In his book on Karl Barth Professor T. F. Torrance spoke at one point of ‘the great watershed of modern theology’. ‘There are,’ he wrote,1 ‘two basic issues here. On the one hand, it is the very substance of the Christian faith that is at stake, and on the other hand, it is the fundamental nature of scientific method, in its critical and methodological renunciation of prior understanding, that is at stake. This is the great watershed of modern theology: either we take the one way or the other – there is no third alter native… one must go either in the direction taken by Barth or in the direction taken by Bultmann.’

At a time when mysticism is at last emerging as a respectable field of study for philosophers and religious phenomenologists, we find this new field in considerable disarray. We see, for example, Eliot Deutsch defending as philosophically intelligible and as significant śankara's non-dualistic interpretation of the mystic's experience.1 There is R. C. Zaehner, on the other hand, labelling śankara's mysticism ‘profane’ and sharply distinguishing it from the fuller, or ‘sacred’, mysticism of the theist.2 A third modern-day interpreter, W. T. Stace, finds both the ‘monism’ of śankara and the dualism of the theist inadequate and proposes ‘pantheism’ as the most plausible interpretation of the mystic's experience.3 Still another interpreter, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, rejects, as did Bertrand Russell much earlier,4 every metaphysical claim put forward by the mystic; any such claim, be it monist, pantheist, or dualist, is but an ‘ontological fairy tale’.5

In his Edifying Discourses, Soren Kierkegaard published a sermon entitled ‘The Unchangeableness of God’ in which he reiterated the dogma which dominated Catholic, Protestant and even Jewish expressions of classical supernaturalist theology from the first century A.D. until the advent of process theology in the twentieth century. The dogma that as a perfect being, God must be totally unchanging in every conceivable respect was expressed by Kierkegaard in such ways as:

He changes all, Himself unchanged. When everything seems stable (for it is only in appearance that the external world is for a time unchanged, in reality it is always in flux) and in the overturn of all things, He remains equally unchanged; no change touches Him, not even the shadow of a change; in unaltered clearness He, the father of lights, remained eternally unchanged.1

In thinking about God's relation to the world philosophical theologians have taken two lines of thought. In some cases (e.g. Aquinas) these two views have been held side by side, in others separately.

The first has been to conceive of God as existing timelessly, or outside time, and as contemplating the world in one timeless creative gaze. (Convenient documentation can be found in God and Timelessness by Nelson Pike.)1 As has often been pointed out, this view is subject to the difficulty of making sense of a temporal order of events in a tenseless mode. God may know (timelessly) that e is earlier than f. But A. N. Prior has forcefully argued that if God's knowledge is outside time this restricts what God knows to those truths that are themselves timeless. The idea of something's being over, or going to happen, or happening now cannot fall within the knowledge of God if he exists timelessly. To replace the indexical words such as ‘now’ and ‘then’ with dates and definite descriptions of places will not suffice because (for example) what we know when we know that e is over but f is not is not simply that e is before f.2

My attention in this paper will be focused almost exclusively on the interpretation of Part III of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion suggested by Professor Nelson Pike at the very close of his excellent recent commentary on that enduring classic.1 As I will show briefly in Section II below, Pike's interpretation of Part III emerges from the wider context of his quarrel with Kemp Smith in regard to the final outcome of these Dialogues. I find much in Pike's commentary to applaud and to agree with, especially in its earlier sections, but on this whole question of Hume's final position in the Dialogues, I find his views less than convincing. But in this paper I will confine myself to showing what I think is wrong with his reading of Part III, and no more.2 In particular, I will make no effort to challenge Pike's disagreement with Kemp Smith in regard to the final dialogue. Though Pike himself regards Part III as crucial, I am well aware that to make anything like a successful case against the kind of interpretation he favours of the upshot of the Dialogues much more would have to be done than I attempt in this paper. I submit this attempt, then, in partial fulfillment of a larger task to be completed at some future time.

Suppose that a person P1 dies some time during 1978. Many years later, the resurrection world, a perennial object of Christian concern, begins on the morning of the day of judgment. On its first morning there are in that world distinct persons, P2 and P3, each of whom is related in remarkably intimate ways to P1. You are to imagine that each of them satisfies each of the criteria or conditions necessary for identity with P1 to some extent, that both of them satisfy these conditions to exactly the same extent, and that every other denizen of the resurrection world satisfies each of these conditions to a lesser extent than P2 and P3 do. Thus, for example, philosophers often claim that bodily continuity is a necessary condition for personal identity. If it is, you might assume that the body P2 has on the morning of the day of judgment contains some of the same atoms the body of P11 contained when P1 died, and that P2's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death just in case P3's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death. Or, again, some philosophers hold that connectedness of memory is necessary for personal identity. If so, you are to suppose that on the morning of the day of judgment P3 seems to remember some of the events in the life of P1 having happened to him, and that P3 seems to remember a certain event in the life of P1 having happened to him just in case P2 seems to remember that very event in the life of P1 having happened to him. You are to fill in the details by adding complete parity between P2 and P3 with respect to similarity of DNA molecules, character traits and whatever else you deem relevant to personal identity. And, finally, you are to complete the story by imagining that P2 and P3 live very different sorts of lives in the resurrection world. To heighten the poignancy of the story, you might imagine that P2 enjoys forever after the beatitude promised to the blessed while P3 suffers the everlasting torments reserved for the damned.

A well-trodden approach to statements of religious belief takes the following course:

Religious believers call upon God as their loving Father. Clearly God, being a spirit, is not a Father in the straightforward biological sense. What is claimed is that he is the creator and sustainer of all things, and that he has moreover a special father-like care for his human creatures. But this claim does not seem to be subject to any modification in the face of apparent lack of parental care on the part of God to his children. In fact believers are unwilling or unable to specify any actual or potential state of affairs that counts or would count towards deciding the truth value of their belief. In the light of this, it is hard to see the belief as having any meaning at all. The conclusion is that however much we may want to accept religious statements on faith, we cannot, because we are unable to discover what it is we are being asked to believe.

Hope is a category of transcedence, by means of which a man does not permit what he senses and experiences to be the sole criterion of what is possible. It is the belief or the conviction that present reality (what I see) does not exhaust the potentialities of the given data. Hope opens the present to the future; it enables a man to look ahead, to break the fixity of what he observes, and to perceive the world as open-textured. The categories of possibility and of transcendence interweave a closely stitched fabric - hope says that tomorrow can be better than today.

A related question to the one posed in the title is: ‘Is religion psychology?’ In order to make this question a little sharper, let us raise two parallel ones: ‘Is religion physiology?’ and ‘Is religion physiotherapy?’

I have the impression that the answer to any of the above four questions is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. What I propose to do below is to try to find out how we might understand these questions in the light of the Bhagavad Gītā and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with occasional help from other sources. These two texts are of paramount importance in Indian religion and psychology, and may be considered representative of the classical Indian view.