Is the no-minimum claim true? I have argued that it is not. Andrew Cullison contends that my argument fails, since human sentience is variable; while Michael Schrynemakers has contended that the failure is my neglect of vagueness. Both, I argue, are wrong.

In this paper I explore the relationship between the idea of possible worlds and the notion of the beauty of God. I argue that there is a clear contradiction between the idea that God is utterly and completely beautiful on the one hand and the notion that He contains within himself all possible worlds on the other. Since some of the possible worlds residing in the mind of the deity are ugly, their presence seems to compromise God's complete and utter beauty.

There is much more said in the Critique of Pure Reason about the relationship between God and purposiveness than what is found in Kant's analysis of the physico-theological (design) argument. The ‘Wise Author of Nature’ is central to his analysis of regulative principles in the ‘Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic’ and also appears in the ‘Canon’, first with regards to the Highest Good and then again in relation to our theoretical use of purposiveness. This paper will begin with a brief discussion of the physico-theological argument before moving on to the Appendix and the Canon. Finally, it will consider some changes to the role of the Wise Author in the Critique of Judgement.

This paper takes issue with remarks by Brian Clack on the manner in which Wittgensteinian philosophers have interpreted religion. Clack attributes an expressivist interpretation of religion to Wittgensteinians. By reference to my own writings, and to those of Rush Rhees, I show how wide of the mark is this gloss on the Wittgensteinian tradition's approach to religion. In particular, the view that magico-religious rituals are cathartic is demonstrated to be one that Wittgensteinians have been keen to attack, rather than defend. The conclusion of the paper emphasizes the point that Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians have been concerned with denying the appropriateness of producing a general theory of religion or magic. Hence, they have no need of an expressive theory.

I argue that the problem of religious luck posed by Zagzebski poses a problem for the theory of hell proposed by Buckareff and Plug, according to which God adopts an open-door policy toward those in hell. Though escapism is not open to many of the criticisms Zagzebski raises against potential solutions to the problem of luck, escapism fails to solve the problem: it merely pushes luck forward into the afterlife. I suggest a hybrid solution to the problem which combines escapism and the claim that God gives enough grace to those in hell to cancel out any bad moral luck.

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.

While the theses that (1) human beings are primarily passional creatures and that (2) religion is fundamentally a product of our sensible nature are both closely linked to David Hume, Hume's contemporary Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), also defended them and explored their implications. Importantly, Kames does not draw the same sceptical conclusions as does Hume. Employing a sophisticated account of the rationality of what he calls the ‘sensitive branch’ of human nature, Kames argues that religion plays a central role in the development and perfection of human life.

I answer Alvin Plantinga's challenge to provide a ‘proper’ de jure objection to religious belief. What I call the ‘sophisticates’ evidential objection' (SEO) concludes that sophisticated Christians lack epistemic justification for believing central Christian propositions. The SEO utilizes a theory of epistemic justification in the spirit of the evidentialism of Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. I defend philosophical interest in the SEO (and its underlying evidentialism) against objections from Reformed epistemology, by addressing Plantinga's criteria for a proper de jure objection, his anti-evidentialist arguments, and the relevance of ‘impulsional evidence’. I argue that no result from Plantinga-style Reformed epistemology precludes the reasons I offer in favour of giving the SEO its due philosophical attention.

If God is not a person, what sense does it make to worship ‘it’? The problem of worship takes on a new aspect in the light of models of God which have recently been promulgated by certain philosophers and theologians – that God is ‘Being itself’, ‘the ground of our being’, ‘experienced non-objective reality’, an inspiring picture, a fictional entity in a religious story, a linguistic device for indicating the fundamentality of our perspective on life or ‘the self not yet become’.

In On Liberty, Mill says that ‘the same causes which make … [a person] a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin’. Despite Mill's not having drawn it out, there is an argument implicit in his comments that is germane to both externalist and internalist understandings of the epistemic justification of religious beliefs, even though some of these understandings would not wish to use the term ‘epistemic justification’ to refer to whatever it is that they suggest must be added to true belief for it to count as knowledge. In this paper, we shall articulate this argument; examine how it challenges those religious believers who would wish to claim their religious beliefs as knowledge; and consider what they may do to meet this challenge.

In what follows I argue for two interrelated theses: (1) that early Buddhism is not a form of empiricism, and (2) that consequently there is no basis for an early Buddhist apologetic which contrasts an empirical early Buddhism with either a metaphysical Hinduism on the one hand, or with a baseless Christianity on the other.

This article offers a model of the Trinity dealing with various objections to the filioque clause. I deal with three worries: the problem of double procession; the problem of the Father's omnipotence; worries about the Spirit's subordination. The model has two main commitments: (i) relations like proceeding, begetting, generation, etc. are causal relations; (ii) each Divine Person is caused by the other two Divine Persons. The model also allows for the Father's elevation over and above the Spirit and the Son. I end by discussing some problems for this revisionary scheme.1

In this article I develop a new problem for the doctrine of the Trinity that I call the Problem of Triunity. Rather than proceeding from the fact that God is one and the persons are many, as the traditional problem of the Trinity does, the problem of triunity proceeds from the fact that, in one sense or another, God is many, and yet each divine person on his own is just one.

Do all religions worship the same God? Sometimes this question is answered positively, sometimes negatively. Various reasons are given. In the first four sections of this paper we will analyse arguments which affirm or deny that all religions worship the same God. We will see that different types of argument are used. Some authors base their answers to our question on their theological insights (section 1); others defend their thesis with reference to the results of studies in comparative religion (section 2); a third type of argument derives from the philosophy of religion (section 3) and a fourth from philosophical views regarding the ultimate unity of the world (section 4). After this survey we will deal with the structure of the various arguments given. What kind of argument is decisive? I will also make some comments on each of these arguments in order to develop my own. We will then draw our conclusion as to the kind of arguments which are appropriate to our theme (section 5). In the last section I will elaborate my own view.

God's knowledge of individuals becomes an issue only in the face of a Pantokrator, and it remains an issue in each of the monotheistic religions familiar to us. If one seldom finds it raised in more recent times, that can only represent collective prudent counsel, for the history of each tradition records, one after another, the shipwrecks of those who essayed it, as well as bitter aftermaths in their respective religious communities. The more bitter, I believe, as certain stages of this inquiry lead one to dilemmas so harsh that atheism alone could offer plausible rest to the spirit.

I. The argument from design or ‘teleological argument’ purports to be an inductive proof for the existence of God, proceeding from the evidence of the order exhibited by natural phenomena to the probable conclusion of a rational agent responsible for producing that order. The argument was severely criticized by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and it was widely conceded that Hume's objections had cast serious doubt on the adequacy of the teleological argument, if not destroyed its credibility entirely. However, there has been a recent reappraisal of this claim by R. G. Swinburne, who maintains that none of Hume's criticisms have any validity against a ‘carefully articulated version of the argument’. Using an analogical argument based on temporal regularities rather than on spatial regularities (or arrangement of parts), Swinburne claims to have shown that the teleological argument is a legitimate inference to the best explanation whose force depends only on the strength of the analogy and on the degree to which the resulting theory makes explanation of empirical matters simpler and more coherent. Moreover, he claims to have shown that the argument provides support for the Christian monotheistic hypothesis and not merely for the weak claim that the universe was designed (somehow). This is an important claim since it has long been thought that Hume's most devastating blow was dealt when he showed that the teleological argument (if it is admitted to have any force at all) provides just as much support for the negation of certain propositions considered essential to Christian monotheism as it does for their affirmation.

It is a widely held viewpoint in Christian apologetics that in addition to defending Christian theism against objections (negative apologetics), apologists should also present arguments in support of the truth of theism and Christianity (positive apologetics). In contemporary philosophy of religion, the Reformed epistemology movement has often been criticized on the grounds that it falls considerably short of satisfying the positive side of this two-tiered approach to Christian apologetics. Reformed epistemology is said to constitute or entail an inadequate apologetic methodology since it rejects positive apologetics or at least favours negative over positive apologetics. In this paper I argue that this common objection fails on two grounds. First, while the arguments of Reformed epistemology are relevant and useful to apologetics, neither Reformed epistemology nor its epistemological project should be identified with a distinct school or method of apologetics. Secondly, while certain claims of Reformed epistemology seem to imply a rejection of positive apologetics, or at least a preference for negative or positive apologetics, I argue that no such conclusion follows. In fact, although unimpressed by particular versions of natural theology and positive apologetics, Reformed epistemologists have provided criticisms of each that can constructively shape future approaches to the apologetic employment of natural theology and Christian evidences.

Alston's overall aim in Perceiving God is to show that we are rationally justified in believing that our apparent direct perceptions of God's presence (called ‘M-experiences’) are reliable and thus for the most part veridical, the objective, existentially-committed beliefs based on these experiences thereby being prima facie justified, subject to defeat by certain overriders supplied by some background religion. It is argued that our rational justification for believing this is of both an epistemic and pragmatic (or practical) sort, in which an epistemic reason for believing a proposition is truth conducive, rendering the proposition probable, while a pragmatic one concerns the benefits which accrue from belief. We will begin by considering the pragmatic justification, since the case he makes out for epistemic justification is built on its back.

Descartes holds that God's will is immutable. It cannot be changed by God and, because He is supremely independent, it cannot be changed by anything else. Descartes' God acts by a single immutable will for all eternity, and there is no sense in which it is possible for Him to will or to have willed anything other than what He in fact wills. Passages in which Descartes might appear to be suggesting a different view are simply manifestations of his analytic method.