An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

Nicholai Hartman suggested the well-known distinction between ‘systematic thinking’ and ‘problem thinking’. Whereas the former begins from a series of assumptions and proceeds to offer all-encompassing solutions, the latter begins from a problem and considers it in depth, without striving for comprehensive systems. Problem thinking is dialectical – it appraises the boundaries of the problem and the limitations of its solutions. According to Hartman, a typical instance of a systematic thinker is Spinoza, who created an inclusive metaphysical system based on primary and irrefutable assumptions. A classic example of problem thinking is the philosophy of Plato, which is more intent on clarifying the predicament than on offering solutions, and hence its dialectic character.

Berkeley's system, whatever may be the right textbook label to apply to it, was plainly a piece of religious apologetics, the outline of a constructive natural theology, of a theistic metaphysic. From the Principles onwards he was fashioning a reasoned case for the existence of God, of a certain kind of God with a certain kind of relation to the world.

Berkeley's introductory remarks to several of his treatises verify Jessop's evaluation. Berkeley saw his task to be the defence of the central tenets of classical theism, achieved through ‘a plain demonstration of the immediate Providence of an all-seeing God, and the natural immortality of the soul...’. At the foundation of this defence, as is well known, lies the metaphysic commonly called ‘immaterialism’, which holds that, contrary to popular belief, physical objects are not enduring material substances, but rather ideas inhering in finite and infinite spirit.

Iris Murdoch's concept of Good is a central feature of her moral theory; in Murdoch's thought, attention to the Good is the primary means of improving our moral conduct. Unfortunately, her unsystematic presentation of her ideas and the difficulty of the issues being considered make it hard to be sure what she means by the Good, and how we are to attend to it. I will argue that this uncertainty has given rise to three objections which, with some clarification and development of Murdoch's view, are by no means fatal to her position.

There are some quite striking similarities between the moral psychology Maimonides presents in ‘Eight Chapters’ and Aristotle's moral psychology. They both deny that individuals have the virtues and vices by nature; they put a great deal of weight on habituation as a formative factor with respect to character; and they both characterize virtues in terms of lying in a mean between excess and defect. These are fundamentals of moral psychology that they share. But there are some very significant differences as well, and these are brought out quite clearly by a consideration of Maimonides' ‘Laws of Repentance’. It is worth looking at these differences not just for the sake of seeing how some Aristotelian claims are modified by the Jewish tradition, but also in order to see how moral psychology and the interpretation of the scope of human volition are altered by certain types of theistic commitments.

A. A. Howsepian argued in a recent article in this publication that Mormons are atheists. It is the purpose of this article to respond to Howsepian by showing: (1) Howsepian has oversimplified Mormon thought in general and the views of individual Mormons in particular to the point of distortion and caricature; (2) Howsepian has not accurately assessed the options available to Mormons; (3) a central argument in Howsepian's approach falls victim to the basic logical fallacy of composition; and (4) the Anselmian criterion that any being that can count as God necessarily must be the greatest conceivable being (the ‘GCB criterion’) should either be modified or understood in a sense that allows for potentiality within God; and (5) Mormon beliefs can satisfy the GCB criterion if modified to provide that the GCB must be unsurpassable by any being distinct from God but may be self-surpassable in some respects.

John Hick offers a summary account of William James's ‘The Will to Believe’ which is typical of the way that this essay has been understood by many in the one hundred years since it was first published. According to Hick, James argues

that the existence or nonexistence of God, of which there can be no conclusive evidence either way, is a matter of such momentous importance that anyone who so desires has the right to stake one's life upon the God hypothesis.

It is undeniable that the influence of Kantian ethics has been monumental in illuminating the significance of persons as free moral agents. By virtue of being bearers of reason and responsibility, a dignity is conferred upon humans on account of their status as unique persons. Kaufman emphasises this point in his recent work, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology in the context of the relationship between individual and collective ethics;

persons – as free and responsible agents and thus in important respects self-determining and with projects of their own – should never be dealt with as mere ‘things’, mere instruments for the purposes of others; they are always entitled to special respect.

For Søren Kierkegaard, ‘How is it possible for one to become a disciple?’ was the fundamental question. The Philosophical Fragments, first published in 1844 under the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, propounds a hypothetical metaphysical framework within which an answer to this question is formulated. This framework is usually construed simply as a general account of what must be the case if Christianity is true. But this has given rise to some perplexity regarding how the Climacian framework is to be interpreted. This is the result of the failure to take into account the specific function which it is meant to serve – namely, as the framework for ascertaining how becoming a disciple is a possibility. My present objective is not to pass any judgement on the adequacy of this framework as a model purporting to represent reality. Rather, I shall simply attempt a consistent elucidation of the framework which Climacus presents; and in so doing, I indicate the way in which, given this framework, the question ‘How is it possible for one to become a disciple?’ is to be answered – what I shall call ‘the Climacian answer’.

Part 1 of this article provides a basic account of the framework by explaining its key concepts and their relationship to one another. I then employ this account as the foundation for the thesis developed in Part 2: namely, that, for Climacus, faith is the condition of discipleship. In conclusion, I outline the answer which, on my interpretation, Kierkegaard's Climacian framework yields to the question ‘How is it possible for one to become a disciple?’

Terence Penelhum, Reason and Religious Faith Pp. 166. (Colorado and Cumnor Hill: Westview Press (Focus Series), 1996.) £32.50 hb, £10.95 pb.

A little boy at Sunday School once defined ‘faith’ as ‘believing firmly what you know isn't true’. The religious believer does not normally take himself to be in quite that desperate epistemic plight, even if he accepts Tertullian's motto credo quia absurdum. All the same, an uncomfortable tension is apt to appear between his religious beliefs and their rationality, and his other beliefs and their rationality. Like this: if ‘God exists’ seems or feels true, nonetheless it does not feel true in the same way that ‘There are nine planets in the solar system’ feels true. There are at least five contrasts. First, that there are nine planets in the solar system is not a belief that any sensible person will ever feel great fervour about (outside such improbable scenarios as those where they are struggling to resist being brainwashed by the Flat Earth Society). Second, it is immediately clear how the belief about the planets might be shown to be false. Third, no one is accounted morally praiseworthy for believing that there are nine planets in the solar system; that belief is even epistemically praiseworthy only in a very minimal sense. Nor (fourth) is someone worthy of moral blame, exactly, if they don't believe that there are nine planets – unless perhaps they refuse to believe it in the teeth of clear evidence. By contrast (a fifth point) some have apparently thought that praiseworthiness or importance of believing in God's existence is not only not dependent on the evidence, but actually inversely proportional to it.

Divine passibility refers to the hypothesis that God feels the suffering and joy of the world. Passibility implies that God not only knows all propositions that are true of the world (if such a list is logically possible) but that God subjectively experiences, either partially or entirely, what is experienced within the world. The question of God's passibility is related to a surprising number of areas important to contemporary theology. For example, omniscience is thought to be impossible unless passibility is assumed, for to know something fully implies a certain level of experiential knowledge. But it seems that any being open to experience would also have to be passible, or so it is argued. Additionally, the precise character of God's passibility or impassibility has ramifications for issues in Christology and theodicy. Not surprisingly, therefore, the question of whether or not God is immanently involved with the processes of a changing world has become a matter of great debate in this century. Recently Charles Hartshorne (1984 relying on 1941, 1948), Marcel Sarot (1992, 1995), Paul Fiddes (1988), Charles Taliaferro (1989) and George Shields (1992) have argued that God does in fact feel, either emotionally or physically, the vicissitudes, happiness and anguish of the world. Others, such as Richard Creel (1986) and Paul Helm (1988, 1990) argue that God cannot possibly be implicated in or, even worse, identified with a created, contingent and imperfect world. Although the question of whether or not God is passible relates to important aspects of God's nature such as omniscience, omnipresence and immutability, this paper will focus on the question of whether divine passibility is metaphysically possible.

I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to Dr Chappell for the encomia he has so kindly included in his notice of my book. It was especially kind of him to include them when we appear to disagree so fundamentally on the two issues he has chosen to discuss. First, he does not think, as I do, that the world is religiously ambiguous. Second, he thinks that religious beliefs can be, and are, chosen, and I do not.

Before beginning, I should perhaps say that I do not see the book as an attempt to steer a middle course between literalist and anti-realist extremes. From the outset I assume, with believers and their critics, that faith is, at the core, a matter of having certain beliefs about the cosmos and our relationship to it, and that it is especially controversial because the way in which these beliefs are held by those who have them does not seem to conform to the standards of rationality that both groups agree in applying to other beliefs. I think the words ‘literalist’ and ‘realist’ are appropriate enough to apply to this assumption. I also happen to think that anti-realist philosophers of religion like Cupitt and Phillips have responded to the criticisms that faith has generated by trying to replace its cognitive core of belief by other elements, like serenity or personal liberation, that are in actual faith combined with it. The book presents no arguments for this opinion, but I would be distressed if anything I have said in it savours of an attempt to lean towards an anti-realist view.