A recent paper, ‘Hume's Immanent God’, (in (I))* by George Nathan, contains an insightful interpretation of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (henceforth, briefly, D). Insight is no guarantee against error. I shall argue that Nathan's interpretation is mistaken, and then offer my own.

Nathan observes that the general tendency in scholarship on D has been to focus on its sceptical side. He proposes to ‘bring out Hume's positive contribution’. Nathan's thesis, briefly, is that D best supports a modestly theistic interpretation according to which God is the ultimate cause of order in the universe.

There is an impasse in the discussion as to how to judge a religion other than one's own. On the one hand judging another religion by the criteria and standards of one's own tradition has become a highly problematic exercise. The metaphor used by some critics for such an approach is that of jingoistic flag-waving. Criticisms of this strategy are numerous and interdisciplinary in their nature. For instance, it is argued that such an enterprise is part and parcel of the political–economic imperialism of western (Christian) history. Such geo-political–religious imperialism is intolerable in a post-colonial age. Sociologically, anthropologically, and philosophically it has been argued that disparate traditions are quite simply incommensurable, each operating with their own rules and grammar. Hence, to judge one religion against another is like judging the goodness of an apple against a vacuum cleaner. The degree of incommensurability varies, so that at the lower end of the scale, the appropriate analogy is that of judging the goodness of apples against oranges. Such criticisms involve a range of disputed questions such as the possibility of successful translation of one language into another alien and different language, the epistemological logocentricism of western philosophical thought, and so on. I should state before proceeding that despite such criticisms I am a supporter of a nuanced form of this first strategy. I shall return to this point in due course.

This paper draws attention to the way free choice participates in the occurrence of what is usually called natural evil. While earthquakes are natural phenomena, they injure only those who have chosen to live in places where they occur. But if God could not foresee these choices, then God could not foresee much about the amount and distribution of natural evil. Combining a libertarian notion of freedom with a denial of middle knowledge allows God to be much less implicated in the occurrence of natural evil. This gives some of the familiar theistic replies to the problem, such as Hick's soul-making theodicy, enhanced plausibility.

The notion of transubstantiation has not fared well in analytic circles despite the revival of interest in scholastic philosophy. Common charges are that it leads to scepticism, does violence to the Aristotelian account of change and fails to achieve the purpose for which it was introduced by Catholic thinkers, namely, to account for the supposed real presence of Christ on the altar during the celebration of the Eucharist. In this paper I will argue that at least some of these objections rest on misconstruing the logical form of expressions like ‘There is bread on the altar’ and ‘…is the blood of Christ’.

For many philosophical thinkers down through the centuries, the notion of a creation out of sheer nothing has been found to be quite unintelligible. Nevertheless the idea of creation preserves an important insight and needs to be freed from the difficulties of this traditional formulation. Alfred North Whitehead has offered an alternative theory of creation worth exploring: each individual actuality creates itself out of prior creative acts. God then serves to direct this creative process.

This article brings mathematical realism and theological realism into conversation. It outlines a realist ontology that characterizes abstract mathematical objects as inaccessible to the senses, non-spatiotemporal, and acausal. Mathematical realists are challenged to explain how we can know such objects. The article reviews some promising responses to this challenge before considering the view that the object of theology also possesses the three characteristic features of abstract objects, and consequently may be known through the same methods that yield knowledge of mathematical objects.

Divine omnipotence entails that God can choose to do evil (even though He will not) by taking up a human nature. In showing others by way of example how temptations are to be overcome, His exposure to evil desires in such circumstances is consistent with moral perfection. The view that ‘God has the greatest power and is morally perfect simpliciter’, is religiously more adequate than ‘God has great power and is essentially morally perfect’. The essentiality of other divine attributes to God is discussed, and rebuttals to Anselmian arguments are offered.

This essay is a revision of my earlier effort to overturn the prevailing view that there is merely a ‘family resemblance’ between religions. A religion is a system of practices rationalized by beliefs according to which the practices place the practitioner in a relation-of-value to a supermundane reality so grand that it can figure centrally in the satisfaction of substantial human needs. A ‘supermundane reality’ is one that exceeds the mundane world revealed by sense perception. The theory generates a useful taxonomy of practices and theories closely related to, but substantially different from, religions.

Next to the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness is the most prominent single argument for atheism in the current literature. Most advocates of the problem target what can be termed ‘generic theism’, theism abstracted from any particular religious tradition. Correspondingly most replies are made from the perspective of generic theism. While understandable, this common structure to the dialectic can obscure possible replies centred on the doctrinal resources of particular religions. I argue here that Christian soteriology provides a good reason why God might refrain from making His existence rationally indubitable to all.

Open theists have generally affirmed that God exercises general sovereignty, seeking to achieve an overall providential goal related to our freely choosing to love Him, though the path to that goal is uncertain. This understanding of God's relationship to the world has the implication that God risks failure in achieving His purpose, since His success ultimately depends upon our free choices. In this paper, I first outline some concerns about the risks involved in God's exercising general sovereignty, and then explain how an alternative ‘hopeful’ view alleviates these concerns. I conclude that the hopeful view is a promising alternative that deserves further exploration.

The evil-god challenge holds that theism is highly symmetrical to the evil-god hypothesis and thus it is not more reasonable to accept one rather than the other. But, since it is not reasonable to accept the evil-god hypothesis, it is not reasonable to accept theism. This article will primarily focus on defending the challenge from two recent objections which hold that it follows from the nature of moral motivation that theism is intrinsically much more likely to be true than the evil-god hypothesis. However, I will also argue that there is a different intrinsic asymmetry between the hypotheses which favours theism.

Which form of belief-less religion should the agnostic prefer: non-doxasticism which substitutes belief with some weaker cognitive attitude, or fictionalism which standardly treats religious life as a game of make-believe? I argue for non-doxasticism due to its ability to handle the problems associated with fictionalism. However, in an argument for exclusive availability I go further, denying even that the agnostic has a choice: if she has a religious pro-attitude only non-doxasticism is rationally available to her. I also address and reject a recent argument by Finlay Malcolm to the effect that non-doxasticism cannot be properly distinguished from fictionalism.

This paper provides a methodological schema for interpreting Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion that supports the traditional thesis that Philo represents Hume's views on religious belief. To understand the complexity of Hume's ‘naturalism’ and his assessment of religious belief, it is essential to grasp the manner in which Philo articulates a consistently Humean position in the Dialogues.

One of the most important recent developments in the discussion of Kierkegaard's ethics is an interpretation defended, in different forms, by Philip Quinn and Stephen Evans. Both argue that a divine-command theory of moral obligation (DCT) is to be found in Works of Love. Against this view, I argue that, despite significant overlap between DCT and the view of moral obligation found in Works of Love, there is at least one essential difference between the two: the former, but not the latter, is committed to the claim that, necessarily, p is morally obligatory only if God commands that p.

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 doctrine of Middle Knowledge presupposes that conditionals of freedom (statements of the form ‘If A were circumstances C, he would perform X’) can be true. Such conditions are, where true, not true in virtue of the truth of any categorical proposition. Nor can their truth be modelled in terms of comparative similarity of possible worlds, because the structure of possible worlds is a necessary one, whereas the connection between antecedent and consequent of a conditional of freedom is a contingent one. Lewis and Stalmaker are committed to ‘conditional fatalism’, the view that things only would go a certain way if they would have to go that way. Although commitment to conditional fatalism does not itself import a commitment to fatalism, it is hard to find a separate motivation for it.

Logical positivism and its derivatives cast a sustained philosophical shadow over religious faith and theological reflection. Any number of issues continue to surface in explicit and subdued forms, all of them relating to the status of religious beliefs. In fairly recent years, much fruitful discussion is dependent on the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's last notes, collected in On Certainty, are still largely unmined by those wishing to gain clarity about religious belief. It turns out, however, that these pages promise to be among the most helpful. In what follows, therefore, there is first offered a summary of the dominant themes of On Certainty – Wittgenstein's critique of G. E. Moore and his treatment of Moore's truisms of common sense. By a painstaking analysis, Wittgenstein shows that the truths defended by Moore are among any number of other fundamental propositions which have an extraordinary logical role in our language and judgements about the world. Next, partly by reference to Wittgenstein's lectures on religious belief and other collected notes, it is argued that many beliefs in Christianity share significant logical features with those fundamental propositions. Not least is the fact that, like the latter but unlike scientific hypotheses, Christian beliefs are removed from the ordinary traffic of verification and falsification. Despite the likenesses, notice is also taken of various dissimilarities which further set the peculiarity of Christian articles of faith into bold relief. The disparities, however, do not impugn the logically fundamental role which those beliefs have in the language and lives of those who embrace the faith.

According to the free-will defence, the exercise of free will by creatures is of such value that God is willing to allow the existence of evil which comes from the misuse of free will. A well-known objection holds that the exercise of free will is compatible with determinism and thus, if God exists, God could have predetermined exactly how the will would be exercised; God could even have predetermined that free will would be exercised sinlessly. Thus, it is held, the free-will defence cannot be used as a partial account of why God should have allowed evil to exist. I investigate this objection using Kripke's apparatus for treating modalities and natural kinds to explore the nature of the incompatibilism required by the free-will defence. I show why the objection fails even if the standard arguments for compatibilism are acceptable. This is because the modality involved in the incompatibilism needed by the free-will defence differs from the modality involved in the compatibilism that is supported by standard compatibilist arguments. Finally, an argument is sketched for a variety of incompatibilism of the kind needed by the free-will defence.

Up to now, a very large majority of work in the religious philosophy of life's meaning has presumed a conception of God that is Abrahamic. In contrast, in this article I critically discuss some of the desirable and undesirable facets of Traditional African Religion's salient conceptions of God as they bear on meaning in life. Given an interest in a maximally meaningful life, and supposing meaning would come from fulfilling God's purpose for us, would it be reasonable to prefer God as characteristically conceived by African philosophers of religion to exist instead of the Abrahamic conception of God? At this stage of enquiry, I answer that, in respect of the range of people to whom God's purpose would apply, a more African view of God would plausibly offer a greater meaning, but that, concerning what the content of God's purpose would be, the Abrahamic view appears to offer a greater one. I conclude by reflecting on this mixed verdict and by suggesting respects in which non-purposive facets of the African and Abrahamic conceptions of God could also have implications for life's meaning.

Philip Kitcher has recently proposed a form of ‘cosmopolitan secularism’ which he suggests could enable the members of a future secular society to continue to access and benefit from the moral and existential resources of the world's religions. I criticize this proposal by appeal to contemporary work on the role of emotion and practice in religious commitment. Using the work of John Cottingham and Mark Wynn, two objections are offered to the cosmopolitan secularists' claim that the moral resources of a religion could be both preserved by and employed within a secular society whose members lack emotional commitment to and practical engagement with the religions in question. I conclude that, pace Kitcher, cosmopolitan secularism cannot fulfil its promise to preserve the moral resources of religion in the absence of genuine religious traditions and communities.