Faced with what he saw as the danger to society in the ascendancy of natural science and decline in religion and morals, the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim sought the origins of both religion and science in their function in primitive societies as guarantors of social solidarity. In contrast to Frazer, Tylor, and other early anthropologists, he looked for the internal intelligibility of myth and ritual in social terms, rather than regarding them just as failed attempts to state objective truths about the natural world of the same kind as those later arrived at by natural science. One does not have to accept Durkheim's ultimately atheistic identification of God with Society, nor the politically authoritarian consequences which have some-times been held to follow from this identification, to see that Durkheim has raised a set of issues of crucial importance for a discussion of science and the myths and doctrines of religion. For what he has done is to reintroduce a third factor into the perennial and by now rather frustrating dichotomy between science and religion, namely society and the sciences of man. It is some consequences of this approach that I want to explore in this paper.

For quite some time, critics have attacked religious language on the grounds that theologians employed metaphors that were irreducible. By irreducible, they meant metaphors that could not be paraphrased in literal language. And any such language that could not be reduced to words that can be taken in a literal sense, would be devoid of cognitive meaning or truth value. Since theologians claimed that statements like ‘God is love’ cannot be reduced to a literal sense without robbing the concept of God of its transcendent status, sceptics replied that such failures merely indicated the meaninglessness of religious language. Or, if apologists did assert that ‘God is love’ can be paraphrased by statements describing the love of one man for another, the sceptic claimed that such a move reduced religious language to anthropological language where terms like ‘God’ were superfluous. Critics argued that metaphors of religion posed the following dilemma: either religious metaphors could not be reduced to literal paraphrases and were, therefore, meaningless; or, religious metaphors could be reduced to literal paraphrases, but the method by which they were reduced eliminated the necessity for theological terminology.

I. Professor William L. Rowe begins an interesting paper on the Cosmological Argument by stating that his ‘purpose …is not to resurrect it’ but ‘to uncover, clarify, and examine some of the philosophical concepts and theses essential to the reasoning exhibited in the argument’. (49) However, in the concluding pages of his paper, Rowe is at some pains to show that his discussion does at least demonstrate that the Cosmological Argument is beyond the reach of criticisms levelled against it in the works of its classical critics, Hume and Kant and their modern-day counterparts. To quote his concluding remark: ‘Like most important philosophical arguments, it appears that the Cosmological Argument is neither as good as its supporters have claimed it to be nor as bad as its critics have believed.’ (61) Now I have long suspected that some such estimate of the Cosmological Argument was correct; however I do not think that Rowe's discussions in his paper establish his contention that the reports of the death of the Cosmological Argument have been premature. Nevertheless, Rowe's uncovering of the reasoning that lies behind the argument does have the merit of laying bare the precise point from which, as well as the direction in which, the defence of the argument should proceed if we are to truly make some headway on this hoary topic. In what follows, I will first try to show why I think Rowe's discussion fails to establish his conclusion and thereafter try to give the outline of a more successful strategy for arriving at the same conclusion.

Speaking for the theology of the East, Masao Abe says: ‘I do not see the ontological ground on which (in the West) being has priority over non-being’. Professor Abe is speaking of Tillich's assertion (in The Courage To Be, p. 34, 40) that there is an ‘ontological priority of being over nonbeing’, but Abe's question is more or less directed to the whole Western metaphysical tradition and illustrates the fundamental philosophical point at issue between the East and West. Nonbeing can be ruled out of consideration as Parmenides and Wittgenstein have done (what cannot be said clearly should not be spoken about). Or, like Plato and Tillich, being can be said to embrace both itself and nonbeing, even if this is not explained in detail very clearly. Yet the challenge of the East still stands: What embraces both being and nonbeing may not be ‘Being’ but ‘that which is neither being nor non-being’. If the East and the West are to meet metaphysically, we can no longer simply assume the priority of being over nonbeing. We must begin by considering the alternative of the East and then justify any choice between competing first principles by prior metaphysical argument.

Christians have often held that on the day of judgment God will condemn some persons who have disobeyed him to a hell of everlasting torment and total unhappiness from which there is no hope of escape, as a punishment for their deeds up to that time. This is not the only way that hell has been or could be conceived of, but it has been the predominant conception in the Christian church throughout much of its history and it is the one on which I shall focus in this paper.

In this paper I would like to begin following up a suggestion made informally in conversation by Professor Mircea Eliade that someone with an interest in phenomenology of religion take a serious look at the writings of the American anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda. Since the appearance of his most recent book two years ago, there has been a growing bibliography of commentaries on and interviews with this scholar. To my knowledge, however, no one has yet attempted to bring to bear on his works some of the insights derived from the comparative approach of a phenomenology of religion. This paper will only be a step in that direction. It is intended in the first place to set some relatively new material before a group of scholars in order to invite comments from various special disciplines. Throughout, it is prompted by my own personal curiosity and informed, for better or worse, by my own developing understanding of the aims and procedures of a general phenomenology of religion.

In ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ Laurence Sterne writes:

That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I'm sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

When trying to understand the nature of religious experience as ‘mediated immediacy’ I am reminded of Professor J. N. Findlay's description of Hegel's thought as a kind of ‘philosophical Buchenwald’ specialising in intellectual tortures. Nevertheless, recent literature on the subject of religious experience reveals an increasing number of thinkers expressing confidence in the viability of this notion, John E. Smith of Yale being the most outstanding. This is not to say that all the thinkers categorised by ‘mediated immediacy’ have no important differences. They do. Infact, Smith might not even accept the phrase as accurately describing his position, despite the fact that J.B. Stearns applied it to his thought in a recent article.