The doctrine of the Trinity says that there is just one God and three distinct divine persons, each of whom is God. This would seem to imply that there are three divine persons, each a different person the other persons but the same God as the other persons. If we accept what I believe is the most popular account of identity current among logicians then we must hold that this apparent consequence is contradictory. We see this as follows (it will suffice to consider just the relation of Father and Son): logicians generally treat relativized identity expressions of the form ‘is the same A as’ (here ‘A’ stands in for a term which relativizes the identity) as being analysable in terms of absolute (or unrelativized) identity according to the following equivalence schema, (E):

(E) a is the same A as b if and only if a is identical to b and a is an A and b is an A.

The view under consideration affirms the following three sentences:

(1) The Father and the Son are persons.

(2) The Father is not the same person as the Son.

(3) The Father is the same God as the Son.

There are five main claims that may be made about life after death:

(a) We are reincarnated in the self-same body we had in life.

(b) We are reincarnated in another body. (For my purposes in this paper it is a matter of indifference whether this is thought of as reincarnation in anotherworld, or as reincarnation in this world: the arguments I shall be examining apply equally to either case. Throughout the paper the term ‘reincarnation’ used without qualification should be taken to mean ‘reincarnation in a different body’.)

(c) We are revived, or continue to live (or to have conscious existence) in a disembodied form.

While Christian beliefs are presumably much more widely known, especially in the Western world, some adherents to the major non-Christian religions also make claims that some of their historical rabbis, prophets, gurus or ‘messiahs’ rose from the dead. Judging from the relevant religious literature, it appears that such non-Christian claims are often ignored, perhaps because there is little awareness of them. Even if the existence of such beliefs is recognized, almost never is there any in-depth answer to the question of whether such claims could possibly be grounded in supernatural events of history.

This paper provides a methodological schema for interpreting Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion that supports the traditional thesis that Philo represents Hume's views on religious belief. To understand the complexity of Hume's ‘naturalism’ and his assessment of religious belief, it is essential to grasp the manner in which Philo articulates a consistently Humean position in the Dialogues.

Sceptical arguments, it is commonly claimed, may succeed in disarming some powerful objections to religious belief, but they do nothing more than establish a state of parity between the believer and the objector. For this reason, they make no positive contribution to the justification of religious belief and therefore are of value only to the fideist who insists that religious beliefs do not have and do not need rational support. However, while this opinion is widely held by philosophers of religion, it ignores the fact that sceptical arguments have given rise to a constructive tradition in epistemology: what is often referred to as naturalism. In what follows I shall develop a suggestion from this tradition, and that is that sceptical arguments lead not to an abandonment of claims to justified belief but to a revision and contextualization of our epistemic standards. Though this suggestion can be found in a number of philosophers in this tradition, my inspiration for it comes from Pascal, who made an important place for scepticism in the evidentialist argument for Christianity which we find in the Pensées. To develop this suggestion, I shall first sketch a position inspired by Pascal and then argue that the possibilities it suggests have been insufficiently considered in a number of recent discussions of the importance of sceptical arguments in the epistemology of religious belief.

In this essay I wish to defend the intuition that God transcends time, of which he is the Creator. To do this, I will develop a new understanding of the term ‘timeless eternity’ as it applies to God. This assumes the inadequacy of the traditional notion of divine eternity, as it is found in Boethius, Anselm and Aquinas. Very briefly, the reasons for this inadequacy are as follows. God sustains the universe, which means in part that he is responsible for the fundamental ontological status of things. Because the universe is an everchanging reality, things do change in their fundamental ontological status at different times – a change we must ascribe to God, and cannot ascribe to the objects themselves, since this has to do with their very existence. God himself, therefore, does different things at different times. This implies change in God. Whenever a change occurs, a duration occurs. Therefore, God is in time. But I do not think it is proper to say that God is in our time. God transcends time, and he is the Creator of our space-time. It is theologically more proper to say that we are in God's time, and I will adopt this language here.

John Dewey once said of philosophical problems that they are quite different from old soldiers. Not only do they never die, but they do not even fade away. Something similar might be said about the unfavourable Divine attributes of the 1950s and 60s, timelessness or eternity, necessary existence, foreknowledge of creaturely free choices, and immutability. All have contemporary defenders. Even the puzzling, traditional tenet that God is metaphysically simple now has formidable apologists. Perhaps the least popular of the traditional theistic canon, the most likely to fade away, is the tenet that God is impassible. The recent appearance of Richard Creel's Divine Impassibility has shown that even this least popular of attributes can be powerfully articulated and defended. Roughly, the impassibility thesis is the claim that God does not undergo sensory experience including suffering and pain, nor is God subject to corruption, substantial essential change or to external agency. Creel's defence of Divine impassibilism is certainly the most balanced and sophisticated in the current literature. Any argument for passibilism must take Creel's work seriously. I intend to do just that in the course of defending the thesis that the God of Christian theism is passible in an important respect. There are substantive moral and religious reasons to believe God suffers.

Human agents, unless they be crazed by some impediment of mind, are usually all too painfully aware of the risks inherent in their task of exercising agency. We are vulnerable as we act to forces not fully within our control, to unsound judgements which we ourselves make, and to the limits of our own reach which we sometimes miss or ignore. However, it is common enough in orthodox Christian circles, when transposing the concepts of action and agency to the divine, to remove the element of risk which so closely accompanies our own experience of action. God, it is claimed, is the perfect agent – who never fails – who accomplishes all and everything he sets out to do.

During the last several years, philosophers of religion have witnessed a long-drawn debate between Nelson Pike and John Fischer on the problems of theological fatalism, Fischer claiming in his most recent contribution to have proved that even if God's past beliefs are ‘nice soft facts’, still theological fatalism cannot be averted. Unfortunately, this debate has not – at least it seems to this observer – served substantially either to clarify the issues involved or to move toward a resolution of the question, but has instead confused matters by its use of misleading terminology and diverted the discussion into unpromising side roads.