In contemporary discussion of the philosophy of religion, or for that matter of any branch of philosophy, the names of Whitehead and Wittgenstein are not often linked. Whitehead's later work is, for the most part, treated as a rather specialized interest, an attractively under-cultivated field for the enterprising thesis-writer perhaps, but well away from the main centres of current philosophical activity. And what he has to say about specifically religious or theological issues (apart from the often quoted or misquoted ‘Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness‘)1 becomes simply one ramification of an ingenious but somewhat eccentric system. Nonetheless, there is at least this much justification for considering it in relation to the much more influential and widely discussed views of Wittgenstein. Whitehead has some original things to say about God, Wittgenstein some original reasons for thinking that Whitehead's brand of originality is here radically misplaced. And the possibility or otherwise of such theological originality is an issue of very considerable importance for the philosophy of religion.

We are commemorating the centenary of the birth of a personality remarkable in herself and remarkable also as a mirror of some great questions about the understanding of God, man and the world. A quaint episode in literary history focuses these questions as they emerged in Evelyn Underhill's life. She had published in 1911, when she was thirty-seven years old, a very learned and also very readable book with the title Mysticism. It sold well from the start, and its execellenc was acclaimed by critics as different as Dean Inge and Dom John Chapman. But an acquaintance who was not at the time an intimate friend wrote to say that he had not yet, as he had hoped, been able to make a thorough study of the whole work; but as a second printing of it was imminent he made two proposals, and he presented them in a tone just a little reminiscent of Hitler addressing the President of Czechoslovakia. I quote Baron von Hugel:

(1) Either, you rest content, so far as my little help is concerned with these corrections proposed for the first four chapters – yet with the extension that you go through all the passages concerning (a) the supposed identity of man's soul and God, (b) the supposed non-necessity of institutional, historical, etc. religion for many or for some; and you would strictly weigh and reconsider them all. Or,

(2) you would get your publisher to defer the reprinting till the beginning of February, in which case I willingly undertake to give January to a careful study of your entire book.

A paper on Hume's metaphysics might be exceedingly short: we might say that Hume pricked bubbles but blew none. Most readers of Hume think there is nothing here to write about, unless anti-metaphysics be a form of metaphysics.l Hume's good repute rose with agnosticism and positivism, and it is characteristic of the Germans to credit Hume with being the awakener from dogmatic, that is, metaphysical, slumbers. Add to this those who deplore Hume as the antithesis of classical philosophy, and we have a chorus who would laugh down the claim that Hume had, as he claimed, a system. And indeed who cannot quote Hume's eloquent conclusion about ‘divinity or school metaphysics’: ‘Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion’ (EcHU 132, p. 165)?2

Ever since its relatively late arrival on the theological scene the historical-critical method has been cast in a wide variety of roles. It is unfortunate that it has seldom made its appearance as one of theology's handmaids. Only recently, with the gradual retreat of the theologies of the Word, has it been enabled to terminate its prolonged contract to play court jester to a series of sovereign directors.

Many of us, and I am no exception, have been led to assume, almost un-consciously, that Śankara is India's greatest philosopher and that the non-dualist philosophy he consolidated, Advaita Vedānta, is the supreme spiritual philosophy of India, if not of the whole world. Dualist (Dvaita) opponents like Madhva, on the other hand, have usually been appreciated very little, if at all. Several of my colleagues think of Madhva as a reactionary, if brilliant, theist whose philosophy best serves as a foil to Śankara's. Madhva, it almost seems, is studied not for his own philosophical virtues but as a means the better to appreciate Śankara's. I believe that we must weigh more carefully the dualist position, particularly its trenchant critique of non-dualism. We may discover in the process that Śankara, whatever else he was – brilliant stylist, mystic par excellence, deft polemicist – was not the originator or consolidator of anything like an internally consistent metaphysics.

It is a fact that human beings attempt to discourse about God. The question is: can they? In this paper I want to discuss the problem of man's endeavour to speak and write meaningfully about God. In the first part of the paper, I will discuss the informative function of language and the conditions under which one can use language intelligibly to communicate information about a particular concrete individual or object. In the second part of the paper, I will attempt to apply my remarks to the problem of discourse about God and to show how God can be understood as a concrete individual by employing the metaphysical categories of C. S. Peirce.

The persistence of the religious spirit under the most varied cultural circumstances suggests the superficiality, though not necessarily the irrelevance, of those explanatory theories that view religion as the symptom of some profound, but theoretically superable, social or personal disorder. Certainly the most influential of these, the Marxist and the Freudian, cannot be dismissed as mere errors; they have too clearly perceived certain regular abuses of religious sensitivity, and they have stated these in such a bold and open way that it seems unlikely that anyone could resist their simple truth: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people …’ [Marx]; ‘religion [is]… the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’ [Freud].

In his autobiographical-biographical study, Father and Son, Edmund Gosse describes how one evening, during his childhood, while his father was praying at - or, rather, over - his bed, a rather large insect dark and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting insect ought to need, appeared at the bottom of the counterpane, and slowly advanced… I bore it in silent fascination till it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed ‘Papa! Papa!’. My Father rose in great dudgeon, removed the insect (what were insects to him!) and then gave me a tremendous lecture.1

The basic position of Otto in The Idea of the Holy2 may be stated as follows:

All religions involve and rest on experience of the numinous, which affords a positive knowledge of the central object of religion - God. This position is what may be called a Theory of Religion: like Freud's explanation of religion in terms of father figures, and Durkheim's claim that religion is society's celebration of itself, it claims to give an explanation of the phenomenon of religion - the fact that men belong to religions etc. Unlike some of its rivals, this Theory of Religion does not explain religion away; the explanation is intended to be compatible with religious belief; the explanatory concepts are supposed to be concepts from within religion. If Otto had just argued that religion was, or some religions were, true, his claims would have been only of theological interest. But what makes his writings especially important is that he looks at religion not merely as a theologian, but also as a phenomenologist; he is concerned to explain religion and religions as they are; even to explain the diversity of religions (with a version of evolutionism). It would be over-simple, but not entirely wide of the truth, to say that he first looks at religions in the sensitive but neutral manner of the phenomenologist, to decide what are the central phenomena of religion; and then puts forward a theological explanation of these phenomena. At least, this is what for much of his book he aims to do.

A good deal has already been written on the possible relevance of Niels Bohr's principle of ‘complementarity’ to various theological issues. Bohr, himself, suggested that the concept might be useful in discussions concerning the relation of intra-mundane causality and divine providence, or that of human freedom and divine sovereignty. These suggestions have been taken up and developed by C. A. Coulson and D. M. Mackay, but they have also seriously been criticized, notably by I. G. Barbour. The principal difficulty encountered in regarding God and the world as ‘complementary’, in Bohr's sense of the term, is that Creator and creature are generally thought to be two distinct ‘entities’, in Christian ‘theism’, rather than two ‘modes’ of a single entity as ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ are two ‘complementary’ modes of an atomic object in physics.

In his The Origins of Pragmatism,1 A. J. Ayer unveiled a new James; and, clearly, he found his new one a good deal more attractive than the received ones. That is hardly surprising, for in some ways the new James looks remarkably like Ayer himself. The important question, however, is how far Ayer's James resembles the real one, and that is the subject of this paper. But let us see, first, where the new James looks different from the older ones.

God, as viewed by Muslims, Jews and Christians, is a transcendent being. To say that God is transcendent is to say, among other things, that spatiotemporal predicates do not apply to him. He is disembodied and absolutely immutable. God, nevertheless, is on this same view an agent. He makes things happen, he answers prayers, he judges, he forgives, he punishes, he guides, etc. The concept of God as a being worthy of worship seems to require that God be an absolutely eternal being on the one hand with all that this entails and a being that is absolutely just, merciful, forgiving, loving, good, on the other. It is the predication of such attributes of God that yields the concept of transcendent agency. This means in effect that for a being to be God this being must be, at least, a disembodied agent. But the concept of a disembodied agent, it is argued, is a contradiction in terms.

Many philosophers have claimed that theological statements, if taken as referring to something transcending the world of human experience, are devoid of factual content. They may be meaningful in other ways, but they cannot function to describe anything, to say anything true or false. The two most famous defences of this view are Ayer's in chapter vi of Language, Truth, and Logic, and Flew's in his essay ‘Theology and Falsification’.1

Although an immense amount has been written about miracles by philosophers – and theologicans of a philosophical turn of mind – to the point where no one wants to read any more on the subject, there are still two very good reasons for writing about miracles: (1) the concept of a miracle commonly employed simply will not do, so that most of the talk of discovering whether or not some event is miraculous is beside the point; (2) the proper way of looking at what a miracle is involves one in clarifying the very perplexing notions of agency and explanation, and both of these notions are interesting in their own right.

I want to say a few words to dispel certain silly mistakes made about the Hindu notion of devās by Westerners not of this tradition. It is common for Westerners, and especially for certain tendentious devotees of Semitic traditions – most notably the Christian one – to accuse Hinduism of ‘polytheism’, meaning by this the nonsense that enlightened Hindus believe there to be a multitude of ‘gods’, all equivalent to the single Semitic one. But this is simply false. The Hindu equivalent, so far as there is one, to Christianity's ‘God, the Father, Supreme Being or Person’, is Brahman, manifest as Īśvara, and sometimes called ‘Purusottama’ (lit. ‘Supreme Personl’: see Bhagavad Gītā, 15: 15–18), and of which there is only one.

William James presents Pascal's wager in this manner: if you believe in God and God exists, then your gain is infinite; if you believe in God and God doesn't exist, then your loss is finite. Therefore, since a finite loss is reasonable where there is the possibility of infinite gain, you ought to believe in God. ‘What have you to lose?’ James asks (II).1

In a well-known article,1 John Hick argues that the proposition ‘God (as conceived by Christians) exists' is, in principle, verifiable but is not falsifiable. Essentially, his argument is that while no experience in this life could conclusively disprove the existence of the Christian God, certain experiences one might have in the after-life would conclusively verify the existence of the Christian God. In particular, he argues that post mortem experiences of Christ ruling in the Kingdom of God would constitute a verification of the existence of the Christian God. In this paper, I shall argue that on Hick's own assumptions, the existence of the Christian God turns out to be falsifiable, in principle, as well as verifiable.

In this paper, I shall be concerned to show: (1) that Winch believes that there can be different conceptions of ‘agreement with reality’; (2) that Wittgenstein agrees with this, but emphasizes the difficulty of understanding such conceptions; (3) that Winch realizes this difficulty, and yet still tries to gain understanding of primitive social institutions in terms of their sense of the significance of human life, in terms of the limiting notions of birth, death and sexual relations; (4) that such a notion of the significance of human life cannot be made sense of without an understanding of the concept of agreement with reality which undergirds it; (5) that Winch's position is internally incoherent.

The purpose of this paper is to clear up the long-standing veritable mountain of misinterpretation, perpetuated from critic to critic, concerning the admittedly problematic concept of self-authenticating (i.e. unmistakable) religious experience. While it may well be the case, as many have argued, that a sort of ‘experience’ about which one could not be mistaken is simply a logically impossible state of affairs, this cannot be known to be the case so long as what is under attack is (as I hope to show) a bogus concept, obviously absurd, having nothing whatsoever to do with the correct interpretation of ‘self-authentication’. Hence, my mission herein is essentially that of philosophical analysis or clarification of meaning. Only upon suitable clarification of this concept will we be in a position to consider the question of its possible application, i.e. whether or not there could be an instantiation of such experience. I might point out that my central concern is somewhat more explicatory than historical, though I believe that the account developed in this paper is essentially congenial with the intent of those who have been proponents of the view that there can be self-authenticating religious experience. Let us begin, then, by turning to some representative criticism of the concept in question.

In his masterly book Christ and Culture H. Richard Niebuhr identified five main attitudes which Christians have taken towards secular culture. The first emphasizes the opposition between Christ and culture. In the New Testament it is best seen in Revelation (where it is complicated by a situation of persecution) and in the First Epistle of John. But it appears in its most radical form in Tertullian, though even he is not wholly consistent. Men are under illusions from their very culture (Apol. 21). Graeco-Roman society was shot through and through with what Tertullian regarded as superstition and idolatry, as well as immorality. So Tertullian repudiated political life, military service, many aspects of commerce, philosophy and the arts (apart from the amount of literary training needed for expression).