of a piece with the other main works of Kierkegaard. This is what I should like to understand in the following discussion: how is this book important for Kierkegaard's main effort?

The purpose of this essay is to summarize the contemporary discussion of hermeneutic philosophy and to suggest some possible applications of this discussion to theological studies. To facilitate this summary, we will first clarify the general nature of hermeneutic philosophy and provide the historical background to its theological evaluation.

In this paper I first point out that happiness might of its nature be unamenable to the calculating ‘plan of life’ approach, and argue that the incompatible model of a personal search, by no means implying ‘ontological subjectivity’ though, fits in more smoothly with the idea. Secondly, I discuss the arguments assembled by Aquinas for a view of this type. I argue thirdly that although we can show there is some one thing in which all happiness consists, whatever it may be it must be incompatible with temporal life, whether or not any other is possible. Hence a discussion which excludes ‘transcendence’ will not get to grips with the concept of happiness.

Courage is a basic virtue to any heroic society. It is the defining virtue of the aristocratic warrior in the Iliad. It came with a set of other related virtues, all functioning in a social setting unique to that heroic era. However, as society evolved beyond the heroics of war to the civility of settled city–states, courage would be reviewed and redefined. In fact the whole virtue complex would undergo fundamental changes. Still later, when from out of the cities philosophers rose, they would, in their commitment to a higher justice or righteousness than what the city had to offer to date, submit courage to a third critique and transformation. We see this in Greece; we may also see it in China.

If one believes in a personal God, must one also believe that God is a person? I hold that the former is essential to Christian faith, the latter an impediment to it. Several recent writers in the philosophy of religion have however assumed that to believe in God is to believe in a person. The most subtle and influential proponent of ‘bodiless person theism’ is Richard Swinburne. I hope to show that this philosophical presentation of theism is unwarrantable and misrepresents what the theological tradition says about God. In section (I) I describe how Swinburne justifies his view that God is a person. In section (II) I show that this view is defective. In section (III) I uncover a common, though mistaken, procedure among several other advocates of this type of theism. In section (IV) I suggest that the belief that God is a person is foreign to Christian theology, with the unfortunate consequence that a philosophical defence of it is not only mistaken: it is also pointless.