Donna Haraway, in her ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, issues a warning that in the postmodern world where grand narratives increasingly fail and subjects are seen to be irremediably fragmented, ‘we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making a partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. Epistemology is about knowing the difference’. Such an account of epistemology, which sees its central task to be a knowledge of the significance of difference and a capacity to discern between innocent and oppressive forms of difference, is perhaps not one that would most readily occur to British philosophers of religion. It is, however, an account which has resonances both with many contemporary continental thinkers and with feminist epistemologists. Notwithstanding the many areas of divergence between and among these groups, on two points at least they converge: that the recognition and discernment of difference has become inescapable for epistemology, and that of the differences which must be dealt with, gender difference has a paradigmatic status.

William Forgie's negative conclusion concerning the possibility of theistic experience in particular turns on a sophisticated, if idiosyncratic, phenomenology of experience in general. Forgie introduces us to his position by having us imagine two people, Tim and Tom Tibbetts. He then asks us to suppose that Tim and Tom are identical twins who live next door. Imagine that looking over the fence one fine sunny day you have what you take to be a veridical visual experience of someone who looks like one of the Tibbetts. If you were required to rely solely on the content of your experience, says Forgie, and not on any extra-experiential information to which you may be privy (e.g. you know Tom is away at aunt Millie's), there would be no way to identify the object of your experience as Tim, rather than Tom, Tibbetts. An experience of one would be phenomenologically indistinguishable from an experience of the other and there would be, therefore, nothing in the experience itself which guarantees that it's Tim, rather than Tom.

In The Christian God (hereafter CG), Richard Swinburne offers a series of arguments which a priori support the necessity of the doctrine of the Trinity. If his arguments are successful, he has dramatically narrowed the field of logically possible religious beliefs to (Christian) trinitarianism. I contend that Swinburne's arguments necessitate the existence of more than one quasi-independent divine being; indeed Swinburne's arguments move us in the direction of tritheism rather than orthodox trinitarianism.

Argument is the very life-blood of philosophy and, hence, prima facie one might expect that distinctive phenomenon of the Jewish religious tradition, ‘holy argument’, to be of special interest to philosophers, particularly philosophers of religion. However, there is little to suggest that those engaged in the philosophical approach to religion are even aware that such a phenomenon as a piety of argument exists. But it does. In the philosophical field rational argument conducted according to the established rules of logic is the fundamental tool in the pursuit of truth and understanding or for the clarification of problems, ideas and concepts; in Judaism, rational, legal argument pursued according to recognized principles and processes is the most highly commended path to encounter and engagement with God. Moreover, within this same religious tradition, ‘holy argument’ embraces not only argument about God, about His nature (theology), His ways (theodicy) and His will (halakhah), but also argument with God, putting God on trial and taking Him to task as One who is Himself bound and judged by that same Torah that Israel is obligated to obey. The high value placed upon study and the exercise of the intellect in the Jewish tradition is well known; it is not only a mitzvah and an act of worship but a form of imitatio Dei, for God Himself engages in the study of Torah. But the mode of study in Judaism and the form in which the intellect is exercised is characteristically that of argument and debate, the quintessential activity of philosophy and philosophers.

In this postmodern era, God-talk is facing serious challenges. Is it still possible to have a meaningful concept of God after the demise of metaphysical realism? How can we make sense of the idea of absolute transcendence in a secularized world? In what sense can we still believe something as divine revelation when foundationalism is no longer taken for granted? While some believe that we can go about our old theological business as usual, others have entirely given up on the hope of any intelligible theology. It is my hunch, however, that there are ways of doing theology that can take our postmodern conditions into serious account. In this article, I shall argue that, however anachronistic it might seem, Hegel's God-talk, seen through the lens of Heidegger's understanding of Being, provides one such possibility.

Does widespread non-acceptance of Christianity constitute evidence for the non-existence of God? Theodore M. Drange has recently claimed that this question requires an affirmative answer if certain widely held views about God are presupposed; if God is construed in a certain way, an ‘Argument from Non-belief’ can be developed for the non-existence of God. I hope to show that a crucial premise of Drange's argument, one for which he provides only weak Biblical evidence, can be defended by means of an a priori argument.