Of the whole field of religious studies, one area of consistent interest and activity has been the study of myth; and if any one area has represented the wide variety of approaches scholars of religion have utilized, it is this one. Students of language and literature (e.g. F. Max Müller and J. Campbell), psychology (e.g. S. Freud and C. Jung), sociology (e.g. E. Durkheim and P. Berger), social anthropology (e.g. B. Malinowski, V. Turner and C. Levi-Strauss) as well as religion (e.g. M. Eliade and G. La Rue) have all offered interpretations of myth. An investigation of these various approaches to understanding myth seems to point to the conclusion that the history of the study of myth is a history of reductionism. That is, the heritage transmitted to scholars who would attempt to understand the nature and function of myth within a single discipline is one which most often limits the essential nature or function of myth to that discipline's underlying assumptions alone. Hence, myth is usually linked either to the social or the psychological dimension of human experience exclusively. However, even those theories of myth which combine social and psychological methods and assumptions have usually resulted in truncated conclusions which give pause to those of us who seek their application.

To say ‘mysticism versus philosophy’ in the context of Islamic civilization means something far different from what it has come to signify in the West, where many philosophers have looked upon mysticism as the abandonment of any attempt to reconcile religious data with intelligent thought. Certainly the Muslim mystics and philosophers sometimes display a certain mutual opposition and antagonism, but never does their relationship even approach incompatibility.

Perhaps you have heard the story of the philosopher who fell off the edge of a cliff and was hanging by the limb of a tree. After calling for help for some time he heard a voice from the heavens saying, ‘I am here’. The philosopher explained his dilemma and then asked, ‘Can you help me?’ The voice replied, ‘Do you believe in me?’, to which the philosopher without hesitation, given the circumstances, said, ‘Yes, of course’. The voice came back, ‘Then, let go.’ There was silence and some moments passed before the philosopher somewhat meekly replied, ‘Lord, I know that this is not the best time and place for a discussion but you know how philosophers are, and you do seem to be asking a good bit of me. I know that many of your followers in recent times would agree that I should let go, but I have this feeling that they may be confusing the doctrine of salvation by faith alone with an epistemological doctrine that faith is a commitment that requires no justification. Could we talk about this? And, in the meantime, I hope you will not be offended if I ask, Is there anyone else up there?’

This paper is devoted to the task of exploring just what there is in man's nature which makes it possible for him to be open to religious experience, to be positively disposed to receive it. By ‘natural’ here I mean only that which all men are in fact endowed with when they enter this present world of human history before they enter into any particular religious context. Hence I am not going to get involved in the difficult theological controversy as to whether this initial endowment includes only what is due to human nature as a created nature or also some supernatural extra gift of God as orienting man in a special way towards himself in this existential historical order, which could have been otherwise. What he begins life with in the present historical order I shall call natural, whatever its origin.What I mean by ‘religious experience’ must be left somewhat vague, so as to include its many varieties. Let us describe it roughly as any direct existential awareness of the presence or activity of an ultimate, absolute, transcendent dimension of reality, especially the more intense forms of unitive awareness of this Transcendent which have traditionally been called ‘mystical experience’. Before beginning our exploration, let me stress that my purpose here is not to establish or validate that there is such a thing as authentic religious experience. I presuppose that as known or accepted from elsewhere, at least as a hypothesis for discussion.

In probably the earliest Upanisad text, one learns that at the beginning of the world there was only Ātman in the form of a person. Discovering that only he existed, he declared ‘I am’. After losing his fear of being alone, he found that he did not have pleasure because of his solitary condition. Thereupon, he divided himself and became a man and a woman. When the two beings copulated other beings and forms of life were produced. Thus the original universal principle is androgynous. By knowing itself, it became all that there is in the universe. The philosophical implication of this myth is that he who knows that he is Brahman becomes the All. It is unclear, however, whether or not the author of this section of the text means to imply that the one who knows becomes androgynous.

In two recent articles Grace M. (Dyck) Jantzen has argued that an embodied God could be both a being worthy of worship (in the Judaeo-Christian tradition) and omnipresent. In arguing for neither of these claims has she attempted to prove that God (if he exists) is embodied, or even that God (if he exists) must be embodied. Rather, she has urged acceptance of the more modest claim there is no good reason for denying the possible embodiment of God (if he exists) on grounds either connected with his being a worthy object of worship or in terms of a supposed entailment of incorporeality on God's omnipresence. Yet contemporary thinkers with as radically divergent views about God as Kai Nielsen and Father Copleston forward ‘the argument that an embodied God is inadequate for sophisticated theism’; and, Jantzen avers, there is a ‘widespread belief that if God is indeed omnipresent, as we are clearly taught in Scripture, then that doctrine of omnipresence entails immediately that God must be incorporeal’. The purpose of my remarks in this note is not to dispute Jantzen's conclusions, but to question the strength and/or satisfactoriness of some of her arguments for those conclusions. Perhaps the most pervading misgiving arises over her unquestioned equating of ‘embodiment’ with ‘having a body’. Surely at first blush such synonymy appears both obvious and innocuous. But where the notion of embodiment itself is the crux of the issue, careful reflection needs to be given to just what the notion involves. Yet she simply accepts the synonymy ‘without any further ado, as though it were just obviously true’, just as she accuses Findlay of doing regarding ‘the claim that only a being who exists necessarily would be worthy of our worship’.

Let me, to begin with, outline the main points of my paper.

First of all, I shall draw a very basic distinction between three parts or aspects of reality. I shall then go on to claim that there are certain kinds of understanding and explanation which correspond to each of these three parts, and to discuss the sort of experience these different kinds of understanding involve. Within this perspective, religion will emerge as one kind of understanding and explanation, different from and parallel to scientific understanding. Having reached this point in the argument, we shall be able to see one demarcation-line between scientific and religious understanding, and to offer one explanation why this demarcation-line is changing and culturally dependent. The next step, leading to Part II of my paper, claims that our attempt to understand our situation in the world involves the formation of an overall or ‘total’ view, an all-inclusive picture of reality. I shall then go on to discuss how the different kinds of understanding explained in Part I affect the formation of a total view. This leads to a classification of world-views into four main types, corresponding to the former distinctions. In this scheme, we see how religion can be a kind of understanding different from but dependent on that pointed out in Part I, and bearing a complicated relation to scientific understanding. In explaining this I shall also discuss the reasonableness of different world-views.

Not only for Augustine, but for virtually all Christian theologians, the doctrine of free will is of critical importance for theodicy. The reason for this is easy to state: these theologians trace either all (as in the case of Augustine) or much evil to human sin, which in turn is understood as an abuse of the free will with which human beings were endowed by their Creator. Augustine sums it very well: ‘… all that we call evil is either sin or punishment for sin’. The argument of this paper is that, unfortunately, Augustine's statements about free will are not adequate to the great theological burden placed upon them. Such a critical judgement is of considerable consequence for Christian theology generally, since Augustine exercised such an enormous formative influence upon later thinkers.

By far the most common term in Professor Jeffner's paper is ‘understanding’, and it is clearly with understanding that he is primarily concerned. However, at the beginning of his paper he talks of understanding and explanation, and at least in the case of his third kind of reality he clearly sees understanding and explanation as intimately related. In this he is surely right. I myself would say that understanding is cognizing a manifold as a single whole in all its internal relationships, and this ties up with what Jeffner has to say about Gestalts on pp. 220–221. And explanation, as I hope to show, depends upon or presupposes the understanding that flows from the possession of a Gestalt. However, Jeffner adopts Hempel and Oppenheim's deductivist account of scientific explanation, and I believe this account to be fundamentally mistaken, and to have serious consequences for his argument. One does not achieve explanation merely by finding a set of empirically true premises from which a proposition expressing the explanandum can be deduced – if that were so one would explain Socrates' mortality by pointing out that everything snub-nosed is mortal, and that Socrates was snub-nosed. It is interesting, in this respect, to compare Hempel's account of explanation with that of Aristotle. There are substantial similarities between the two accounts, but there is one fundamental difference. Hempel insists that there can be no explanation unless events are connected in some way, and so rejects, for example, a mere sequential narrative as constituting an explanation.

Let us start with rephrasing the question in order to make sure that we have, roughly speaking, the same things in mind when we discuss it. There is no difficulty about the word belief. In the subtitle of my lecture, it is defined as ‘to be committed to a religion’. I propose that we stick to that definition, and see how far it brings us in our search for an answer.

My argument will be that our understanding of human beings, which is what I take the Christian doctrine of man to be concerned with, will benefit considerably from an examination of two different but related clusters of human attitudes which can be found respectively under the headings ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’. There are many pitfalls in the way of such an enterprise, and occasionally some prejudices to be overcome. For example L. E. Loemker in the relevant articles in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes a fairly lengthy discussion with the rather terminal judgement:

In G. K. Chesterton's story The Doom of the Darnaways, Lord Darnaway put on the spines of dummy books in his library such empty designations as The Snakes of Ireland and The Religion of Frederick the Great: I too might appear to have chosen a non-subject for this paper. My coming to the contrary conclusion was the unwitting work of the man whom Balliol College employed to give us tutorials in political philosophy. I soon noticed that his interpretation of Hobbes seemed to be based on a few chapters of Leviathan; desiring to get material for probing questions, and allured by Hobbes's style, I quickly devoured the whole of Leviathan. This reading left me with an abiding respect for the moral and political philosophy of Hobbes; his religious views, at this time, I found curious rather than impressive, but already I had no doubt that they were not mere hollow professions thinly cloaking an immoralist atheism, but were considered opinions sincerely held.

The questions set in the draft programme for this session of the conference are:

Is it possible to understand the religion of somebody else, or must one be committed to a religious position in order to understand it? Is belief a condition for understanding?

These questions give the contemporary form of the debate about the perennial problem of the relationship between belief and understanding, and I sympathise with Professor Kuitert's sense that these questions themselves require further definition. Fortunately for the sake of philosophical dialogue I do not fully accept his conclusions. This however, is not because he wants to deny that belief is a condition for understanding, whereas I wish to affirm this. The main part of my paper will be devoted to showing what I find to be unsatisfactory in such an antithesis.