A decent interval has elapsed since the publication, in Religious Studies, Vol. 11 (1975), pp. 167–79, of Professor R. C. Zaehner's article: ‘Why Not Islam?’ The question, an intriguing one, was answered there with such ambivalence that a cynic might be forgiven for thinking he was being trifled with, while a well-wisher could easily be lost in confusion. The Professor commended Islam from the angle least worthy to command credence or to merit acceptance. His case for Islam had about it an air of almost perverse pleading, identifying Islam's main asset as an authoritarian simplicity suited to simple minds. The writer appeared to be withholding his own position by the very form of his advocacy. The article could equally be read as a subtle dissuasive. ’Sadly, debate cannot now be joined. For the piece must have been among the very last the author published. Death, as with Dickens and the mystery of Edwin Drood, silences inquiry about the puzzle of his intentions. It would be unseemly to have pressed the issues too sharply or too soon. But, at this distance of time, it may be possible to wonder in print about what Professor Zaehner's purpose really was. ’Why not…?’ is a question which it is always well for us to ask about alternatives within the human, or the religious, scene. Negative questions, as the Latin grammarians have it, expect the answer Yes. ’Why not X,’ however, when it comes to grips, has to pass into reasons why in the affirmative. It is in doing so that Zaehner offers what, on many counts, would seem to be dubious, even un-Islamic, reasons for his pleas.

One thing our modern dialogue-consciousness has given us is what might be called an historical ‘sounding board’ harking back to the Hebraic tradition in which reverberate refrains of words like ‘When he calls, I shall answer, I am with you’ (Psalm 90). Set within the framework of our own age, which could be termed an age which speaks of God grown silent, these echoes can have a particular poignancy for us and we can at times find special relevance in the discovery of comparable tensions in the past. Such a tension is revealed in a study of the religious verse of two seventeenth-century English poets, John Donne and George Herbert.

It is sometimes suggested that the logic of religious language differs from other kinds of language. Or it is said that each ‘language-game’ has its own ‘logic’ and that, whatever usual language-games are played in the context of religion, there is something that could be called the ‘religious language-game’ which does not correspond to any other and, therefore, has its own peculiar logic. In either case, religious people are urged to make clear what this logic is, so that their utterances may be understood and evaluated.

Recently several philosophers have claimed that miracles cannot occur or that belief in them involves a misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise. In this paper I will argue that these claims, particularly the latter, are mistaken. By examining the characteristics of the believer's conception of the miraculous I will be able to show how he can meet these sceptical challenges. In particular, I will argue that the believer can hold that certain particular events are the result of intervention by divine agency and are thus not to be explained scientifically but nevertheless can grant the scientist autonomy to investigate all types of events. While I urge that belief in the miraculous does not rest on a confusion I do not argue whether or not this belief is rational or justified.

C. A. Campbell has for many years defended vigorously, and often persuasively, the following libertarian claims: (1) that the libertarian concept of freedom of choice is meaningful; (2) that the libertarian variety of freedom of choice is necessary for moral responsibility; and (3) that the libertarian variety of freedom of choice is a reality. This paper will be concerned with Campbell's effort of will argument for the last claim.

Although Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, Alvin Plantinga has developed a theodicy that is fundamentally Arminian rather than Calvinistic. Anthony Flew, although the son of an Arminian Christian minister, regards the Arminian view of ‘free will’ to be both unacceptable on its own terms and incompatible with classical Christian theism. In this paper I hope to disentangle some of the involved controversy regarding theodicy which has developed between Plantinga and Flew, and between Flew and myself. The major portion of this paper is devoted to showing that Plantinga's theodicy contains some serious flaws and undesirable implications.

The Free Will Defence, as we shall understand it here, is an attempt to show that

(1) God exists and he is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good is logically consistent with

(2) There is moral evil in the actual world.

In a recent paper Anthony Flew gives an argument which can be outlined as follows:

1. Any attempt to give a ‘free will defence’ (to rebut the argument from evil against God's existence) must be based either on a compatibilist notion of free will or a libertarian, incompatibilist, notion of free will.

2. A free will defence based on a compatibilist notion of free will must fail, for on a compatibilist view of free will, God could make creatures who were free but never chose evil.

3. A free will defence based on a libertarian notion of free will might have other difficulties, but on a libertarian view of free will God could not both leave men free and bring it about that they never chose evil.

4. But a free will defence based on an incompatibilist, libertarian notion of free will can be rejected, since:

(a) It is not clear that the ordinary use of such key terms as ‘action’ and ‘choice’ carry any implications of libertarian free will.

(b) If such terms did carry the implication of libertarian free will it becomes hard to see how anyone could be in a position to know that a choice had been made or an action performed.

(c) The possession of libertarian free will by created beings seems to be incompatible with the essential theistic doctrine that all created beings are always utterly dependent on God as their sustaining cause.

5. Therefore the free will defence fails.