Centred on figures like Herbert McCabe, David Burrell, and Brian Davies the loose tradition known as grammatical thomism is undervalued within analytic philosophy of religion. This is particularly unfortunate, since a grammatical thomist approach offers the prospect of both a reorientation towards a more apophatic conception of God, consonant with the theology and practice of many religious traditions, and of moving beyond certain debates in the philosophy of religion. In this article, a grammatical thomist approach to the word ‘God’ is laid out: the conditions for introducing the word constrain its grammar, such that it cannot be understood as designating anything within our world. Accordingly inferential moves which we might otherwise find tempting are blocked. The result is an apophatic theology grounded in linguistic considerations. Objections against linguistic approaches to philosophy and theology, owing to Williamson and Murphy respectively, are considered and counter-arguments presented. The potential for therapeutic approaches to both the problem of evil and questions around theology and politics is then flagged.

The traditional Christian view that God foreknows the future exclusively in terms of what will and will not come to pass is partially rooted in two ancient Hellenistic philosophical assumptions. Hellenistic philosophers universally assumed that propositions asserting ‘x will occur’ contradict propositions asserting ‘x will not occur’ and generally assumed that the gods lose significant providential advantage if they know the future partly as a domain of possibilities rather than exclusively in terms of what will and will not occur. Both assumptions continue to influence people in the direction of the traditional understanding of God's knowledge of the future. In this essay I argue that the first assumption is unnecessary and the second largely misguided.

First, my thanks to Richard Swinburne for his probing and thoughtful review of my book Warranted Christian Belief (WCB). His account of the book's mainline of argument is accurate as far as it goes; it does contain an important lacuna, however. The focus of the book is twofold; it is aimed in two directions. First, just as Swinburne says, I argue that there are no plausible de iure objections to Christian belief that are independent of de facto objections; any plausible objection to the rationality of Christian belief, or to its warrant (the property that distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief), or its justification, will either be obviously mistaken or will (as with Freud, and Marx and a thousand others) presuppose one or more de facto objections. This is intended as a contribution to apologetics; it is important, because many or most objections to Christian belief are of just the sort I attempt to discredit. (‘I don't know whether Christian belief is true or not – who could know a thing like that? – but I do know that it is irrational, or unwarranted, or not rationally justified, or…’.) Second (and this is the focus Swinburne fails to mention), I proposed the extended A/C (Aquinas/Calvin) model as, from the perspective of Christian belief, a plausible account of the way in which Christian belief is, in fact, justified, rational and warranted. So the book is aimed in two directions: first towards readers generally, whether Christian believers or not, and second towards Christian believers.

In his recent trilogy, J. L. Schellenberg presents a new religious option: to have beliefless faith in a general object of religious concern that he thinks is referenced at the core of most sectarian religions – the axiological, soteriological, and metaphysical ultimate, which I call ‘UUU’. After explaining what UUU is more fully, I argue that the claim that UUU exists should not be, as Schellenberg says, the only focus for philosophy of religion. Still, I argue that such a claim is a good basis for a new form of religion, especially if it is modified in a couple of ways.

The mystical experiences of the ṛṣis, the spiritual giants of the early Vedic times, led to the creation of the Vedic hymns and eventually to the formation of the whole elaborate structure of the Vedic religion, as upheld by the Indian priesthood. But there were obviously others who pursued mystical experiences without themselves engaging, like the ancient ṛṣis, in attempts to transmit their experiences through mythological poetry and religious leadership. They adopted mystical ecstasy as their way of life. Mysticism as a conscious way of life is, in India, called Yoga. Being outside the trend of Vedic mythological creativity and the Brāhmanic religious orthodoxy, the Yogis of Vedic times left little evidence of their existence, practices and achievements. And such evidence as has survived in the Vedas is scanty and indirect.

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.

In recent years the issue of whether mysticism can be induced by drugs has been pursued by both scholars of mystical literature and psychological researchers. R. C. Zaehner is perhaps the best known among the scholars of religious literature who have addressed the issues of drug-induced mysticism. While on the side of empirical psychology investigators such as Walter N. Pahnke, R. E. L. Masters, and Jean Houston have pursued some of the same issues using the techniques of laboratory experimentation. Zaehner, who was familiar with both Eastern and Western mysticism, argued that drug-induced experiences are not the same as religious mystical experiences of the theistic variety. It was farcical, he argued, for Aldous Huxley to posit a connection between his preternatural feeling of oneness with his chair and the Beatific Vision. The issue between Zaehner and Huxley was not over the veridicality of Huxley's mystical experience. It was over the significance of Huxley's experience: Was it or was it not a drug-induced mystical experience of the sort attained by mystics after heroic struggles of self-discipline? This was the issue again when Zaehner came to address himself to the claims of Timothy Leary, a chief proponent of ‘the LSD experience’, and, in general terms, this has been the central issue pursued by the psychological researchers.

Theodicy begins with the recognition that the world is not obviously under the care of a loving God with limitless power and wisdom. If it were, why would the world be burdened with its considerable amount and variety of evil? Theodicists are those who attempt to answer this question by suggesting a possible rationale for the appearance of evil in a theocentric universe. In the past theodicists have taken up the cause of theodicy in the service of piety, so that God might be defended against libel from humans, particularly the accusation that God's reign lacks justice. Contemporary practitioners, who live in a world where the existence of God can no longer be presumed, tend to favour theodicy as an exercise in securing the rationality of religious belief. Their hope is that one crucial theoretical obstacle to responsible belief in God will have been eliminated, once the idea of God has been reconciled with the reality of evil. What has commonly united theodicists, at least since the Enlightenment, is that they must answer to a non–believing antagonist. Until relatively recently, theodicy has been a debate between apologists for theistic faith and their cultured detractors.

Some philosophers have argued that a world created by an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being would not contain evil. Since the world contains evil in fact, it follows (so it is claimed) that the world was not created by an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being. One of the replies frequently given to this argument is that the world contains evil only because it is populated with free creatures (men and devils) who perform morally wrong action. This is the centre of the so-called ‘Free Will Theodicy’ - a favourite not only of technical theologians such as Thomas Aquinas but of practising believers of the least sophisticated sort. On this view, evil results from the illicit exercise of created free will. The fault thus lies with his creatures and not with the omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good creator.

One of the more popular bedtime stories in our house just now is Horton Hears a Who by Dr Seuss. Horton is an elephant, and unlike the other animals in the jungle, he is capable – thanks doubtless to his large ears – of hearing the faint sounds made by some minute beings called Whos, who live in a town called Whoville on a tiny speck of dust. The other animals think Horton is mad when he talks to the Whos: they take the speck of dust from him and attempt to get rid of it. After a series of adventures Horton retrieves the speck of dust, gets the Whos to shout loudly enough to be heard by the other animals, and so everyone lives happily ever after. In the course of the story, before the speck of dust is taken from him, Horton is walking along and worrying:

‘Should I put this speck down?…’ Horton thought with alarm.

‘If I do these small persons may come to great harm.

I can't put it down. And I won't! After all

A person's a person, no matter how small.’

In a series of articles in this journal, Wes Morriston has launched what can only be considered a full-scale assault on the divine command theory (DCT) of morality. According to Morriston, proponents of this theory are committed to an alarming counterpossible: that if God did command an annual human sacrifice, it would be morally obligatory. Since only a ‘terrible’ deity would do such a ‘terrible’ thing, we should reject DCT. Indeed, if there were such a deity, the world would be a terrible place – certainly far worse than it is. We argue that Morriston's non-standard method for assessing counterpossibles of this sort is flawed. Not only is the savvy DCT-ist at liberty to reject it, but Morriston's method badly misfires in the face of theistic activism – a metaphysical platform available to DCT-ists, according to which if God didn't exist, neither would anything else.

This article suggests that different philosophical traditions have developed and matured around particular conceptual metaphors. It proposes that conceptual metaphor theory provides a useful tool with which to think about different world philosophical traditions, as it can reveal the deep structure of networks of ideas. Conceptual metaphors are not just linguistic devices; rather they organize whole networks of thought, experience, and activity. This idea is explored and special attention paid to the role of those conceptual metaphors that structure ways of thinking about knowledge within Western, Indian, and East Asian traditions. The article concludes with some reflections on the implications of this approach for inter-cultural philosophy of religion.

Alvin Plantinga's much heralded religious epistemology is a many-faceted thing. In simplest terms, it is an attempt to free would-be rational theists from the evidentialist requirement for religious belief and to show that they are well within their ‘epistemic rights’ in taking certain beliefs about God as ‘properly basic’. In an early version of his programme, Plantinga sought to achieve both these objectives through a single strategem, namely via the overthrow of ‘classical foundationalism’, an historically wide-ranging approach to epistemology he judges to be, even today, preeminent. Plantinga's frontal attack on his self-styled opposition, however, soon proved inadequate to his task, largely because it exposed his own position to criticism and left pressing questions unanswered. By this time, of course, Plantinga has done much to reply to his critics and to address fundamental questions; yet in so doing, he has adopted argumentative manoeuvres, some quite surprising, that take him considerably beyond his original position. These developments in his proposal are central to the discussion that follows. If we are to comprehend them, however, we must begin where he did, with a critique of classical foundationalism, for in the case of Plantinga's religious epistemology, to trace genesis is to elucidate growth.

In Volume i of his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich says, ‘Being precedes nonbeing in ontological validity, as the word “nonbeing” itself indicates’ (p. 189). He also says elsewhere, ‘Being “embraces” itself and nonbeing’, and ‘Nonbeing is dependent on the being it negates. “Dependent”—points first of all to the ontological priority of being over nonbeing’ (The Courage to Be, p. 34, p. 40). Tillich makes these statements in connection with a tendency among some Christian thinkers to take God as Being itself. The same understanding of the relation of being and non-being can be discerned in major strands of Greek philosophy through the ideas of to on and me on. Although Greek philosophy and the Christian movement have different starting points in time, in geographical locale, in conceptual orientation, Tillich's statements demonstrate the manner in which the two strands have, to a significant degree, merged, and his comments reflect a basic under standing (if not the basic understanding) of being and nonbeing in the West.

In this article I argue that the integration of biblical exegesis and metaphysical argumentation in Turretin's doctrine of God is due to his views in epistemology and semantics. Anyone reading Turretin's Locus de Deo will recognize that it is not limited to scriptural exegesis and exploration of biblical concepts. The biblical orientation is, of course, prominent, but in addition he combines it with logic and metaphysics. I argue that by adhering to an instrumental view of reason, and an analogical or partially univocal theory of theistic reference, he is able to construct a concept of God which draws first and foremost on the Christian canon and in addition on logic and metaphysics.

This article aims to provide an explication of the doctrine of the monarchy of the Father. A precisification of the doctrine is made within the building-fundamentality framework provided by Karen Bennett, which enables a further clarification of the central elements of the doctrine to be made and an important objection against it to be answered.

To say that God is omniscient, most philosophers and theologians agree, is to say that he knows all true propositions and none that are false. But there is a great deal of disagreement about what is knowable. Some believe that God's knowledge is limited to everything that is (or has been) actual and that which will follow deterministically from it. He knows, for example, exactly what Caesar was thinking when he crossed the Rubicon and how many horses he had in his army that day. And he knows exactly how Gorbachev feels about the use of nuclear weapons. And since he knows how the ‘laws of nature’ (which he has purportedly created) function, he knows, for example, how certain weather systems will develop and what their effects will be on certain natural environments. But with respect to any future state of affairs which includes free human decision-making as a causal component, God is said not to know what will occur. God, as the ultimate psychoanalyst or behaviourist, can with great accuracy predict what we will freely decide to do in the future in many cases. He might well, for example, be able to predict quite accurately who will win the 1988 Presidential election. But a God who possesses only ‘present knowledge’ (PK) cannot know who will win. Given that the election in question is dependent on free choices which have yet to be made, there is presently nothing for God to know.

The classical conception of God is that of a necessary being. On a possible worlds semantics, this entails that God exists at every possible world. According to the modal realist account of David Lewis, possible worlds are understood to be real, concrete worlds – no different in kind from the actual world. But, modal realism is equipped to accommodate the existence of a necessary being in only one of three ways: (1) By way of counterpart theory, or (2) by way of a special case of trans-world identity for causally inert necessary beings (e.g. pure sets), or else (3) causally potent ones which lack accidental intrinsic properties. I argue that each of these three options entails unacceptable consequences – (1) and (2) are incompatible with theism, and (3) is incompatible with modal realism. I conclude that (at least) one of these views is false.

In this paper I critically examine Brian Leftow's attempt to construct a theistic semantics for counterpossibles, one that can be used to make sense of the fact that propositions, which exist necessarily, nevertheless depend on God as their cause. I argue that the impressive theoretical framework erected by Leftow cannot guarantee an asymmetrical dependence of propositions on God, and ultimately leads to a semantic collapse in which every counterpossible comes out false. I end by defending an alternative account of God and propositions – what I call ‘theistic existentialism’. It is shown how this account underwrites a semantics for counterpossibles that conveniently avoids the problems attending Leftow's theory.

I think that there is much about contemporary philosophy of religion that should change. Most importantly, philosophy of religion should be philosophy of religion, not merely philosophy of theism, or philosophy of Christianity, or philosophy of certain denominations of Christianity, or the like. Here, however, I shall complain about one fairly narrow aspect of contemporary philosophy of religion that really irks me: its obsession with derivations that have as their conclusion either the claim that God exists or the claim that God does not exist. I shall work myself up by degrees.