‘Dialectic’ or ‘dialectics’ has been defined as the ‘art of investigating the truth of opinions, testing of truth by discussion’. What can usefully be said about the art of investigating or testing the truth of religious opinions by discussion?

To read the Bible ‘like any other book’: that is one of the striking phrases in Benjamin Jowett's sprawling essay – it is over roo pages long – ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’ in Essays and Reviews (1860; cf. pp. 338, 375, 377, 404 of that edition, which is quoted without further reference throughout this article). Another memorable phrase concerned the ‘original’ meaning: ‘the office of the interpreter is not to add another [meaning], but to recover the original one; the meaning, that is, of the words as they first struck on the ears or flashed before the eyes of those who heard and read them’ (p. 338).

During the summer of 1981 I had field training in an ‘outreach ministry’ of the United Church of Canada on an Ojibway Indian reserve in southern Manitoba. The Protestant churches first placed white ministers on the Swan Lake Reserve with the undeclared but clear intention to suppress the ‘paganism’ of traditional Ojibway spirituality. But the present policy of the United Church is to support the Band's recovery of self-determination in politics, culture, and religion. Some people in the United Church (and outside it) may worry that this non-proselytizing policy is a betrayal of our Christian duty to tell all the world that Jesus Christ is Lord. But quite the opposite is true. The silent witness given by the outreach minister in serving the needs of the Indians (as they see those needs) is one way to proclaim Christ's Lordship. Indeed it is the only way which is appropriate in our relations with a people whose exploitation has in the past proceeded under His name.

In The City of God, XI, 10, St Augustine claims that the divine nature is simple because ‘it is what it has’ (quod habet hoc est). We may take this as a slogan for the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS), a doctrine which finds its way into orthodox medieval Christian theological speculation. Like the doctrine of God's timeless eternality, the DDS has seemed obvious and pious to many, and incoherent, misguided, and repugnant to others. Unlike the doctrine of God's timeless eternality, the DDS has received very little critical attention. The DDS did not originate with Augustine, but I am not primarily concerned with its pedigree. Nor am I concerned to ask how the doctrine interacts with trinitarian speculation. I will have my hands full as it is. In Section I of this paper I shall provide a rough characterization of the DDS, indicate its complexity, and focus on a particular aspect of the doctrine which will exercise us in the remainder of the paper, namely, the thesis that the divine attributes are all identical with each other and with God. In section n I shall discuss Alvin Plantinga's recent objections to Aquinas' version of the DDS. I shall then offer a more detailed presentation of what I take to be Aquinas' version (section III), and recast it in terms of a theory of attributes which is significantly different from Plantinga's (section IV). Although the recasting of the doctrine will enable me to rebut Plantinga's objections (section v), it by no means solves all the problems of the DDS. In section vi I shall discuss the chief lingering problem facing a defender of the DDS.

Great philosophical problems are known by their power to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of their own dissolution. Indeed, it may be only thus that we are finally convinced of the enduring significance of a problem. The mind-body problem has been dissolved at least twice in the last fifty years: once by the positivists, and again by the therapeutic analysts. Yet it strongly re-asserts itself, so that it is barely a hyperbole when Wilfrid Sellars says that this problem ‘soon turns out, as one picks at it, to be nothing more nor less than the philosophical enterprise as a whole’.

Philosophy of religion in the twentieth century has been deeply influenced, one might say dominated, by contemporary empiricism. God is the subject of religion, but the word ‘God’ does not name a person or an object in the ordinary way. The word ‘God’ is a symbol for the ultimately mysterious, unknowable and transcedent ground of all being. The insight or conviction, God is, cannot however, be reached within the context of empricism, no matter how broad in intention it may be. The inadequacy of empiricism in this respect is fundamentally connected with its epistemological presuppositions. Religion — at a serious level — is not concerned with beliefs that soothe and console; it is concerned with a vision of God as the ground of all being. Creation points beyond the finite world to God as its transcendent source. Consent to or belief in God is for nothing. It arises out of a sense of wonder, a sense of mystery at creation or being and refletion on it.

People who are agnostics, rather than theists or atheists, frequently defend the claim that their position is more rational than either theism or atheism in the following manner:

It looks [they say] as though there is some reason to believe that God exists (in the form, say, of one of the classical arguments for God's existence); but it also looks as though there is evidence that God does not exist (in the form of the atheistic argument from evil); and whenever there is evidence that a given proposition, p, is true and also evidence that it is false, the most rational thing for anyone who knows that this is the case is to suspend judgement with respect to p. It follows that agnosticism is epistemically preferable to theism and to atheism.

Surely the greatest possible accomplishment for a religious epistemologist would be to show how God's existence might be empirically verified. The most obvious, although certainly not unproblematic, approach to this task is to claim that perceptual evidence is available from which God's existence can be inferred. The only apparent alternative, direct sense perception of God, is ruled out by God's essential unobservability, which is implied by his essential incorporeality. But Robert Oakes, in his essay, ‘Religious Experience, Sense-perception and God's Essential Unobservability’ (Religious Studies, vol. 17, pp. 357–67), boldly suggests a third alternative. God's unobservability may preclude his being perceived directly through the senses, but there are still logically possible, Oakes says, ‘sensory detections of God's presence’ (358). To illustrate, he gives the following quote from William Barclay's The Mind of St Paul:

A great artist tells us that it was his father who taught him to see and to love beauty. His father used to take him out in the evening time…One evening there was a sunset of surpassing majesty and splendour, and at the sight of it his father stood up, removed his cap and looked at the splendour of the dying sun, and said: ‘My son, it is God.’