In a recent paper Michael Tooley has argued that theological statements can be confirmed relative to a phenomenalistic observational language given a certain construal of confirmation. Consequently, he maintains that the verificationist challenge to theological statements, namely that in order to be significant they must be confirmable, can be answered. In this paper I will show that Tooley's argument has serious problems.

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Gregory S. Kavka argues that John Hick was wrong when he said that the statement ‘God (as conceived by Christians) exists’ is verifiable but not falsifiable. Kavka constructs an imaginary `resurrection world' ruled by Satan and inhabited by such resurrected evildoers as Hitler and Stalin. In such a world, those who had been virtuous in earthly life in the hopes of a Christ-dominated resurrection world discover that virtue is inversely rewarded, with the ‘living’ intolerable for them and worst of all for those among them who had lived especially virtuous lives, i.e. the saints. Further, they are told by presumably knowledgeable inhabitants of this world that:

…the historical Christ was an agent sent by Satan to raise in good people false hopes of eternal salvation. This story is confirmed by Satan himself who demonstrates through a huge telescope-like device how he continues to send false saviours to other planets inhabited by intelligent beings in a cruel plan to make such beings miserable in the long run.

God is the ‘high and lofty One who inhabits eternity’, declared the prophet Isaiah, but exactly how we are to understand the notion of eternity is not clear. Traditionally, the Christian church has taken it to mean ‘timeless’. But in his classic work on this subject, Oscar Cullmann has contended that the New Testament ‘does not make a philosophical, qualitative distinction between time and eternity. It knows linear time only…’ He maintains, ‘Primitive Christianity knows nothing of a timeless God. The “eternal” God is he who was in the beginning, is now, and will be in all the future, “who is, who was, and who will be” (Rev. 1:4).’ As a result, God's eternity, says Cullmann, must be expressed in terms of endless time.

Suppose that a person P1 dies some time during 1978. Many years later, the resurrection world, a perennial object of Christian concern, begins on the morning of the day of judgment. On its first morning there are in that world distinct persons, P2 and P3, each of whom is related in remarkably intimate ways to P1. You are to imagine that each of them satisfies each of the criteria or conditions necessary for identity with P1 to some extent, that both of them satisfy these conditions to exactly the same extent, and that every other denizen of the resurrection world satisfies each of these conditions to a lesser extent than P2 and P3 do. Thus, for example, philosophers often claim that bodily continuity is a necessary condition for personal identity. If it is, you might assume that the body P2 has on the morning of the day of judgment contains some of the same atoms the body of P11 contained when P1 died, and that P2's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death just in case P3's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P1's body at the time of death. Or, again, some philosophers hold that connectedness of memory is necessary for personal identity. If so, you are to suppose that on the morning of the day of judgment P3 seems to remember some of the events in the life of P1 having happened to him, and that P3 seems to remember a certain event in the life of P1 having happened to him just in case P2 seems to remember that very event in the life of P1 having happened to him. You are to fill in the details by adding complete parity between P2 and P3 with respect to similarity of DNA molecules, character traits and whatever else you deem relevant to personal identity. And, finally, you are to complete the story by imagining that P2 and P3 live very different sorts of lives in the resurrection world. To heighten the poignancy of the story, you might imagine that P2 enjoys forever after the beatitude promised to the blessed while P3 suffers the everlasting torments reserved for the damned.

In the preface to his book God the Problem, Gordon Kaufman writes ‘Although the notion of God as agent seems presupposed by most contemporary theologians … Austin Farrer has been almost alone in trying to specify carefully and consistently just what this might be understood to mean.’

The conceptual framework of religion is more like the frame of a picture than the frame of a house; and what goes on within the frame is other than conceptual. This is the hypothesis motivating the analysis which follows. Given the hypothesis, the problem is to conceive what religion is - this other-than-conceptual enterprise which tends to attract conceptual frames. A possible answer is available in Wittgensteinian ‘seeing-as’. A number of philosophers of religion have recently exercised this option. The present paper adds to their work by comparing a number of types of religious seeing-as with the instances of visual ambiguity drawn on by Wittgenstein.

In ‘The Will to Believe’, the religious hypothesis for William James says, first, ‘that the best things are the more eternal things’, and second, ‘that we are better off now if we believe her first affirmation to be true’ (p.26) He later qualifies the first affirmation: ‘The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form’ (p.27).

A well-trodden approach to statements of religious belief takes the following course:

Religious believers call upon God as their loving Father. Clearly God, being a spirit, is not a Father in the straightforward biological sense. What is claimed is that he is the creator and sustainer of all things, and that he has moreover a special father-like care for his human creatures. But this claim does not seem to be subject to any modification in the face of apparent lack of parental care on the part of God to his children. In fact believers are unwilling or unable to specify any actual or potential state of affairs that counts or would count towards deciding the truth value of their belief. In the light of this, it is hard to see the belief as having any meaning at all. The conclusion is that however much we may want to accept religious statements on faith, we cannot, because we are unable to discover what it is we are being asked to believe.

During the past few decades a growing interest in what is often called the ‘Kyoto School’ of philosophy has evidenced itself here and there in the West, especially in discussions of comparative religious thought and in the pages of journals which are sensitive, in the post-colonial world, to the value of giving attention to contemporary thought that originates outside the Anglo-American and continental contexts. What has made the so-called Kyoto School especially interesting is the fact that those thinkers identified with it obviously possess a wide acquaintance with Western thought but also have a programme of clarifying points at which they, as Japanese philosophers, find Western philosophy either in sum or in its parts inadequate or objectionable. Moreover, inasmuch as the philosophers of the Kyoto School have deliberately reached back into the Mahayana Buddhist component in Japanese civilization in order to find terms, perspectives, and even foundations for their own analyses and constructions, Western students of comparative religion and comparative thought have in the study of this school a unique aperture for observing how a group of thinkers, while sharing modernity and its problems with us, reates both of these to a religious tradition which is in many ways strikingly different from that of the West.

In the two decades following the publication of New Essays in Philosophical Theology, a metatheological awareness has been steadily developing among systematic theologians. Gordon Kaufman is one of those theologians prepared to face the rather embarrassing question as to whether sentences containing the word ‘God’ provide information about a transcendent reality called ‘God’. Kaufman has, indeed, always seen the need for a constructive relationship between theology and philosophy, a relationship in which both philosophy and theology retain their respective autonomous standpoints. In arguing for an historically orientated philosophy, he claimed that here one would treat what is concrete and specific for Christian faith in abstract and general terms, showing how ‘every philosophical perspective finds its focus and meaning in a historical event which is the centre of history - the Christ - for it’. Because it has grown out of a generalizing of Christian faith-affirmations, this philosophy does not threaten theology's autonomy. Indeed, it would ‘already be determined by the Christian perspective in its fundamental orientation’. It is the methodological importance of this notion of a perspective which the present article seeks to make clear.

Among contemporary novelists Iris Murdoch is unique. On the one hand she is a novelist and a philosopher and yet does not write philosophical novels, and, on the other hand, her work as a moral philosopher is uninfluenced by current moral philosophy.

Hope is a category of transcedence, by means of which a man does not permit what he senses and experiences to be the sole criterion of what is possible. It is the belief or the conviction that present reality (what I see) does not exhaust the potentialities of the given data. Hope opens the present to the future; it enables a man to look ahead, to break the fixity of what he observes, and to perceive the world as open-textured. The categories of possibility and of transcendence interweave a closely stitched fabric - hope says that tomorrow can be better than today.

No fruitful discussion of the logic of religious belief can afford to ignore George Mavrodes' classification of propositional concepts, i.e. concepts predicable of propositions singly (p) or in sets (S), as an analytical tool for pinning down the ‘person-oriented’ and ‘content-oriented’ factors in such ‘epistemic activities’ as religious proving, experiencing, and verifying. Mavrodes shows in particular that the formal model of logical soundness, i.e. valid form and true premises, has but limited application to proving, experiencing, and verifying as ways of giving good reasons for religious belief. In this essay, I will show how Mavrodes' analysis of the logic of religious belief can be extended by substituting a procedural model of logical soundness for the truth-functionally formal model that he adopts. I will show further why it is desirable and, in certain instances, vital to extend his analysis in this manner. Along the way, I will explain why the extension that I am advocating augments Mavrodes' original analysis without substantially altering it or sacrificing any of its original analytical virtues.

A related question to the one posed in the title is: ‘Is religion psychology?’ In order to make this question a little sharper, let us raise two parallel ones: ‘Is religion physiology?’ and ‘Is religion physiotherapy?’

I have the impression that the answer to any of the above four questions is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. What I propose to do below is to try to find out how we might understand these questions in the light of the Bhagavad Gītā and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with occasional help from other sources. These two texts are of paramount importance in Indian religion and psychology, and may be considered representative of the classical Indian view.

I propose in this paper to examine and analyse the concept of śūnyatā as it is expressed in the Hrdaya sūtras of the Buddhist prajñā-pāramitā literature and in the Mū1amadhyamaka-kārikās of Nāgārjuna. I shall attempt to show some of the difficulties involved in seeking an objective referent or counter part for the concept and also in trying to preserve the tension implicit in the affirmation of the middle way. I hope to indicate that the via negativa approach has positive implications for the understanding of śūnyatā and that in the final analysis we may have to look for its meaning in the way it is used.

Sometime after the famous fratricidal battle among the Bharatas known as the Mahābhārata war was over (on the eve of which the Bhagavadgītā had been revealed to Arjuna by Krŗşņa), Arjuna

requested Krŗşņa… to repeat the instruction which had already been conveyed to him on ‘the holy field of Kurukşetra’ but which had gone out of his ‘degenerate mind’. Kŗşņa thereupon protests that he is not equal to a verbatim recapitulation of the Bhagavadgītā but agrees in lieu of that to impart to Arjuna the same instruction in other words, through the medium of a certain ancient story – or purātana itihāsa. And the instruction thus conveyed constitutes what is called the Anugītā, a name which is in itself an embodiment of this anecdote.

The riddle Frazer confronts us with in The Golden Bough is posed in the form of a question. ‘Why is this happening?’ - this life and death of the King of the Wood at Nemi? In the related context of his accounts of the fire-festivals in Europe, Frazer refines the question in a more dramatic form: ‘What is the meaning of such sacrifices? Why were men and animals burnt to death at these festivals?’ Frazer recognizes something serious in all this. The practice of human sacrifice is puzzling; it does leave us disquieted! But Frazer's search for what he calls ‘a fairly probable explanation’ of the motives which gave rise to the priesthood of Nemi and its embodiment of the practice of human sacrifice, Wittgenstein in his ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’ feels, does not help us to understand a practice like the burning of a man! With all the additional data, numerous theories, and the historical tracing of origins we are no closer to resolving the perplexities of the riddle than the riddle itself presents to us daily.