In this paper I would like to begin following up a suggestion made informally in conversation by Professor Mircea Eliade that someone with an interest in phenomenology of religion take a serious look at the writings of the American anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda. Since the appearance of his most recent book two years ago, there has been a growing bibliography of commentaries on and interviews with this scholar. To my knowledge, however, no one has yet attempted to bring to bear on his works some of the insights derived from the comparative approach of a phenomenology of religion. This paper will only be a step in that direction. It is intended in the first place to set some relatively new material before a group of scholars in order to invite comments from various special disciplines. Throughout, it is prompted by my own personal curiosity and informed, for better or worse, by my own developing understanding of the aims and procedures of a general phenomenology of religion.

Q: If necessity is the mother of invention, whence necessity?

A. (Thesis): The matrix of necessity in God-talk is religious experience, philosophically interpreted. The interpreters, theists and non-thesists, have indeed been inventive.

Knowledge of God, in the sense of acquaintance with him, is an unavoidable part of our experience as human beings. God is presented to us along with the other data of our experience. That is the heart of the understanding of the knowledge of God according to the doctrines of the two Process theologians who are the subjects of this paper. Quite how it is so will, I hope, follow from an exposition of the views of Schubert M. Ogden and Charles Hartshorne, who represent different aspects of the situation. Hartshorne is the philosopher, who has devoted all his intellectual life to preaching and refining his metaphysical system, while Ogden has taken up Hartshorne's discoveries for apologetic and theological reasons. A brief look at Ogden's intellectual history will set the scene.

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

In ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ Laurence Sterne writes:

That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I'm sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

In about the year A.D. III Pliny sent to the emperor Trajan a report about the behaviour of Christians in Bithynia in which he said that they admitted to having meetings before dawn at which it was their practice carmen Christo quasi deo dicere. Would the Christians have thought this account of themselves to be a fair one? Certainly Pliny was right in thinking that the Christians gave, and professed to give, worship to Christ as divine. But no doubt he would suppose that to them Christ was ‘a god’, just one of the deities whose statues were familiar in the Graeco-Roman world. He could scarcely be expected to grasp that carmen Christo quasi deo dicere involved the attitudes to Christ described by St John or Ignatius of Antioch or Polycarp of Smyrna.

It seems clear that the ontological argument can no longer be dismissed as a silly fallacy. The dogma of the impossibility of necessary existence is seriously threatened by the case of necessary existential truths in mathematics, and as for the claim that the ontological argument must beg the question, since by mentioning God in the premise his existence is presupposed, it is undermined by the fact that we often refer to things—Hamlet for instance— we do not for a moment think exist. The doctrine that existence is not a property (‘exists’ is not a predicate), insofar as it does not reduce to one of the foregoing points, is very murky, for the sense in which ‘red’ is a predicate and ‘exists’ is not has never been clearly defined. Moreover, the way many believers hold that ‘God exists’ is immune to empirical refutation strongly suggests that we are dealing here with an analytic statement, which is just what the ontological argument should be expected to produce. It seems in order, then, to conduct theological discussion under the supposition that the argument is in fact sound.

The purpose of this article is to make yet another attempt to defend and restate as convincingly as possible the argument for God's existence based on religious experience. In its simplest form the argument is an inference from the fact that men experience God to the conclusion that God exists. Experience is always experience of something, it is alleged, and if that something is of the kind to have independent, objective existence and if a given experience is really of that thing, then that thing must exist. The clearest sort of case, where this type of existential argument from experience is used, is that of normal perception: a man sees a tree, therefore the tree exists. The deduction works because the man's seeing is non-delusive. He sees the tree because it is there to be seen.

Anyone teaching in theological schools or university departments of religion in the West should be struck by two related factors which seem to influence the attitude and thinking, of today's students. The first is the preoccupation with ‘experience’, while the second is the openness toward Eastern religious insights as well as their meditation techniques. In this paper, the writer intends to reflect on these two factors both as the causes and the effects of the significant change that has taken place in Western man's world of meaning in our time.

When trying to understand the nature of religious experience as ‘mediated immediacy’ I am reminded of Professor J. N. Findlay's description of Hegel's thought as a kind of ‘philosophical Buchenwald’ specialising in intellectual tortures. Nevertheless, recent literature on the subject of religious experience reveals an increasing number of thinkers expressing confidence in the viability of this notion, John E. Smith of Yale being the most outstanding. This is not to say that all the thinkers categorised by ‘mediated immediacy’ have no important differences. They do. Infact, Smith might not even accept the phrase as accurately describing his position, despite the fact that J.B. Stearns applied it to his thought in a recent article.

In his article ‘Professor Bartley's Theory of Rationality and Religious Belief’ Mr W. D. Hudson has brought considerable clarification to the rather confused situation occasioned by Professor W. W. Bartley's book The Retreat to Commitment (London, 1964) and its subsequent discussion; but the process can, I think, be carried still further.

The aim of this paper is to give a characterisation of religion and the Religious Spirit, basing itself on the Platonic assumption that there are Forms, salient jewels of simplicity and affinity, to be dug out from the soil of vague experience and cut clear from the confusedly shifting patterns of usage, which will give us conceptual mastery over the changeable detail in a given sector. It will further be Platonic in that it will not seek to discount the deep gulfs between the species into which religion qua genus divides itself, i.e. its theistic, polytheistic and atheistic subvarieties, taking it to be of the essence of a true genus to extend itself over mutually exclusive species, only being what it is by including in its sense the alternatives which are thus mutually exclusive. (The genus of Living Creature in Plato's Timaeus has this sort of disjunctive universality, and no theory of universals is adequate which does not recognise their inherent disjunctivity.) And my treatment will be Platonic, thirdly, in that it will endeavour to delimit the Religious Spirit by, on the one hand, setting it over against what it excludes, all purely this-world talk and life which is quite irreligious, and by, on the other hand, opposing it to forms of talk and life which fall short of it in various ways or which deviate from it variously, thereby likewise contributing to our understanding of what it is. The practice of Plato, which could study the deviations from his ideal city in order to confirm his notion of its structure and excellence, and which also paired every ideal pattern with its opposite— piety with impiety, justice with self-interested tyranny, etc.—is plainly one to be followed: Plato, as we know from a citation from his contemporary Hermodorus in one of the Aristotelian commentators, always set beside the ‘in itself’ of the pure Form the deviant and the wholly negative which were nonetheless part of its sense. Religion will therefore stand before us as a target that it is possible to fall short of or miss altogether as well as to hit squarely, and we shall try by a series of glancing darts to end by hitting it squarely.

Is the existence of God a reasonable metaphysical hypothesis? So asks A. C. Ewing in his important posthumous work, Value and Reality. Thus the topic of the book is theistic religion, not in its entirety, but rather merely in its intellectual part. That it does have such a part, and further that it makes claims ‘to objective truth in the field of metaphysics’ (p. 24), is defended on the grounds (a) that a fictional ‘story’ about God has what religious or ethical impact it may have because, or at least mainly because, it is taken precisely not as fictional, but as expressing an objective theological truth; and (b) that a story, or an account, can constitute a good reason for one's acting in a certain way only if the account is, in fact, objectively true. Bearing on both points is Ewing's observation that ‘emotion, at least except in pathological cases, requires some objective belief about the real, true or false, to support it for long, and if it exists without knowledge or rationally founded belief with which it is in agreement, it is to be condemned as irrational or unfitting, as it would be unfitting to rejoice at something disastrous or be angry with an inanimate thing’ (p. 27). The claim is not, we are told, that religious statements are literal as distinguished from symbolic. The door would seem to be left open, in fact, to their all being symbolic. What is essential is that some of them symbolise distinctively metaphysical truths, or truths ‘going beyond the realm of science’ and ‘throwing some light on the general nature of the real’ (p. 30). We should indeed distinguish, Ewing notes, ‘belief in’ from ‘belief that’. Yet the former is not possible without the latter. ‘Unless I believe that God exists I cannot believe in God’ (p. 28). So in Ewing's opinion, statements of metaphysics—if not concerning God, then at least concerning certain general aspects of reality—are most important for religion as a whole, and are, in being true, conceptually necessary to its validity, or to its ‘fittingness’.