bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Moral Autonomy and Divine Commands
Authors: Coulter Chan L.
Published: October 2008

A Divine Command Theory of Ethics is sometimes rejected on the grounds that such a theory is incompatible with human moral autonomy. If we assume that human beings are morally autonomous, the argument goes, then no human being can be obligated to perform any action simply because God (or any other agent) has commanded it. The incompatibility between a Divine Command Ethic and moral autonomy is a corollary of an argument James Rachels uses to deny the very existence of God. He argues that any being which can be denoted by the term God must be a being worthy of worship. But, in order to be a being worthy of worship it must be such that other beings owe it unconditional obedience. Since human beings are morally autonomous and cannot owe unconditional obedience to any other being, nothing can meet the criterion for being God. Hence, there is no possible state of affairs which includes both a being worthy of worship and morally autonomous human agents.
Moral Regeneration and Divine Aid in Kant
Authors: Michalson G. E.
Published: October 2008

Kant is often viewed as the exemplar of the Enlightenment tendency to reduce religion to morality, to eliminate religious appeals to mystery or to supernatural action, and to insist – in Kant's own words – that weourselvesmust make ourselves ‘into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil’, we are to become. His entire philosophy in some ways epitomizes what Hans Blumenberg has called the ‘project of self–assertion’, the ‘essence of which [can be] formulated as the “program of antidivine self–deification”’. For if the centerpiece of Kant's philosophical vision is human autonomy, and if the implicit point of a Kantian view of morality and religion is to equate salvation with the individual achievement of virtue, then there seems to be little role left for a heteronomous grace or divine act to play.
Is Kierkegaard an Irrationalist? Reason, Paradox, and Faith
Authors: Evans C. S.
Published: October 2008

If some philosophers had not existed, the history of philosophy would have to invent them. After all, what would the introduction to philosophy teacher do without good old Berkeley, the notorious denier of common sense, or Hume, the infamous sceptic. In some cases, in fact, philosophershavebeen invented by the history of philosophy. I don't mean to suggest that historians of philosophy have actually altered the past by bringing into being real flesh and blood philosophers. Rather, I mean to say that the textbook caricatures of famous philosophers are often a creation of the tradition, encrusted layers of hoary myths and legends which often hold the actual philosopher prisoner, the myths of Berkeley and Hume which I just alluded to being excellent examples.
Eternal Loneliness: Art and Religion in Kierkegaard and Zen
Authors: Pattison George
Published: October 2008

When we compare a thinker as complex and many–sided as Søren Kierkegaard with a cultural phenomenon as significant as Zen Buddhism it is unlikely that we will be able to come up with any simple formula by which to summarize the results of the comparison. But the value of such comparative studies need not in any case lie in the conclusions we reach but in the intrinsic interest and importance of the material itself, in the questions and insights raised by both similarities and dissimilarities. All this is still true if we confine the field of comparison to a very specific area, as here, where we are concerned with the relationship between art and religion in Kierkegaard and Zen. For this is of course no marginal issue: the distinction between the aesthetic and the religious is fundamental to the whole structure of Kierkegaard's authorship while the arts provde one of the main manifestations of the spirit of Zen. Our line of enquiry may be narrow but it takes us straight to the heart of the matter and the questions which it raises are crucial to the overall assessment of both Kierkegaard and Zen and of the relationship between them.
Irresistibility, Epistemic Warrant and Religious Belief
Authors: Lints Richard
Published: October 2008

It has been widely argued that beliefs in general are not under direct voluntary control. It is not the case that we can by decision of the will (however construed) decide what to believe or what to refrain from believing in many ordinary instances of believing. Doxastic voluntarism now seems a dubious doctrine at best, regardless of how emphatic Descartes and other traditional epistemologists seemed to be in their support of the doctrine.
Manichaean Responses to Zoroastrianism. (Politico-Religious Controversies in Iran, Past to Present:3)
Authors: Scott D. A.
Published: October 2008

Justice will once (more) take the place which the Magians are keeping now, for it is they who lord it over the world.

(ManichaeanHomily, fourth century)
Natural Theology and the Concept of Perfection in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz
Authors: Webb Mark O.
Published: October 2008

One of the hallmarks of the early modern rationalists was their confidence that a great deal of metaphysics could be done by purely a priori reasoning. They thought so at least partly because they inherited via Descartes Anselm's confidence that the existence of God could be established by purely a priori reasoning in an ontological argument. They also inherited a Thomistic and scholastic confidence that the concept of God as supremely perfect being, if subjected to serious and deep analysis, would yield sound doctrine. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all three took it that they had in their stock of ideas an idea of God sufficiently clear and detailed that a little analytic work could produce real metaphysical results, not only about God himself, but also about the universe in which they found themselves (for Spinoza, these turned out to be the same thing). Though they start with what purport to be ideas of the same God, they get radically different results in their analyses.
The Use of Symbols in Religion from the Perspective of Analytical Psychology
Authors: McGlashan A. R.
Published: October 2008

The consecration of Dr David Jenkins as Bishop of Durham, and many of his public utterances before and since, have concentrated public attention on the resurrection of Christ. What happened on the first Easter Day? Can we ever know for sure? If not, is that a bad or a good thing? What do Christians mean by their credal professions of faith? Do we, must we, all mean more or less the same thing when we repeat them? If that mysterious but constitutive event was not just a conjuring trick with bones, what else may it have been?

What is central to the debate around such questions is the symbolic character of the resurrection story. That is to say, the resurrection was not just a dead person coming to life, although it may include that. It concerns also who the dead person was, and what his coming to life again might be believed to effect. So the resurrection story is the symbol, and the meaning to which it points is what is symbolized. A symbol is an event, act, story, object which essentially points beyond itself to such ulterior meaning, and also participates in the reality to which it points, according to Tillich's definition. The question at issue in this debate centres on the relation between the symbol and the symbolized. One extreme view tends to affirm the literal facticity of the symbolic event, and to assume that its meaning is ipso facto incontrovertibly established. The other extreme regards the precise nature of the event as irrecoverable, and as anyway irrelevant to the validity of the symbol's meaning.
Non Posse Peccare
Authors: Beld Antonie Van Den
Published: October 2008

In a Dutch weekly it was recently stated that man's moral powers are overestimated in the christian faith. The proponent of this belief, the Dutch–American philologist and philosopher Staal seems to me to be closer to the truth of this matter than his distinguished German colleague Nietzsche. The latter used to fascinate me as a young student with his devastating criticisms of christian culture and the christian view of life. According to Nietzsche, the christian religion has not too high, but rather too low a view of mankind: it wanted man to be ugly and evil; in this way it has succeeded in making man so. The insignificance, ugliness and sinfulness of man is the outcome of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who is being told again and again how insignificant, bad and sinful he is, will end up believing it and behave accordingly. A not implausible theory, I thought at that time. However, as I see the matter now, I would support Staal rather than Nietzsche (supposing that my choice would be restricted to them). The christian faith has an optimistic view of man. Does it overestimate him? Does it attribute imaginary moral powers to him? Does it demand the morally impossible? A positive answer to these questions is not unreasonable if one does not want to go beyond a secular, evolutionist or sociobiological under-standing of man and does not take into consideration the affirmations of the Church.
Truth and the Diversity of Religions
Authors: Ward Keith
Published: October 2008

I will be concerned with only one problem about truth which is raised by the diversity of religions which exist in the world. The problem is this: many religions claim to state truths about the nature of the universe and human destiny which are important or even necessary for human salvation and ultimate well-being. Many of these truths seem to he incompatible; yet there is no agreed method for deciding which are to he accepted; and equally intelligent, informed, virtuous and holy people belong to different faiths. It seems, therefore, that a believing member of any one tradition is compelled to regard all other traditions as holding false beliefs and therefore as not leading to salvation. Since each faith forms a minority of the world's population, all religious believers thus seem committed to saying that most intelligent, virtuous and spiritually devoted people cannot know the truth or attain salvation. This is a problem, because it is in tension with the belief, held by many traditions, that the supremely real being is concerned for the salvation of all rational creatures. How can this he so if, through no fault of their own, most creatures cannot come to know the truth and thereby attain salvation?
World Religions and World Orders
Authors: Clark Stephen R. L.
Published: October 2008

There are good reasons for being suspicious of the very concept of ‘a religion’, let alone a ‘world religion’. It may be useful for a hospital administrator to know a patient's ‘religion’ – as Protestant or Church of England or Catholic or Buddhist – but such labels clearly do little more than identify the most suitable chaplain, and connote groupings in the vast and confusing region of ‘religious thought and practice’ that are of very different ranks. By any rational, genealogical taxonomy ‘Protestant’, ‘Anglican’, ‘Catholic’ connote species, genera or families within Christianity, which is in turn a taxon within the multivariant tradition traced back to Abraham. ‘Buddhism’ includes as many variants as would ‘Abrahamism’. Most Abrahamists, traditionally, have been theists, but it is difficult not to suspect that Marxist socialism is an atypical (and probably non-viable) variant which has inherited a linear view of time, a contest between the chosen agents of justice and the doomed powers-that-be, and the prospect of a future in which ‘there shall be no more sea’.
Anthropomorphic Concepts of God
Authors: Schoen Edward L.
Published: October 2008

Three of the most venerable objections to anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine are traceable to Xenophanes and his critique of the early Greek gods. Though suitably revised, these ancient criticisms have persisted over the centuries, plaguing various religious communities, particularly those of classical Christian commitment. Xenophanes complained that anthropomorphism leads to unseemly characterizations, noting that both over the ages, the list of unseemly characteristics has expanded somewhat.
Faith and the Possibility of Private Meaning
Authors: Gurrey C. S.
Published: October 2008

That there is a personal, or private, dimension to religious and moral experience is obvious enough. On the face of things we may feel driven even to attach a sense which is essentially personal to the content of propositions relating to those areas of experience. ‘I know what I mean by what he says’, one might say. Or, it might be felt that there is a sense in which each man has a God who is uniquely his own. Just how far can we push this idea of the irreducibly personal meaning, the necessarily individual content to such a moral or religious concept? Can we, in the end, give it an acceptable and unequivocal logical form?
‘If there is a God, any Experience which seems to be of God, will be Genuine’
Authors: Levine Michael P.
Published: October 2008

In The Existence of God Richard Swinburne argues that ‘if there is a God, any experience which seems to be of God, will be genuine – will be of God.’ On the face of it this claim of the essential veridicality of any religious experience, given the existence of God, is incredible. Consider what is being claimed by looking at a particularly dramatic example – but one that is well within the purview of Swinburne's claim. The ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ who murdered at least thirteen women, claimed to hear voices telling him to kill. He took these voices to be divine. While it is easy enough to suspect the killer's sanity, it is not so easy to doubt his sincerity. Yet since Swinburne claims that God probably exists, he is committed to the view that the Ripper had a series of genuine religious experiences – so much for the arduous preparations sometime taken as necessary for a ‘vision’ of God.
Providence, Freedom, and Human Destiny
Authors: Talbott Thomas
Published: October 2008

According to some theists, God will never completely destroy moral evil or banish it from his creation entirely; instead, he will eventually confine moral evil to a specific region of his creation, a region known as hell, and those condemned to hell, having no hope of escape from it, will live out eternity in a state of estrangement from God as well as from each other. Let us call that the traditional doctrine of hell. Elsewhere I have argued that any form of theism which includes such a doctrine, even one that tries to preserve consistency by denying the universal love of God, is in fact logically inconsistent. But moderately conservative theists, as I have called them, have an argument for the traditional doctrine that some have found convincing, one that emphasizes libertarian free will. The argument is this. Because God is perfectly loving, he wills the good for every created person and wills the redemption of all who have fallen into evil; but because he has also given his loved ones the gift of freedom and some of them in fact exercise their freedom to reject him forever, it is simply not within his power, even as an omnipotent being, to redeem all of those who fall into evil. According to moderately conservative theists, therefore, the following hypothesis, which I shall call the Rejection Hypothesis (RH), is at least possibly true:

(RH) Some persons will, despite God's best efforts to save them, freely and irrevocably reject God and thus separate themselves from God forever.
Hume on Divine Amorality
Authors: Walls Jerry L.
Published: October 2008

David Hume's philosophy is notoriously naturalistic. It is an attempt to give an account of man and his world relying only on evidence which can be gleaned from sense observation and introspection. Whatever can be inferred from this evidence is a proper philosophical conclusion.
Jewish Faith and the Holocaust
Authors: Cohn-Sherbok Dan
Published: October 2008

Throughout their long history suffering has been the hallmark of the Jewish people. Driven from their homeland, buffeted from country to country and plagued by persecutions, Jews have been rejected, despised and led as a lamb to the slaughter. The Holocaust is the most recent chapter in this tragic record of events. The Third Reich's system of murder squads, concentration camps and killing centres eliminated nearly 6 million Jews; though Jewish communities had previously been decimated, such large scale devastation profoundly affected the Jewish religious consciousness. For many Jews it has seemed impossible to reconcile the concept of a loving, compassionate and merciful God with the terrible events of the Nazi regime. A number of important Jewish thinkers have grappled with traditional beliefs about God in the light of such suffering, but in various ways their responses are inadequate. If the Jewish faith is to survive, Holocaust theology will need to incorporate a belief in the Afterlife in which the righteous of Israel who died in the death camps will receive their due reward.
Time, Actuality and Omniscience
Authors: Leftow Brian
Published: October 2008

Many traditional theists have said that

(i) God is propositionally omniscient,

i.e. knows all truths. Many traditional theists also hold that

(2) God is timeless.

That is, these theists hold that though God exists, there is no time at which He exists, and He does not exist earlier or later than anything. Some recent philosophers, among them Arthor Prior, Robert Coburn, Norman Kretz mann, Nicholas Wolterstorfl Richard Gale and Patrick Grim, have argued that

(3) There are truths to whose expression ‘now’ is essential, and that (1)–(3) compose an inconsistent set of propositions. These writers argue that due to the semantics of ‘now’, a timeless God cannot know truths to whose expression ‘now’ is essential. To know a truth, it is claimed, one must be able to mentally token a proposition expressing what one knows. To token a truth to whose expression ‘now’ is essential, one must token ‘now’. ‘Now’ and relevantly similar terms (such as tensed verbs) inter alia locate those who use them in time: if one says truly that it is now 3 p.m., it follows that one exists at 3 p.m. So a timeless being cannot use ‘now’ and relevantly similar terms, and so (it is claimed) cannot know truths for whose expression ‘now’ and its ilk are required.
Creation, Creativity and Necessary Being
Authors: Hughes Martin
Published: October 2008

Can the ontological and cosmological arguments (O and C) for the existence of God, whose complex relationship was discussed by Kant, achieve more together than they can achieve apart? Yes, but what they achieve is not necessarily a proof of monotheism.
David Hume'sDialogues Concerning Natural Religion:Otherness in History and in Text
Authors: John Robert , Manning Sheffler
Published: October 2008

In the autumn of 1915 at Princeton, the graduate student, Charles Hendel, and the professor, Norman Kemp Smith, went for a walk. Hendel thought the time auspicious to announce his desire to write a dissertation on Rousseau. As happens not infrequently between an adviser and a student, Kemp Smith attempted to dissuade his student from his intention and advised him to look into David Hume'sDialogues Concerning Natural Religion, instead. The professor noted that a ‘deadlock’ had long existed between those who thought the sceptic, Philo, spoke for Hume, and those who thought the theistic views of Cleanthes most nearly echoed Hume's true opinions on religion. Perhaps through researching the problem, Kemp Smith suggested, Hendel could ‘resolve that impasse and establish Hume's position on the religious question’.
Certain hope
Authors: Griffiths A. Phillips
Published: October 2008

In his recent article1 Stewart Sutherland rightly and trenchantly criticizes some accounts of hope which ignore, or radically misrepresent, how it is conceived in religious contexts. The most surprising, to me, is Chesterton's, that hope is ‘the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate’. Surprising, not so much for its content as for its source. However, this particular example could be of one who would risk giving scandal for the sake of wit; what he could have had in mind is that ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us’ (Rom. viii. 18; cf. John xvi. 33: ‘… you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer.’). Sutherland also makes clear the unhelpfulness (in this context, not the one they had in mind) of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ analysts' account of the concept; not least because it is given without reference to the religious concept, and often is irrelevant to the notion of hope ‘in its proper conceptual surroundings’.
Understanding the Question: Wittgenstein on Faith and Meaning
Authors: Eisenstein Gabe
Published: October 2008

The role of belief in religion is always the subject of the greatest misunderstandings, as well as some of the subtlest meditations. The student of religion may be drawn to those direct expressions of spiritual insight with regard to which belief seems abstract and superfluous; and yet when one wants to indicate the religious attitude, the commitment to ‘something higher’, as a fact of personal significance, few notions seem more apt than belief or faith. The peculiar logic of religious faith is that unlike beliefs which are held in lieu of verified knowledge, faith is often valued precisely because it is faith, and does not concern the objectively verifiable.
Crossed Fingers and Praying Hands: Remarks on Religious Belief and Superstition
Authors: Ray R. J.
Published: October 2008

Picture the following scene. A minister takes communion to one of her elderly home-bound members. When she arrives she is met by her parishioner and two visiting friends. She invites both visitors to partake of communion with her and the parishioner. One woman happily agrees to do so. The other woman declines by giving a mini-sermon explaining that because she feels unworthy to partake of the Lord's Supper she would be guilty of sin if she did so. Furthermore, if she took communion in this unworthy state God would cause her to be sick. After communion, the minister inquires if she might wash the communion cups. The woman who participated in the sacrament with the pastor and church member asks if she might perform this function. But then she hesitates and asks with a sense of temerity, “Is it alright if I do so?” “I mean,” she continues, “may be I'm not supposed to wash them. They are holy cups and my hands are so tainted with sin. It might be wrong for me to handle them.” Finally, the shut-in who was the original object of the visit in the first place tells her young, and by now bewildered, pastor, “You know. Last month when you brought me communion my hip was killing me. After you served me the elements the pain just went away. I know the sacrament healed me.” The pastor offers a final prayer not knowing if her words will be heard as a prayer to God or as an incantation or spiritual good-luck charm.
The Possibility of Reincarnation
Authors: Noonan Harold W.
Published: October 2008

Man has always hoped to survive his bodily death, and it is a central tenet of many religions that such survival is a reality. It has been supposed by many that one form such survival might take is reincarnation in another body. Subscribers to this view include Pythagoras, Plato sometimes, and a large number of Eastern thinkers. Other thinkers have, of course, disputed that reincarnation is a fact, and some have even denied that it is a possibility. But seldom has it been claimed by its opponents that reincarnation is a logical impossibility.
Personal Identity and Rebirth
Authors: Stoeber Michael
Published: October 2008

Western philosophers are generally very unsympathetic to the notion of reincarnation, especially the idea of rebirth in another body in this world. This paper will argue that retributive rebirth as it is traditionally understood in Hindu thought involves serious problems given the ambiguousness of personal identity in the conception, difficulties which are born out in a moral tenuousness and which bring the reasonableness of the belief into question. However, though this conception of rebirth is the culturally and historically dominant version in Indian thought, it is not the sole conception. The ‘soul-making’ version I will develop and defend in this paper does not overcome the ambiguity associated with personal identity in the retributive version, but it nevertheless reasonably overrides the problems retributive rebirth encounters in such an association. And though soul-making rebirth is quite different in tone and in emphasis from the traditionally dominant retributive version, it can be found in varying degrees in certain Hindu philosophies, most vividly perhaps in Aurobindo Ghose. Moreover, this conception is not exclusive to Hinduism and is compatible even with some Christian theologies.
In Defence of Reincarnation
Authors: Daniels Charles B.
Published: October 2008

In ‘Reincarnation and Relativized Identity’1 J. J. MacIntosh argues that reincarnation is impossible. I wish to make a slightly backhanded defence of reincarnation by showing that MacIntosh's argument does not succeed. I do not follow his recipe for defence of reincarnation exactly:
The Development of Otto's Thought 1898–1917: From Luther's View of the Holy Spirit to the Holy
Authors: Minney Robin
Published: October 2008

The purpose of this paper is to outline the developments in the thinking of Rudolf Otto, as far as possible through his theology, philosophy, psychology and phenomenology. The fact that Otto's interests took him into so many fields at once suggests serious breaks and inconsistencies in his work. This paper, however, will argue for a consistency in his thought and development. To achieve this requires an appreciation of the close connection he felt to exist between his philosophy and psychology, the theoretical and the empirical. We know that Otto was strongly influenced by the philosophy of J. Fr. Fries. Yet it is by no means necessary to agree either with Fries or with what Otto made of Fries' system in order to trace continuity. We simply need to understand Otto's development in the context of the time.
Mansel's Agnosticism
Authors: Fitzgerald Timothy
Published: October 2008

Nobody is likely to claim that the name of Henry Longueville Mansel is an important one in contemporary Anglican theology. During the 130 years since he gave his Bampton Lectures in 1858 his work has been only sporadically reviewed. But he deserves more than this. As the title of his lecture – The Limits of Religious Thought – suggests, Mansel was partly responsible for bringing the philosophy of Kant into British religious thinking; and the problems he faced in trying to make a concept of regulative truth consistent with orthodox Anglican doctrine make his intellectual dilemma of unusual interest to the modern reader.
Blanshard's Ethics of Belief and Metaphysical Postulates
Authors: George Phillips Winfred
Published: October 2008

In Brand Blanshard's major defence of reason in religion, Reason and Belief, he criticizes both Roman Catholics and Protestants for advocating contradictory theological doctrines and for believing beyond what the evidence supports. Claiming belief to be an ethical matter, with one morally responsible for one's religious beliefs, he holds that one is morally obligated in such metaphysical matters to believe only what the evidence warrants. Blanshard finds that religious beliefs typically fail to meet the standard of this ethics of belief, and thus his ethics appears inhospitable to religious belief.
Why didn't God Create the World Sooner?
Authors: Leftow Brian
Published: October 2008

The Western monotheisms agree that (1) God has created the universe, and that (2) at some point in the past, the universe began to exist. Thus they believe that (1) and (2) are compatible. Yet one can argue that (1) and (2) are incompatible, so that the Western theistic picture of creation is inconsistent. Augustine's Confessions quotes a famous argument that (1) entails~(2):

What was God doing before he made heaven and earth? … if (God) did nothing, why did he not continue in this way … forever …? If any new motion arise in God, or a new will is formed in him, to the end of establishing creation which he had never established previously …, then (God) is not truly … eternal. Yet if it were God's sempiternal will for the creature to exist, why is not the creature sempiternal also?

This argument suggests that if God has created the universe, then for any t, God must have been acting before t, and therefore the universe must have existed before t. But if for any t the universe existed before t, then the universe had no first moment of existence, and so (2) is false.
Residual Natural Evil and Anthropic Reasoning
Authors: McLean Murdith
Published: October 2008

Bad things happen; and not just to bad people, but with apparent indifference to the moral or other qualities of the victims. For the theist who believes that the world is created and governed by an all-powerful and perfectly good God, this is a notorious difficulty. In fact the problem of evil is surely the most persuasive consideration available in favour of atheism.
Divine Omniscience, Immutability, Aseity and Human Free Will
Authors: Brown Robert F.
Published: October 2008

If classical Western theism is correct that God's timeless omniscience is compatible with human free will, then it is incoherent to hold that this God can in any strict sense be immutable anda seas well as omniscient. That is my thesis. ‘Classical theism’ shall refer here to the tradition of philosophical theology centring on such mainstream authors as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. ‘Divine omniscience’ shall mean that the eternal God knows all events as a timeless observer of them. ‘Human free will’ shall mean that human beings are, at least sometimes, self-determining agents who make choices not decisively caused to be what they are by external or internal factors other than the free willing itself – choices that these agents have the capacity and the freedom to make differently than they do. Except where stipulated otherwise, ‘divine immutability’ shall ‘mean that God is neither subject to, nor capable of, change in being, knowing, or willing, since God is immune to external influences, and without internal needs, of the sorts that might give rise to such change. Finally, ‘aseity’ shall be used to underline the divine immunity to external influences, since a being that is whollya seor self-caused (is ‘pure act’ in the Thomistic sense), cannot be open to such influences, cannot be made to be what or how it is by anything other than itself.
Reply: Bagger and the Ghosts of GAA
Authors: Forman Robert K. C.
Published: October 2008

I am grateful for Mr Bagger's thoughtful remarks, as well as those of Professors Cousins, Smith, Katz, and Gimello at a recent American Academy of Religion panel devoted to The Problem of Pure Consciousness. But I cannot help but be struck by the tone of Mr Bagger's notice. As one colleague communicated to me after reading the piece, this is one of the most gratuitously rude pieces he had ever seen! If our book is really as bad as all this, it makes one wonder (a) why Religious Studies, or Mr Bagger, would bother to give it such attention, and (b) whether it indicates how deeply we have touched a nerve in the contemporary debate.
The Gregarious Metaphor Of The Selfish Gene
Authors: Grant Colin
Published: October 2008

Science establishes facts; the arts create imaginary possibilities; theology speculates. Although this characterization might receive wide endorsement, highly creative and literary developments in contemporary science suggest otherwise. The intriguing gene's-eye view of life promoted by sociobiology, and especially in Richard Dawkins' ‘biography’ of the selfish gene, represents a highly literate and imaginative account of reality that not only shatters the science/arts stereotype but even suggests that ultimately science involves views of reality of theological proportions.
Saintliness And Moral Perfection
Authors: Horne James R.
Published: October 2008

In the course of supporting his larger thesis about mysticism, Steven Katz argues that, ‘Every religious community and every mystical movement within each community has a “model” or “models” of the ideal practitioner of the religious life.' Among thirteen functions of such models he mentions three that partially overlap. He says that (i) these model lives set standards of perfection to measure believers' actions, (ii) they are perfect examples of what it is to be a human being, and (iii) they are moral paradigms. Katz mentions various saints, sages, and other exemplary figures, and sums up with the claim that in the Christian tradition the function of ‘ models’ is expressed in Thomas à Kempis' The Imitation of Christ. Taking all of this together, one could conclude that he intends to say that every religious tradition contains accounts of morally perfect persons who are examples to be imitated.
Is Ancestral Testimony Foundational Evidence For God's Existence?
Authors: Schubert Frank D.
Published: October 2008

It is Alvin Plantinga's contention that a belief in the existence of God constitutes a rationally justified ‘basic belief’ for which evidence is neither required nor desired. This defiant proposal to jettison any evidential requirements for justifying one's theistic belief has led to a great deal of discussion, with some theists welcoming the possibility that evidence may no longer be necessary to justify one's convictions, and others finding themselves expressing a deep concern that such a move might border on a type of ‘noninitiates-be-damned’ withdrawal from academic discourse. Whatever the outcome of these initial reactions to his project, Plantinga has at least succeeded in ‘changing the subject’, to borrow a phrase from Richard Rorty, though it is most certainly not the sort of change of subject which Rorty himself would welcome - a renewed defence of religious rationality.
Soft Facts And Harsh Realities: Reply To William Craig
Authors: Fischer John Martin
Published: October 2008

(I). In a number of papers I have sought to discuss and cast some doubt on a certain strategy of response to an argument that purports to show that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. This argument proceeds from the alleged ‘fixity of the past’ to the conclusion that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. William Lane Craig has (rather vigorously) criticized my approach to these issues. Here I should like to respond to some of Craig's claims. My goal is to attempt to achieve a clearer, more penetrating view of some of the issues pertaining to the relationship between God's foreknowledge and human freedom. The focus here will be on a strategy of response to the incompatibilist's argument which is associated with William of Ockham.
The Primacy of Relation In Paul Tillich's Theology of Correlation: A Reply to the Critique of Charles Hartshorne
Authors: Sinnett M. W.
Published: October 2008

Have process philosophers understood what Christian theologians are trying to say? The process critique of the broad tradition of Christian theology is motivated, at least in part, by the belief that the God of the Church's traditional confession is too unreservedly transcendent; that is, that he is insufficiently related to his creation. In response, process philosophers have defended a ‘dipolar’ concept of God according to which God is fully transcendent in his ‘primordial nature’ and fully immanent (i.e. ‘surrelative’) in his ‘consequent nature’. The dipolar construction undoubtedly solves the ‘problem’, but the question remains whether there really is a problem to be solved in the first place. Many Christian theologians, after all, have understood their faith, as well as their attempts at the rational exploration of their faith, to depend upon the divine-human relationship constituted by God's own self-disclosure. They have further understood the meaning of the terms of their theological explication to be immanent to this same experiential context of divine-human encounter, within which relationship with God is the primary reality experienced. As a particular aspect of the controversy aroused by the process critique of Christian theology, therefore, the question arises whether process philosophers have taken adequate account of the manner in which Christian theology has been conditioned by this context of divine-human encounter. I have no pretensions within the scope of this brief essay to address this question in its full generality, either with respect to the multifarious theological positions which the process critique has engendered, or with respect to the wide range of difficulties involved in any attempt to understand the relation of the Creator to his creation.
Divine Omniscience and the Soteriological Problem of Evil: Is the Type of Knowledge God Possesses Relevant?
Authors: Basinger David
Published: October 2008

The problem of evil normally discussed in philosophical theology is concerned with the pain and suffering experienced in this life. Why do so many innocent children die slow, torturous deaths as the result of disease, famine or earthquakes? Why do so many seemingly innocent adults suffer as the result of the greed, indifference or perversity of others? If God is all-good, then he certainly does not want such suffering. If God is all-powerful, he should be able to do away with such evils. Thus, must we not conclude that the existence of such evil counts against belief in the existence of an all-loving, all-powerful God?
Respecting Autonomy and Understanding Religion
Authors: Godlove Terry F.
Published: October 2008

My topic is a long-standing tension in the interpretation of religion. On the one hand, it seems undeniable — seems almost to go without saying — that liturgical and sacrificial practices, sacred dance, divination, procession and pilgrimage are intentional actions undertaken by persons. Yet there is a distinguished tradition in the study of religion according to which religious activity is typically caused by forces over which the agent has little or no control. Visible, latter-day members of this tradition include Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and, in some moods, Wittgenstein, but its roster is by no means limited to the religiously unmusical.
Providence and Evil: Three Theories
Authors: Hasker William
Published: October 2008

The last two decades have seen an unprecedented amount of philosophical work on the topics of divine foreknowledge, middle knowledge, and timelessness in relation to human freedom. Most of this effort has been directed at logical and metaphysical aspects of these topics – the compatibility of foreknowledge with free will, the existence of true counterfactuals of freedom and the possibility of middle knowledge, the conceivability and metaphysical possibility of divine timelessness, and so on. Far less attention, in contrast, has been devoted to the broader theological ramifications of these theories. Yet insofar as they are theological theories, they are properly appreciated and indeed fully understood only when placed in the appropriate theological context.
Reparation and Atonement
Authors: Mcnaughton David
Published: October 2008

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.
Kierkegaard on the Transformation of the Individual in Conversion
Authors: Davis William C.
Published: October 2008

From at least the time of the writing of The Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard's work takes a special interest in both the transition from unbelief to faith and the character of the life of true faith. Trained in Lutheran dogma and convinced of the radical nature of human freedom, his work on this subject demonstrates a profound concern for and grasp of Lutheran orthodoxy, as well as a remarkable degree of subtlety. After all, it is no simple task to give an account of the central features of the Christian life that is faithful to both a libertarian conception of human freedom and the doctrines of the church founded by the author of The Bondage of the Will. This paper proposes to accomplish two things: first, to state a problem that lies on the surface of Kierkegaard's account of the transformation involved in Christian conversion and second to present a resolution of the problem that is faithful to Kierkegaard's intentions.
Existing by Convention
Authors: Ferguson Kenneth G.
Published: October 2008

Ever since the Proslogion was first circulated (c. 1077), critics have been bemused by St Anselm's brazen attempt to establish a matter of fact, namely, God's existence, from the simple analysis of a term or concept. Yet every critic who has proposed to ‘write the obituary’ of the Ontological Argument has found it to be remarkably resilient (cf. McGrath, 1990: 212). At the risk of adding to a record of failures, I want to venture a new method for attacking this durable argument. Neither the common version of Anselm's argument from Chapter II of the Proslogion nor the previously unrecognized modal version uncovered by Norman Malcolm from Pros, III (1960: 52) can possibly get under way without Anselm's celebrated assertion that

(1) God is that than which no greater can be conceived.
When Christians become Naturalists
Authors: Robbins J. Wesley
Published: October 2008

The classical pragmatists were as concerned as any of their modern philosophical predecessors that the moral and religious aspects of human life not be swamped by the successes of the physical sciences. It was John Dewey, after all, who said that

The problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from that life.
Reincarnation, Closest Continuers, and the Three Card Trick: a Reply to Noonan and Daniels
Authors: Macintosh J. J.
Published: October 2008

In Religious Studies xxvi (1990) Harold W. Noonan and Charles B. Daniels severally take issue with my ‘Reincarnation and Relativized Identity’. Both make valuable points but both, I think, have somewhat missed the point of my original article. In that paper I singled out five different views on the possibility of life after death: (1) that we are reincarnated in the self-same body we had in our pre-mortem state; (2) that we are reincarnated in another — in a different — body; (3) that we continue to exist (with or without a temporal gap) in a disembodied form, which may or may not culminate in re-embodiment; (4) that pre-mortem life is a dream from which postmortem life is the awakening; (5) that none of the above holds: there is no life after death.
Omniprescient Agency
Authors: Hunt David P.
Published: October 2008

The principle that

(P1) One cannot deliberate over what one already (prior to deliberating) knows is going to happen,

when suitably qualified, has seemed to many philosophers to be about as secure a truth as one is likely to find in this life.Fortunately, (P1) poses little restriction on human deliberation, since the conditions which would trigger its prohibition seldom arise for us: our knowledge of the future is intermittent at best, and those things of which we do have advance knowledge (e.g. that the sun will rise tomorrow) are not the sorts of things over which we would deliberate in any case. But matters appear to stand otherwise with an all-knowing agent such as God is traditionally conceived to be; for what an omniprescient deity ‘already knows is going to happen’ iseverythingthat is going to happen; and if He cannot deliberate over such things, there is nothing over which He can deliberate.
F. H. Bradley and Religious Faith
Authors: Carr Stephen
Published: October 2008

In the following there are two principal objectives. Firstly, I hope to show that what seems to be the usual view of Bradley prevalent amongst theologians and philosophers is inaccurate. Secondly, I shall attempt to set Bradley's thought, albeit briefly, in the wider context of our contemporary interests. I have been more concerned to consider the aspects of Bradley's work that are interesting and, I think, quite exciting for theologians than to give a more general account of his philosophy. Bradley's reactions to specific doctrines of Christianity were coloured a good deal by his reaction to an evangelical upbringing (he was the son of an evangelical clergyman), but on a more abstract level he has an interesting and striking philosophical approach to the notion of religious faith. It is with this latter that I am concerned here.
Belief-in and Belief in God
Authors: Williams John N.
Published: October 2008

Of all the examples of ‘belief-in’, belief in God is both the most mysterious and the most challenging. Indeed whether and how an apologist can make a case for the intellectual respectability of theistic belief, depends upon the nature of this ‘belief-in’. I shall attempt to elucidate this matter by an analysis of the relation of ‘belief-in’ to ‘belief-that’ and by treating belief in God as a special case of ‘belief-in’.
Universal and Particular in Atonement Theology
Authors: Gunton Colin
Published: October 2008

The unique philosophical problems of Christianity derive from the fact that it is not a philosophy, but a gospel. That is to say, its teaching and institutions are distinctively what they are by virtue of their relation to particular divine acts rather than because they are primarily a general teaching or philosophy. Whatever general teaching there is is rooted in particularities. It is not, then, difficult to come to a provisional understanding of the reference of the ‘particular’ in the title. Christianity as a particular religion, distinct from other religions and philosophies, is a distinctive way of appropriating what is believed to be salvation, deriving from a centre in a specific pattern of divine action. That centre, to be sure, gives rise to a range of conceptions of salvation sharing a family resemblance, but is none the less common to all those that are recognisably within the Christian fold.
Craig on the Possibility of Eternal Damnation
Authors: Talbott Thomas
Published: October 2008

In two recent papers, one a critique of two papers of mine, William Lane Craig has sought to put the Free Will Defence in the service of the traditional doctrine of hell; he has sought to establish, in other words, that the following proposition, which I shall call the Damnation Thesis (DT), is at least possibly true:

(DT) There exists at least one sinner S such that S will never be reconciled to God and thus never be saved.
On Worshipping the Same God
Authors: Shaw Patrick
Published: October 2008

There is a story told of Bertrand Russell, that upon being imprisoned as a conscientious objector he was asked his religion, and replied ‘Agnostic’. The warder asked how that was spelt, and Russell spelled it out. The warder said, ‘Well, that's a new one on me, but I suppose we all worship the same God.’