This paper replies to Evan Fales' sociological explanation of mystical experience in two articles in Religious Studies vol. 32 (143–63 and 297–313). In these papers Fales applies the ideas of I. M. Lewis on spirit possession to show how mystical experiences can be accounted for as vehicles for the acquisition of political power and social control. The rebuttal of Fales contains three main elements: (a) the presentation of specific examples of theistic mystical experience from Christianity and Judaism which provide counter-examples to Fales' theory; (b) the presentation of some general objections to its plausibility; and (c) an argument for the conclusion that the burden of proof lies with naturalistic, reductionist explanations of religious experiences rather than with theistic interpretations of those experiences.

In this paper, I develop some internal problems with Alvin Plantanga's proper functionalist epistemology. I focus on: (1) how we know that a belief is the result of proper function and the special difficulties this occasions for religious beliefs; (2) what a properly functioning person should believe in various circumstances, and (3) the problem of design – whether the claim that God designed us can be reconciled with the claim that He was subject to trade-offs, compromises and unintended by-products. These serious internal problems cast doubt upon proper functionalism's fruitfulness as a theory of knowledge.

Suppose there are possible worlds in which God exists but Anselm does not. Then (I argue) there are possible worlds in which Anselm does not exist, but God cannot even entertain the thought that he does not. In such worlds Anselm does not exist, but God does not know that. This, I argue, is incompatible with (a straightforward construal of) the doctrine of God's essential omniscience. Considerations involving negative existentials also call into question a certain picture of creation, on which God chooses which particular (possible) individuals to create. They suggest that there is an element of brute contingency about which individuals exist.

Mediaeval philosophical theologians held – so far as I know without exception – that God was essentially omniscient. In what follows, I shall argue that the existence of individuals whose non-existence is compossible with God's existence raises serious difficulties for the doctrine of God's essential omniscience. If there are individuals that might not have existed even though God did, then – I shall try to show – questions arise about whether God would have been omniscient, if He had existed, but they hadn't.

Nicholas Wolterstorff has recently defended the acceptability of the belief that God speaks and examined various implications of such a belief. This paper examines several of his major hermeneutical and epistemological thesis. Among the issues discussed are the following (i) I examine Wolterstorff's claim to ‘honour’ the results of biblical criticism, and argue that excavative biblical scholarship challenges the plausibility of various crucial assumptions necessary for believing authorial-discourse interpretation of the Bible to be possible. (ii) I dispute his peculiar view that God's speech should not be included under the rubric of divine revelation. (iii) Contrary to Wolterstorff I claim that miracles would have to play an essential role in divine discourse. (iv) I critically examine and reject his claim that – in the case he describes – ‘we are entitled’ to believe God is speaking.

The aim of this paper is to show that, though Levine frequently states that Divine Discourse is full of fundamental errors, he does little by way of proving his point. In particular, I defend the claim in Divine Discourse that divine speech is not a species of revelation. I rebut Levine's account of the significance of Biblical scholarship, defend my interpretation of Ricoeur and my remarks on entitlement.

Recently, Clifford Williams has attempted to argue for the plausibility of a Christian form of physicalism. To make his case, Williams appropriates certain claims by John Locke regarding the possibility of thinking matter to argue for what Williams calls the parity theses: (1) God can make matter and nonmatter either to think or not to think. Given God's omnipotence, the justification for (1) is: (2) there is no contradiction in asserting either that matter or nonmatter thinks or that they do not think. If we expand thinking to include other morally and religiously relevant operations of the mind, then we get: (3) God can make either a purely material being or a nonmaterial entity to have moral and religious characteristics. From this, Williams infers that: (4) there is an equal amount of mystery in thinking matter as there is in non-thinking matter. In response to Williams, I argue that his main arguments for the parity theses fail and his Lockean style argument must be judged a failure. To show this I, first, state Williams' Lockean parity argument and, second, criticize the three arguments he offers for its most important premise.

Moses and Monotheism is Freud's last book on religion. It was published in its entirety only after his flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna. Moses is perhaps Freud's most controversial book on religion. It is both an apology and a curse. It is a critique of traditional Judaism (by way of an Oedipal analysis of a deified Moses), a defence of a modern humanistic Judaism (a Judaism of moral and intellectual values), and a bitter critique of Christianity (a religion not of the Father but of the sons, a failed religion, which expresses its failure in anti-Semitism). A defiant and rebellious book, one might say, one in which an old man rises to meet his fate and does so with surprising wilfulness and vigour. But Moses also reveals a dogmatic Freud defending a critique of religion that is intellectually flawed and politically misdirected.

Recent responses to evidential formulations of the argument from evil have emphasized the possible limitations on human cognitive access to the goods and evils that might be connected with various wordly states of affairs. This emphasis, I argue, is a twin-edged sword, as it imperils a popular form of natural theology. I conclude by arguing that the popularity enjoyed by Reformed Epistemology does not detract from the significance of this result, since Reformed Epistemology is not inimical to natural theology, and Reformists themselves concede the usefulness of theistic proofs.

Vincent Brümmer has recently, by taking his starting-point in the writings of Wittgenstein, defended the idea that the debate about the truth or falsehood of the claim that God exists has no future. I suggest that the arguments Brümmer develops to support this claim fail. This is so because he does not show why any attempt to prove or disprove the truth or falsehood of the belief in the existence of God is circular or how the purported non-provability of the belief that God exists entails that the theism–atheism debate of the truth or falsehood of this belief has no future. In addition, Brümmer does not acknowledge that there are many different religious language-games, that within the theistic language-games the claim that God exists is used in many different ways and that, as a result, it is not true that, within the religious language-game, the belief in the existence of God cannot be doubted, denied, or treated as a hypothesis.

…even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God (Psalms 90.2)

A number of authors, including contributors to this journal, have argued that the only consistent interpretation of God's eternal existence attributes to God an atemporal existence. Their argument seeks to show that it would be self-contradictory to adopt the opposing interpretation that God exists in time, and has indeed existed for an infinite past time. This paper argues that their objections to infinite past existence all turn on a misunderstanding of what that concept involves. The theist is therefore not compelled to adopt the atemporal interpretation, but can instead adopt the more intuitively intelligible thesis that God is in time.

In the past few years, the focus of arguments against theism has shifted. Where previously the existence of evil has been thought by many demonstrative of the impossibility of God's existence, now it is frequently purveyed as merely evidence against the existence of a Supreme Being. Even this more modest claim has been forcefully denied by William Alston and Peter van Inwagen. I argue that their arguments are not persuasive. Not only do they suffer logical flaws but, if accepted, actually have pernicious effects on the values of reasoning and religious practice.

Pascal's wager attempts to provide a prudential reason in support of the rationality of believing that God exists. The wager employs the idea that the utility of theistic belief, if true, is infinite, and in this way, the expected utility of theism swamps that of any of its rivals.

Not surprisingly the wager generates more than a good share of philosophical criticism. In this essay I examine two recent objections levelled against the wager and I argue that each fails. Following this, I argue that a transfinite version of the wager – one using the idea of an infinite utility – is incompatible with standard axiomatic constructions of decision-theory and, as a consequence, the Pascalian would be well-advised to give up the idea of an infinite utility and employ only a finite version of the wager. The consequences of limiting the wager to finite utilities are also explored.

I take up Richard Swinburne's point, in his Responsibility and Atonement, Ch. 5, that although the past cannot be changed, wrongdoers may change its significance by ‘disowning’ their actions through atonement, just as their victims may do so through forgiveness. I argue that the point can and should be pressed much more strongly than it is by Swinburne within the terms of his own discussion; and that it has a much wider significance, transcending that discussion, for there is a constant interplay between events, human actions, and our retrospective assessment of the past. Finally, I look tentatively at the question in an eschatological perspective.

Despite his persistent polemics against the Hegelian ‘speculative’ philosophy, Kierkegaard recognized his own ‘enigmatic respect for Hegel’, and one of his pseudonyms (Johannes Climacus) even acknowledged that his ‘own energies are for the most part consecrated to the service’ of speculation. Nowhere are Kierkegaard's energies more productively devoted to this service than in the work of his last pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, The Sickness Unto Death. In this essay, I argue that not only are there structural parallels between the anatomy of despair in The Sickness Unto Death and the analysis of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in Hegel's Phenomenology, but that there are striking parallels in terms of the actual content of the respective accounts. I develop these parallels in order, finally, to reconsider the terrain of difference between Kierkegaard's Christian therapeutics of despair and Hegel's phenomenological therapeutics.

This paper is a contribution to the programme of moderating Social Trinitarianism to achieve a fairly orthodox result. I follow Swinburne in relying heavily on divine thisnessless and in the important speculation that the Trinity arose from a primordial ‘unitarian’ God. In this paper I explain why I disagree with Swinburnes's account of how the Trinity came into being and I propose an alternative in which the primordial God fissions into three divine persons for the sake of a loving community.

While reports of sensory encounters with the divine come from a variety of religious traditions, philosophers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Robert Oakes have argued that such experiences of incorporeal divine beings are impossible. Nevertheless, by clarifying various relations among acts of perception, perceptual detections of presence and kinds of perceptual recognition, the sensory perception of imperceptible things emerges as a coherent possibility. So, even if they are essentially unobservable, incorporeal divine beings still fall well within the range of normal human sense perception.

God is conceived in the Western theistic tradition to be both the Creator and Conservor of the universe. These two roles were typically classed as different aspects of creation, originating creation and continuing creation. On pain of incoherence, however, conservation needs to be distinguished from creation. Contrary to current analyses (such as Philip Quinn's), creation should be explicated in terms of God's bringing something into being, while conservation should be understood in terms of God's preservation of something over an interval of time. The crucial difference is that while conservation presupposes an object of the divine action, creation does not. Such a construal has significant implications for a tensed theory of time.

William Alston has articulated a powerful defence of the claim that mystical perception generates prima facie justified beliefs about God. At the heart of his defence is the claim that mystical perception is ‘innocent until proven guilty’; that is, Alston claims that the practice of forming beliefs on the basis of putative perceptions of God should be accorded the same presumptive innocence we accord to other standard ways of forming beliefs like sense perception, memory and introspection. But Alston employs a strategy for defending mystical perception that seems to obviate the possibility of criticizing mystical perception and thus that renders otiose Alston's claim that that practice is innocent only until proven guilty. I argue that this appearance is deceptive; Alston's strategy does not render effective criticism of mystical perception unreasonably difficult. I further argue that granting the legitimacy of Alston's strategy is essential to a fair, measured criticism of mystical perception.

This paper is an exploration and interpretation of Kierkegaard's account of Christian belief. I argue that Kierkegaard believed that the Christian metaphysical tradition was exhausted and hence that there could be no defence of belief in God in purely rational terms. I defend this interpretation against objections, going on to argue that Kierkegaard thought it possible to defend a post-metaphysical conception of religious belief. I argue that Kierkegaard thought that such a defence was available if we understand correctly what it is to speak with ethico-religious authority. I argue that, when interpreted in the way I outline, Kierkegaard's notion of ethico-religious authority shows his conception of religious belief to have great plausibility. However, Kierkegaard goes on to argue that an individual's true relationship with God is constituted through the cultivation of guilt and the sense of himself as a sinner, and I give reasons for rejecting this claim, arguing that such cultivation is a form of asceticism.

The Free Will Theodicy (FWT) attempts to defeat the Argument from Evil by claiming that the suffering of the innocent (SOI) is justified by the existence of free will (FW). I argue against the FWT by demonstrating that there are at least three logically possible worlds, one without FW and two with it, such that, if given a choice, all conscious beings would act rationally in choosing to live in any of those three worlds rather than in the current world. This choice outcome undermines the FWT's contention that FW adequately justifies the quantity and severity of the SOI in this world.