In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond Is immortal diamond.

There are several types of experience common to most people that are worth drawing attention to as a build-up to the consideration of ‘play’ in the life of man. The noise of car wheels turning on gravel, the cooing of a pigeon in a forest on a bright, calm May evening, the lonely cry of the curlew going to feed on the nearby marshlands, the whine of the swans’ wings as the birds move to a new place of feeding, the deep echo of a jumbo jet as it ascends along a steep gradient into the sky, the melody of a piece of music coming from nowhere, the staccato and rhythmic chirping of the birds in tune with the early morning expectancy of another day – these are moments reminiscent of other places and other times. ‘Time present and time past.’ There is a ‘nostalgia’ about them. The feeling is repeated each time similar events re-occur.

A longstanding but inchoate preoccupation of mine is the geography of religions. How are landscape and religious faith related? In the context of this question, the definition of religion with which I work entails two considerations: first, what landscape features are incorporated into traditional religious symbol systems? I shall make a few observations about this geographic symbology below. Second, what is the existential connection between landscape and personal faith, i.e. between physical land features and human perceptions, values and commitments. It is this latter enquiry that is the main concern of this paper.

At some time between 1907 and 1912, probably very much nearer the earlier date, Bradley produced the first draft of an article on Christian morality. He did this in response to criticism that his moral ideas were anti-Christian. This charge was based mainly on the content of two articles that he published during 1894 in the International Journal of Ethics, one called ‘Some Remarks on Punishment’ and the other ‘The Limits of Individual and National Self-Sacrifice’. In these Bradley had maintained that the conventional ‘Christian’ belief in the sacredness of life undermined any sensible approach to punishment and any clear understanding of the moral importance of self-assertion (in contrast to self-sacrifice). It encouraged a squeamishness about retribution and ‘social surgery’. It devalued proper human ends and interests, and the rights and duties founded on them. There was needed ‘a correction of our moral view, and a return to a non-Christian and perhaps a Hellenic ideal’, one that would recognize the unlimited right of the moral organism (i.e. virtually the state) to dispose of its members and to use force internationally in defence of right. Bradley pulled no punches and had this to say about the self-styled ‘Christian’ party:

I have come to believe that the whole framework of our current thought is about to begin a long and radical transformation, based on what I shall call a new science of pure consciousness. The content of most of the matters to be considered by this science have hitherto been the concern of some areas of religion, particularly what in our culture we call ‘mysticism’; but the treatment of it would legitimately be called scientific. Thus one aspect of the transformation would be to overcome that apparent conflict between ‘science’ and ‘religion’, which has been so characteristic of our culture over the last few centuries.

For many philosophical thinkers down through the centuries, the notion of a creation out of sheer nothing has been found to be quite unintelligible. Nevertheless the idea of creation preserves an important insight and needs to be freed from the difficulties of this traditional formulation. Alfred North Whitehead has offered an alternative theory of creation worth exploring: each individual actuality creates itself out of prior creative acts. God then serves to direct this creative process.

‘An honest religious thinker’, Wittgenstein remarked, ‘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’.

In his recent article ‘Notes Towards a Critique of Buddhist Karmic Theory’ Paul J. Griffiths makes four criticisms of Buddhist karmic theory: it is empirically false, it is incoherent, it is morally repugnant, and it is vacuous. After listing these four criticisms, Griffiths concludes that ‘all these mean that Buddhist karmic theory as expounded in the major theoretical works devoted to it must be false’ (p. 291).

Let us follow Robert Oakes in describing a self-authenticating experience of God as one that ‘would have the epistemic uniqueness of guaranteeing –all by itself – its veridicality to the person who had it.’ The idea that there could be self-authenticating experiences of God has been criticized often in recent years. It seems that the only experiences that could be self-authenticating are those about one's own current psychological states. Nevertheless, the individual who claims to have such an experience of God is clearly using ‘experience’ in such a way as to suppose that one's experience of God is logically independent of the existence of God, but still self-authenticating.

I am grateful to Mr Levine for his careful and accurate rendering of the thesis which I presented and defended in my first paper on the topic of ‘self-authenticating religious experience’. As should be reasonably clear from his remarks, I defended therein the negative and somewhat modest epistemological thesis that even if it is inconceivable (or logically impossible) for there to occur self-authenticating experience of God, it is far from obvious that such is the case. Hence, it seems to me that the claim of more than a few theistic mystics to have had such experience is entitled to something more than the rather cavalier rejection it has received at the hands of many ‘tough-minded’ epistemologists of religion. (I except Mr Levine: his rejection of that claim inclines towards the distinctly non-cavalier.)

The theism which I consider in this paper is one which affirms each of the three following propositions: ‘God exists’, ‘Omnipotence, omniscience and moral perfection are all defining traits of God’ and ‘Evil exists in the world’. I will not be concerned at all with any variety of theism which might deny the truth of any of the foregoing propositions. Broadly put, my concern, therefore, is with orthodox, traditional theism.