Beliefs are freely attributed to God nowadays in Anglo–American philosophical theology. This practice undoubtedly reflects the twentieth–century popularity of the view that knowledge consists of true justified belief (perhaps with some needed fourth component). (After all no one supposes that God has beliefs in addition to, or instead of knowledge.) The connection is frequently made explicit. If knowledge is true justified belief then whatever God knows He believes. It would seem that much recent talk of divine beliefs stems from Nelson Pike's widely discussed article, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’. In this essay Pike develops a version of the classic argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will in terms of divine forebelief. He introduces this shift by premising that ‘A knows X’ entails ‘A believes X’. As a result of all this, philosophers have increasingly been using the concept of belief in defining ‘omniscience’.

The most striking difference between Christian and Muslim theologies is that while, for Christians, God is a person, Muslims worship an impersonal deity. Despite the importance of this difference for a host of theological issues, it is a difference which has gone largely unnoticed by Christians and Muslims alike. Yet Christians everywhere will affirm that God is a person, while the average Muslim will readily deny this. Theism is often defined by philosophers of religion who work in the Christian tradition in such a manner as to require the belief that God is a person. Thus The Encyclopedia of Philosophy has it that, ‘THEISM signifies belief in one God (theos) who is (a) personal, (b) worthy of adoration, and (c) separate from the world but (d) continuously active in it”. John H. Hick admits that, ‘Theism…is strictly belief in a deity, but is generally used to mean belief in a personal deity”. Richard Swinburne states that a theist is one who believes that there is a God who is a ‘person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe”, and J. L. Mackie, while arguing the case of atheism, endorses Swinburne's definition of theism.

David Hume's greatness depends in large part on how his writings hint at beautiful and coherent theories which are recognizably Humean despite their divergences from the untidy originals. Now, perhaps the clearest vision of a contradiction–free Platonic Form of Hume was had by J. L. Mackie; he described it in such masterpieces as The Cement of the Universe, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, and The Miracle of Theism. How successful is this last in its attack on theism? I shall discuss Mackie's case against theism of a Platonic or Neoplatonic type which replaces ‘God as a person or mind or spirit’ by a more abstract Creative Force or Principle. Mackie sees in it a ‘a formidable rival’ to any theism treating of a divine being; ‘if you demand an ultimate explanation, then this may well be a better one’ (MT, 234–5). But, his chapter thirteen contends, it fares badly in competition with an atheistic, naturalistic approach.

The doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine that God has no physical or metaphysical complexity whatsoever, is not a doctrine designed to induce immediate philosophical acquiescence. There are severe questions about its coherence. And even if those questions can be answered satisfactorily in favour of the doctrine, there remains the question why anyone should accept it. Thomas V. Morris raises both sorts of questions about a version of the doctrine which I have put forward. In the following pages I shall respond to what I take to be the most serious of Morris's objections. I shall argue that the doctrine survives Morris's onslaught, but that one observation of his points it in a direction I had hitherto not taken seriously. The bulk of Morris's paper raises questions of the first sort; perforce the bulk of my paper will also. I shall offer, at the end, a reason for thinking that neither of us is yet in a position to pronounce categorically on the second question. My remarks in this paper constitute an interim report on how I think things presently stand with divine simplicity.

Recently there have been a number of attempts at showing that God's attributes are conceptually defective (Kretzman, Mackie). Foremost among the attributes singled out for criticism is omnipotence. But critics have also questioned the logical compatibility of omniscience and immutability and also omnipotence and omniscience.

Do followers of different religions share common ground at the level of their morality, despite their disagreements over doctrine and metaphysical beliefs? A typical statement of this view was made recently by the Dalai Lama.

Recently there has been considerable debate about the relationship between the religions of the world; in particular Christians have been anxious to formulate a theology of other religions which transcends the traditional Christian belief that God's revelation and salvation are offered exclusively in Jesus Christ. In this context a number of theologians have questioned the finality of Christ and Christianity. Professor John Hick for example - the leading proponent of this view - speaks of a Copernican revolution in theology which involves a radical transformation of the concept of the universe of faiths. It demands, he writes, ‘a paradigm shift from a Christianity–centred or Jesus–centred to a God–centred model of the universe of faiths. One then sees the great world religions as different human responses to the one divine Reality, embodying different perceptions which have been formed in different historical and cultural circumstances. Similarly, the Roman Catholic priest, Raimundo Panikaar, endorses a new map of world religions. Advocating a revised form of ecumenism which strives for unity without harming religious diversity, Panikaar argues that the fundamental religious fact of the world's religions is the mystery known in every authentic religious experience. For Panikaar, this mystery within all religions is both more than and yet has its being within the diverse experiences and beliefs of the religions: ‘It is not simply that there are different ways of leading to the peak, but that the summit itself would collapse if all the paths disappeared. The peak is in a certain sense the result of the slopes leading to it.… It is not that this reality has many names as if there were a reality outside the name. This reality is the many names and each name is a new aspect.’ Such a vision of the universe of faiths implies that no religion can claim final or absolute authority.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of what is sometimes called ‘the literary and dramatic character’ of Hume's Dialogues. This importance is such that not taking this specific character of the Dialogues into account leads to conclusions opposite to the ones Hume, in the special form he gave to his work, was trying to impart to his readers. I will offer my analysis in opposition to the one, voiced by, for instance D. W. Harward, in which ‘the apparent philosophical inconsistencies in the Dialogues are resolved without appeal to Hume's commitment to “literary or dramatic balance,” an appeal few of us find convincing or philosophically interesting’ (Harward, 1976, p. 138). The last part of Harward's statement is of course only of biographical interest; however, the attempt to offer an interpretation of Hume's Dialogues in which the literary character of the work is wilfully set aside, comes to missing a basic understanding for the man and the work. In what follows I will make this explicit by a number of points, each of which shows the importance of this literary and dramatic character of the Dialogues. In each case the result could not be reached without taking this special character into account.

Many people believe it absurd to seek evidence for - or against - personal survival of death. Some do so because they think, for a variety of reasons, that the idea of personal post-mortem survival makes no sense. Whether or not they are right they are at any rate consistent: nothing can be evidence for or against a nonsense. However, there are others who also believe that looking for evidence is absurd and yet do not similarly dismiss the idea as unintelligible. They allow that survival is possible and commonly hope it will ensue; but at the same time they insist that absolutely nothing helpful can be said on the subject.

To say that God is omniscient, most philosophers and theologians agree, is to say that he knows all true propositions and none that are false. But there is a great deal of disagreement about what is knowable. Some believe that God's knowledge is limited to everything that is (or has been) actual and that which will follow deterministically from it. He knows, for example, exactly what Caesar was thinking when he crossed the Rubicon and how many horses he had in his army that day. And he knows exactly how Gorbachev feels about the use of nuclear weapons. And since he knows how the ‘laws of nature’ (which he has purportedly created) function, he knows, for example, how certain weather systems will develop and what their effects will be on certain natural environments. But with respect to any future state of affairs which includes free human decision-making as a causal component, God is said not to know what will occur. God, as the ultimate psychoanalyst or behaviourist, can with great accuracy predict what we will freely decide to do in the future in many cases. He might well, for example, be able to predict quite accurately who will win the 1988 Presidential election. But a God who possesses only ‘present knowledge’ (PK) cannot know who will win. Given that the election in question is dependent on free choices which have yet to be made, there is presently nothing for God to know.

I have found that religious philosophers sometimes commit what might be called the fallacy of misplaced argumentation. Permit me to explain.

Any fully developed system of thought contains many assertions about the world. Yet this proliferation of assertions can be traced back to several underlying propositions which are their logical forebears. This is because large-scale theories generally grow out of fundamental intuitions or conceptual stances. These fundamental intuitions become formulated into theory-embedded, second-order propositions. Understanding the centrality of second-order propositions is essential to understanding the theory which they generate, with its numerous first-order assertions about the world.

The scientific creationist movement has been roundly criticized by a wide spectrum of religious leaders, theologians, and philosophers of religion for its attempts to have its idiosyncratic ideas about the physical world taught in the public schools as scientific alternatives to evolutionary ideas. These religious critics have typically agreed with their secular counterparts that the scientific creationists are guilty of a serious distortion of science.

When one addresses the issue of myth, truth, and justification in religion, what one says to a great extent depends upon one's understanding of religion and theology. For that reason I want to sketch out my views on such matters as a way of locating or identifying the theme of this paper in what I judge to be its proper setting. Having done that, I will then present my thoughts on myth, truth, and justification in religion in hope that some light will be cast on this rather complex issue and that what I say will provoke fruitful discussion.

During the past few decades, Zen (Ch'an) Buddhism has been the most popular Buddhist school in the West and many scholars have expounded the essence of Zen. One of the most well–known expositions is D. T. Suzuki's psychological interpretation. Wu–nien in Zen is identified by him with the unconscious, and satori is seen as the psychological leaping of the unconscious. Other scholars contend that Zen has its ontological roots and should be understood ontologically rather than psychologically. Zen Buddhists are said to be pilgrims of the absolute, and Zen is seen as a search for pure being.

In his article ‘God and Probability’, 1 Hugh Mellor introduced the notion of the ‘bridge-hand fallacy’, allegedly committed by those who think they can appeal to probabilities in arguments for design. I should like to give this notion another airing, partly because of its recent criticism in two interesting books - R. G. Swinburne' The Existence of God and D. J. Bartholomew's God of Chance - and partly because it seems worth asking how it fares in relation to the most recent examples of design argument, namely those which appeal to the so-called ‘anthropic principle’ in cosmology.