It is a widely held belief that one can will to believe, disbelieve, and withhold belief concerning propositions. It is sometimes said that we have a duty to believe certain propositions. These theses have had a long and respected history. In one form or another they receive the support of a large number of philosophers and theologians who have written on the relationship of the will to believing. In the New Testament Jesus holds his disciples responsible for their beliefs, reprimands them for doubting, and speaks of the ability to believe as if it were optional. Paul makes it clear that he thinks propositional belief is a necessary condition for salvation. If a man confesses Christ as Lord with his lips and believes in his heart that God has raised him from the dead, he shall be saved (Romans 10: 9f.). The writer of Hebrews implies that unless we have certain propositional beliefs we cannot please God (Heb. II: 6). In the New Testament most cases of pistis (belief, faith) involve more than a propositional attitude. They involve the idea of trust and faithfulness. Nevertheless, a prima facie case for saying that the volitional theses can be found in the New Testament can be made. Forms of volitionalism can be found stated more explicitly in the writings of the early Church, in the writings of Irenaeus, in the Athanasian Creed, and in Augustine. Acquinas describes faith as an act of the intellect moved by the will. Descartes is perhaps the classic example of a volitionalist, holding that if we were not responsible for our beliefs (especially our false beliefs), then God would be - which is tantamount to blasphemy in that it makes God into a deceiver.

In his Survival and Disembodied Existences Terence Penelhum presents two arguments against the possibility of disembodied survival. The first is that the memory criterion of personal identity is parasitic upon bodily identity and the second is the more fundamental contention that the notion of a disembodied person is unintelligible. Penelhum's claim is not that it is impossible as such to speak of disembodied intelligence, or perception, or even agency, but that the problem of construing the identity of disembodied individuals is overwhelmingly difficult. With regard to the idea of resurrection Penelhum argues that it is intelligible but that the question of whether or not an individual is someone who has been resurrected, or not, is one which no evidence could conclusively settle. It calls for a decision rather than for the production of conclusive evidence. ‘When resurrection is predicted it is always open to a critic to deny that what is predicted has to be accorded that title.’

Traditionally, when man was viewed as a psycho-physical unity, life after death was deemed quite impossible, particularly in the face of universal human mortality and inevitable bodily corruption. However, some modern anthropologically monistic philosophers, including most notably John Hick, have argued that life after death is possible.

The purpose of this article should become plain during the reading of it, but perhaps some prior explanation is needed. Almost from the beginning of my study of the paṭiccasamuppāda I have had the notion that it could not have come into existence in the form the usual twelvefold formulation takes. For reasons which I try to make clear this twelvefold formulation is not a satisfactory statement of what it is supposed to explain, namely the reasons for each individual's continued rebirths. I feel - and sadly I have to emphasize, before someone else does it for me, that in the final analysis I am relying more or less on intuition for my attitude towards the twelvefold formulation - that if one person alone had been responsible for the usually referred to formulation, and especially if that one person had been the Buddha, then those anomalies that now prevail would never have existed.

Central to Buber's philosophy of I-Thou is his understanding of the related notions of dialogue and revelation and his espousal of a non-propositional account of revelation framed in the language and structure of personal dialogical encounter. The consequent re-interpretation of revelation in this form has been widely influential in contemporary theological circles, especially among those theologians and philosophers of religion broadly known as existentialists. However, the wide dissemination and influence of this position does not guarantee its validity. This paper will try to show that the dialogical account of revelation, at least in the form given it by Buber, is logically and philosophically deficient, being based on a set of misleading analogies between inter-human and Divine-human relations.

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Gregory S. Kavka argues that John Hick was wrong when he said that the statement ‘God (as conceived by Christians) exists’ is verifiable but not falsifiable. Kavka constructs an imaginary `resurrection world' ruled by Satan and inhabited by such resurrected evildoers as Hitler and Stalin. In such a world, those who had been virtuous in earthly life in the hopes of a Christ-dominated resurrection world discover that virtue is inversely rewarded, with the ‘living’ intolerable for them and worst of all for those among them who had lived especially virtuous lives, i.e. the saints. Further, they are told by presumably knowledgeable inhabitants of this world that:

…the historical Christ was an agent sent by Satan to raise in good people false hopes of eternal salvation. This story is confirmed by Satan himself who demonstrates through a huge telescope-like device how he continues to send false saviours to other planets inhabited by intelligent beings in a cruel plan to make such beings miserable in the long run.

The conceptual framework of religion is more like the frame of a picture than the frame of a house; and what goes on within the frame is other than conceptual. This is the hypothesis motivating the analysis which follows. Given the hypothesis, the problem is to conceive what religion is - this other-than-conceptual enterprise which tends to attract conceptual frames. A possible answer is available in Wittgensteinian ‘seeing-as’. A number of philosophers of religion have recently exercised this option. The present paper adds to their work by comparing a number of types of religious seeing-as with the instances of visual ambiguity drawn on by Wittgenstein.

In the two decades following the publication of New Essays in Philosophical Theology, a metatheological awareness has been steadily developing among systematic theologians. Gordon Kaufman is one of those theologians prepared to face the rather embarrassing question as to whether sentences containing the word ‘God’ provide information about a transcendent reality called ‘God’. Kaufman has, indeed, always seen the need for a constructive relationship between theology and philosophy, a relationship in which both philosophy and theology retain their respective autonomous standpoints. In arguing for an historically orientated philosophy, he claimed that here one would treat what is concrete and specific for Christian faith in abstract and general terms, showing how ‘every philosophical perspective finds its focus and meaning in a historical event which is the centre of history - the Christ - for it’. Because it has grown out of a generalizing of Christian faith-affirmations, this philosophy does not threaten theology's autonomy. Indeed, it would ‘already be determined by the Christian perspective in its fundamental orientation’. It is the methodological importance of this notion of a perspective which the present article seeks to make clear.

No fruitful discussion of the logic of religious belief can afford to ignore George Mavrodes' classification of propositional concepts, i.e. concepts predicable of propositions singly (p) or in sets (S), as an analytical tool for pinning down the ‘person-oriented’ and ‘content-oriented’ factors in such ‘epistemic activities’ as religious proving, experiencing, and verifying. Mavrodes shows in particular that the formal model of logical soundness, i.e. valid form and true premises, has but limited application to proving, experiencing, and verifying as ways of giving good reasons for religious belief. In this essay, I will show how Mavrodes' analysis of the logic of religious belief can be extended by substituting a procedural model of logical soundness for the truth-functionally formal model that he adopts. I will show further why it is desirable and, in certain instances, vital to extend his analysis in this manner. Along the way, I will explain why the extension that I am advocating augments Mavrodes' original analysis without substantially altering it or sacrificing any of its original analytical virtues.

The riddle Frazer confronts us with in The Golden Bough is posed in the form of a question. ‘Why is this happening?’ - this life and death of the King of the Wood at Nemi? In the related context of his accounts of the fire-festivals in Europe, Frazer refines the question in a more dramatic form: ‘What is the meaning of such sacrifices? Why were men and animals burnt to death at these festivals?’ Frazer recognizes something serious in all this. The practice of human sacrifice is puzzling; it does leave us disquieted! But Frazer's search for what he calls ‘a fairly probable explanation’ of the motives which gave rise to the priesthood of Nemi and its embodiment of the practice of human sacrifice, Wittgenstein in his ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’ feels, does not help us to understand a practice like the burning of a man! With all the additional data, numerous theories, and the historical tracing of origins we are no closer to resolving the perplexities of the riddle than the riddle itself presents to us daily.