The pluralistic approach to religions has come in for some serious criticism in recent writings. I shall consider two examples in particular. The first is the book Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, edited by Gavin D'Costa. This is a collection of essays offered in response to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, edited by John Hick and Paul Knitter. The second example is an essay by Paul Morris, ‘Judaism and Pluralism: the Price of “Religious Freedom”’, in Religious Pluralism and Unbelief, edited by Ian Hamnett.

The paper seeks to address three objections to pilgrimage practices – they are tied to superstitious beliefs (except where they are seen as simply an aid to the imagination), imply a crude experiential or emotional understanding of the nature of faith, and rest upon a primitive conception of divine localizability. In responding to these objections, I argue that the religious significance of places is not reducible to their contribution to religious imagination, experience or understanding. In this sense, relationship to God is not just a matter of thought, but of location.

Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder suggest that it is possible for an omnipotent being, Jove, to create randomly a world from a continuum of ever more perfect possible worlds. They then go on to argue that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable despite creating a surpassable world. I raise a number of problems for the view that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable when he creates (randomly or not) a surpassable world.

Theists typically think it appropriate to pray to God in the hope that He will thereby intervene in affairs. On the other hand, such prayer is often held to be quite inappropriate for pantheists; a view endorsed by many pantheists themselves. This paper argues for the exact opposite of these positions. It is maintained not only that pantheism can make sense of petitionary prayer but that, despite initial appearances to the contrary, classical theism can not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected by the scholar. From Plato and Fontenelle to Schelling and Bultmann, philosophers and theologians have proposed innumerable definitions of myth. But all of these have one thing in common: they are based on the analysis of Greek mythology. Now, for a historian of religions this choice is not a very happy one. It is true that only in Greece did myth inspire and guide epic poetry, tragedy and comedy, as well as the plastic arts; but it is no less true that it is especially in Greek culture that myth was submitted to a long and penetrating analysis, from which it emerged radically ‘de-mythicised’. If in every European language the word ‘myth’ denotes a ‘fiction’, it is because the Greeks proclaimed it to be such twenty-five centuries ago. What is even more serious for an historian of religion: we do not know a single Greek myth within its ritual context. Of course this is not the case with the paleo-Oriental and Asiatic religions; it is especially not the case with the so-called ‘primitive’ religions. As is well known, a living myth is always connected with a cult, inspiring and justifying a religious behaviour. None of this of course means that Greek myth should not figure in an investigation of the mythical phenomenon. But it would seem unwise to begin our kind of inquiry by the study of Greek documents, and even more so to restrict it to such documents. The mythology which informs Homer, Hesiod and the tragic poets represents already a selection and an interpretation of archaic materials, some of which had become almost unintelligible. In short, our best chance of understanding the structure of mythical thought is to study cultures where myth is a ‘living thing’, where it constitutes the very ground of the religious life; in other words, where myth, far from indicating a fiction, is considered to reveal the truth par excellence.

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.

Many theists of a traditional bent have been bothered by the apparent tension between God's essential omnipotence and his essential moral goodness. Nelson Pike draws attention to the conflict between these two attributes in his article ‘Omnipotence and God's Ability to Sin’, and there have been many attempts to respond to it since that time. Most of these responses argue that the essential omnipotence and essential goodness of God are not logically incompatible, so that the traditional conception of God is not incoherent; I think the arguments have been largely successful. However, some theists have found the typical responses to Pike less than convincing, and are tempted to surrender the claim that God has moral perfection essentially in favour of the more modest claim that God is morally perfect in the actual world (and cannot gain or lose this perfection) though in some possible worlds God is morally defective. I argue in this paper that this fall-back position is incoherent. More accurately, I argue that a necessary being who is essentially omniscient and essentially omnipotent (a ‘NOO’ being) cannot be contingently morally perfect or contingently morally defective. Any such being is either essentially good or essentially evil. Since the latter alternative seems unattractive, I argue that theists should embrace the essential moral perfection of God.

In ‘Belief-In and Belief in God’ (Religious Studies, 28, 1992), J. N. Williams suggests that belief in God cannot be rational unless one has rational beliefs that God exists. While agreeing with his conclusion (though not with his statement of it), I disagree at almost every step with his method of arriving at it. In particular I suggest that Williams goes astray concerning the dual aspect of belief in, the nature of performatives, the arousal of belief states, and the correct account of belief in God.

God knows or hath ideas; but His ideas are not convey'd to Him by sense, as ours are. Your not distinguishing where there is so manifest a difference, makes you fancy you see an absurdity where there is none.

Contemporary commentators on Hume's essay, ‘Of miracles’ have increasingly tended to argue that Hume never intended to suggest that testimonial evidence must always be insufficient to justify belief in a miracle. This is in marked contrast to earlier commentators who interpreted Hume as intending to demonstrate that testimonial evidence is incapable in principle of ever establishing rational belief in a miracle. In this article I argue that this traditional interpretation is the correct one.

In his book The Existence of God, Professor Swinburne develops a cumulative case for theism. As part of this case, he presents two forms of the argument from design, one form taking as its premise the fact of spatial order, the other proceeding from the fact of temporal order. In this paper, I shall concern myself with the second of these arguments; that is, in Swinburne's terms, I shall concern myself with the argument from regularities of succession.

The Christian doctrine of the Atonement has been interpreted in several ways. In Responsibility and Atonement, Richard Swinburne offers us a version of the sacrificial account of Christ's redemptive work. This version claims that in the life and death of Jesus we have a gift of great and fitting value, which God himself has made available to us, and which we can in turn offer to God as reparation and penance for our sins. My paper has two main parts. In the first I shall argue that his account is conceptually incoherent; in the second that it is morally flawed. I then briefly suggest that the exemplary theory can capture, better than can the reparation theory, those features which Swinburne believes to be desirable in any account of the Atonement. I take Swinburne's account as my target because it is the best modern exposition of the theory, but my argument is intended to have wider significance.

I have argued that since (i) intentional agency requires intention-acquisition, (ii) intention-acquisition implies a sense of an open future, and (iii) a sense of an open future is incompatible with complete foreknowledge, then (iv) no agent can be omniscient. Alternatively, an omniscient being is omni-impotent. David Hunt continues to oppose this reasoning, most recently, in Religious Studies 32 (March 1996). It is increasingly clear that the debate turns on larger issues concerning necessity and knowledge, but let me here offer a few comments in defence of my position.

Although an immense amount has been written about miracles by philosophers – and theologicans of a philosophical turn of mind – to the point where no one wants to read any more on the subject, there are still two very good reasons for writing about miracles: (1) the concept of a miracle commonly employed simply will not do, so that most of the talk of discovering whether or not some event is miraculous is beside the point; (2) the proper way of looking at what a miracle is involves one in clarifying the very perplexing notions of agency and explanation, and both of these notions are interesting in their own right.