There is an undercurrent to be detected in Anselm's record of the meditative experience that issued in the Ontological Argument and, although it points to a profound and perennial problem in the interpretation of religion, this undercurrent has been largely ignored. The Argument, as is well known, moves entirely within the medium of reflective meaning focused on the idea of God and, unlike the cosmological arguments of later theologians, it makes no appeal whatever to a principle of causality or to the discovery of a sufficient reason for finite existence. Anselm seems to have had his own sense of what one may call the unadulterated rationalism of the Argument when, in his own words, he wondered, ‘if perhaps it might be possible to find one single argument that for its proof required no other save itself, and that by itself would suffice to prove that God really exists’. Here we are entirely within that inner chamber of the mind so dear to the Augustinian tradition, a mind from which one is to exclude all thought save that of God. The task of the one who reflects is to penetrate the inner meaning of this thought in order to discover what it implies beyond what is evident on the surface. With such an eminently rational or logical aim occupying the centre of attention, it is quite understandable that the presence of another, and quite opposed, concern should have been overlooked - Anselm's concern, namely, to transcend, as it were, the medium of thought itself, and enter into the presence of God. The reason that this concern introduces a tension in the search for a proof is that the realization of presence would seem to render proof superfluous, while the inference in an argument - especially one moving towards existence – inevitably suggests, in some sense and to some degree, the absence of what is sought for.

This paper concerns two objections to Pascal's wager. The first claims that Pascal's recommendation to habituate oneself to believe in God is tantamount to religious brainwashing. I argue that this construal misses important aspects of what Pascal had in mind, which may render the habituation process a legitimate means to acquire new understanding. The second objection is based on the idea that a key assumption of the wager – that theistic belief is required for eternal felicity – is morally absurd. I argue that theistic belief, as Pascal understands it, is a necessary aspect for spiritual restoration, not merely an isolated belief in an imperious deity.

Anselm's two ‘ontological’ arguments rest upon three fundamental assertions:

(1) The idea of God is the idea of a being than which nothing more perfect is conceivable.

(2) Whatever exists in the understanding and outside the understanding is more perfect than whatever exists in the understanding alone. (Prosologion 2)

(3) Whatever cannot be conceived not to exist is more perfect than whatever can be conceived not to exist. (Proslogion 3)

Much contemporary philosophy of religion is preoccupied with highly general problems about the nature of religious belief and of religious language, rather than with how to interpret, in detail, specific religious beliefs or forms of religious discourse. Among the matters of dispute there seem to be two of overriding importance. The first concerns the relation between religious beliefs and experience and centres on the question, what sorts of experience are relevant to the acceptance or rejection of religious beliefs. The second concerns whether or not religious beliefs have an explanatory function. Discussion of both these themes in relation to theistic belief is still largely dominated by conceptions of God and of his relation to the world which have been developed by natural theologians, particularly, though not exclusively, those who have worked within traditions significantly influenced by Thomas Aquinas. Thus the idea that religious beliefs have an explanatory function is commonly associated with the view that they present answers to questions raised by those alleged traits or features of the world which have been the concern of natural theologians and which have been described by means of concepts of ‘contingency’, ‘purposiveness’, ‘order’, and ‘design’. Consequently, the sort of experience often held to be relevant to the acceptance or rejection of theistic belief is that which is relevant to the application of these problematic concepts.

Have process philosophers understood what Christian theologians are trying to say? The process critique of the broad tradition of Christian theology is motivated, at least in part, by the belief that the God of the Church's traditional confession is too unreservedly transcendent; that is, that he is insufficiently related to his creation. In response, process philosophers have defended a ‘dipolar’ concept of God according to which God is fully transcendent in his ‘primordial nature’ and fully immanent (i.e. ‘surrelative’) in his ‘consequent nature’. The dipolar construction undoubtedly solves the ‘problem’, but the question remains whether there really is a problem to be solved in the first place. Many Christian theologians, after all, have understood their faith, as well as their attempts at the rational exploration of their faith, to depend upon the divine-human relationship constituted by God's own self-disclosure. They have further understood the meaning of the terms of their theological explication to be immanent to this same experiential context of divine-human encounter, within which relationship with God is the primary reality experienced. As a particular aspect of the controversy aroused by the process critique of Christian theology, therefore, the question arises whether process philosophers have taken adequate account of the manner in which Christian theology has been conditioned by this context of divine-human encounter. I have no pretensions within the scope of this brief essay to address this question in its full generality, either with respect to the multifarious theological positions which the process critique has engendered, or with respect to the wide range of difficulties involved in any attempt to understand the relation of the Creator to his creation.

Feigned madness can be a valuable asset. King David once used it to escape from the Philistines (I Sam. 21), and a twentieth century king, Pirandello's Henry IV pulled much the same trick on a modern philistine culture. Thrown from his horse and struck on the head while on his way to a masquerade party dressed as the Henry of Canossa's chill repentance, he had for twenty years insanely identified himself with the eleventh century monarch. At least this is what his family and the court they provided for his humour thought. As the play opens they are unaware that he has returned to sanity, but has continued to play Henry IV for the last eight of the twenty years, preferring the mad world in which he had lived to the sane world to which he would have to return.

In this short paper, I want to say one thing about the problem of communicating religious understanding. But first it might be helpful to locate the problem in current thinking on religious education.

The present paper defends Augustine's claim that time is ontologically dependent on the world. My proof is accomplished by establishing two sub-proofs. First, I argue that time requires change by criticizing Shoemaker's argument for the counterclaim that time does not require change. Second, I go on to show that there is no source of change apart from the created universe. I conclude that if we grant the traditional theistic assumption that the created universe has a beginning and an end, then since time is ontologically dependent on the world, time cannot extend from the infinite past into the infinite future. And if time does not extend from the infinite past into the infinite future, then a temporal God has a beginning and endures for only a finite period of time. This implausible consequence gives us reason to believe that God is eternal.

The religionsgeschichtliche Schule, born in Germany towards the end of the XIXth century, rapidly met with considerable success throughout the world of scholarship. It reached its zenith during the first decennia of the present century, when it played a leading part in the study of Christian origins, and began to fall out of favour shortly after World War I. Alfred Loisy's Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien, first published in 1919 and re-edited in 1930, represents one of its most significant and also one of its last productions. Very few scholars, if any, would be willing nowadays to enlist under its banner. And yet there can be little doubt that this school, despite its obvious shortcomings and unwarranted systematisations, has, in its time, done the cause of learning signal service.

In responding to the problem that evil poses for belief in the existence of an omnipotent and all good deity, a number of Christian philosophers have followed Augustine in making the free will defence (FWD) the foundation of their theodicies. The FWD seems to be well suited for the important role it has played in Christian religious thought. Not only does it admit the reality of evil in God's world, but it also proposes to free God from moral responsibility for at least a considerable portion of that evil. A few philosophers, e.g. Terence Penelhum, have even argued that ‘… the Christian theist is committed to some form or other of the free will defence …’ because of the Christian understanding of the nature of God and man. Whether or not this is true, the argument that it was not possible for God to create free human beings without permitting some degree of evil in his world (the FWD) has been sufficiently influential that those sceptics who have intended to show that the reality of evil makes theism an intellectually indefensible position have usually felt compelled to treat it. For similar reasons, a number of theistic philosophers have felt obligated to defend the FWD against such sceptical attacks.

Although the basic ideas of the ontological argument can be found in Aristotle and Philo Judaeus (cf. AD pp. 141 ff.), the argument received its classical formulation in Anselm's Proslogion and his Reply to the objections raised by Gaunilo. During the succeeding nine centuries the argument has had a chequered career. It was supported by some scholastic theologians but rejected by Aquinas. Descartes and Leibniz offered their own versions of the proof but Kant's refutation of the argument has generally been accepted as conclusive during the past century and a half. Nevertheless, interest in the proof has never completely disappeared—perhaps provoked by Aquinas' suggestion that the proof may be valid for God even though it cannot be valid for us because of the inadequacy of our knowledge of God. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the ontological argument. J. N. Findlay put the argument into reverse to show the necessary non-existence of God in an article in 1948 (Can God's existence be disproved?) but in later writings he has suggested that the argument may have positive significance. In 1960 Norman Malcolm published a paper in which he distinguished two basically different forms of the ontological argument in the Proslogion and defended the possible validity of the second of them.

Recently there have been a number of attempts at showing that God's attributes are conceptually defective (Kretzman, Mackie). Foremost among the attributes singled out for criticism is omnipotence. But critics have also questioned the logical compatibility of omniscience and immutability and also omnipotence and omniscience.

Is (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?1

In two recent articles Grace M. (Dyck) Jantzen has argued that an embodied God could be both a being worthy of worship (in the Judaeo-Christian tradition) and omnipresent. In arguing for neither of these claims has she attempted to prove that God (if he exists) is embodied, or even that God (if he exists) must be embodied. Rather, she has urged acceptance of the more modest claim there is no good reason for denying the possible embodiment of God (if he exists) on grounds either connected with his being a worthy object of worship or in terms of a supposed entailment of incorporeality on God's omnipresence. Yet contemporary thinkers with as radically divergent views about God as Kai Nielsen and Father Copleston forward ‘the argument that an embodied God is inadequate for sophisticated theism’; and, Jantzen avers, there is a ‘widespread belief that if God is indeed omnipresent, as we are clearly taught in Scripture, then that doctrine of omnipresence entails immediately that God must be incorporeal’. The purpose of my remarks in this note is not to dispute Jantzen's conclusions, but to question the strength and/or satisfactoriness of some of her arguments for those conclusions. Perhaps the most pervading misgiving arises over her unquestioned equating of ‘embodiment’ with ‘having a body’. Surely at first blush such synonymy appears both obvious and innocuous. But where the notion of embodiment itself is the crux of the issue, careful reflection needs to be given to just what the notion involves. Yet she simply accepts the synonymy ‘without any further ado, as though it were just obviously true’, just as she accuses Findlay of doing regarding ‘the claim that only a being who exists necessarily would be worthy of our worship’.

Many people believe it absurd to seek evidence for - or against - personal survival of death. Some do so because they think, for a variety of reasons, that the idea of personal post-mortem survival makes no sense. Whether or not they are right they are at any rate consistent: nothing can be evidence for or against a nonsense. However, there are others who also believe that looking for evidence is absurd and yet do not similarly dismiss the idea as unintelligible. They allow that survival is possible and commonly hope it will ensue; but at the same time they insist that absolutely nothing helpful can be said on the subject.

From at least the time of the writing of The Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard's work takes a special interest in both the transition from unbelief to faith and the character of the life of true faith. Trained in Lutheran dogma and convinced of the radical nature of human freedom, his work on this subject demonstrates a profound concern for and grasp of Lutheran orthodoxy, as well as a remarkable degree of subtlety. After all, it is no simple task to give an account of the central features of the Christian life that is faithful to both a libertarian conception of human freedom and the doctrines of the church founded by the author of The Bondage of the Will. This paper proposes to accomplish two things: first, to state a problem that lies on the surface of Kierkegaard's account of the transformation involved in Christian conversion and second to present a resolution of the problem that is faithful to Kierkegaard's intentions.