Philosophy of religion in the twentieth century has been deeply influenced, one might say dominated, by contemporary empiricism. God is the subject of religion, but the word ‘God’ does not name a person or an object in the ordinary way. The word ‘God’ is a symbol for the ultimately mysterious, unknowable and transcedent ground of all being. The insight or conviction, God is, cannot however, be reached within the context of empricism, no matter how broad in intention it may be. The inadequacy of empiricism in this respect is fundamentally connected with its epistemological presuppositions. Religion — at a serious level — is not concerned with beliefs that soothe and console; it is concerned with a vision of God as the ground of all being. Creation points beyond the finite world to God as its transcendent source. Consent to or belief in God is for nothing. It arises out of a sense of wonder, a sense of mystery at creation or being and refletion on it.

Recently Steven E. Boër gave another turn to the discussion of the free will defence by claiming that the free will defence is irrelevant to the justification of moral evil. Conceding that free will may be of real value, Boër claims that free will could have been allowed creatures without that leading to any moral evil at all. What I shall hereafter refer to as the ‘Boër reform’ is the suggestion that God could have allowed creatures to exercise free choices but have intervened with ‘coincidence miracles’ to prevent all the intended evil from actually occurring. What is important to the free will defence, according to Boër, is the ability to choose freely and not the ability to succeed in effecting what we have intended to accomplish. It is no intrusion on the freedom of our wills for God to prevent us from accomplishing what we tried to do with our free wills as long as we were free to try.

Disorder and suffering are increasing significantly in our society. Violent crime, unemployment, escape through drug-taking are all on the increase. It is apparent, also, that much of this disorder and suffering, and the anxiety it fosters, is rooted in science and its technological off-spring. The un-employment produced by a micro-technology is only one small example. It is also apparent that one of the principal foundation stones for the scientific enterprise was Christianity.

The difficulty of ascribing metaphysical predicates such as absoluteness, necessity and perfection to God while simultaneously ascribing personal predicates such as compassion, freedom and agency has often been noted. Most efforts to resolve this dilemma have tended to fall into one of three categories: (I) a merely verbal solution such as that God is ‘compassionate in terms of our experience but…not so in terms of [God's] own’; (2) the univocal and unqualified ascription of the metaphysical predicates to God coupled with equivocation with respect to the personal predicates which results in the final elimination of the latter; (3) the fideistic denial that intelligible language is applicable to God. Unfortunately, none of these is satisfactory. The first solution is seen to be but a version of the second, and it is arguable that the second is, as Feuerbach contends, tantamount to a ‘subtle, disguised atheism’, since ‘to deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself’ or, alternatively, ‘an existence in general, an existence without qualities, is an insipidity, an absurdity’. The third ‘solution’ is no better and is hardly more than an evasive tactic.

Many philosophers have written in the past as though it were nearly obvious to rational reflection that the existence of evil in this world is incompatible with the presumed properties of the Christian God, and they have assumed a proof of incompatibility to be easy to construct. An informal underpinning for this line of thought is easy to develop. Surely God in his benevolence finds evil to be evil, and hence has both the desire and the means, provided by his omnipotence and omniscience, to eradicate it. But it remains a brute fact that evil exists. While this seems plausible enough at first glance, and seems damaging to the rationality of Christian belief, attempts to pin down a definite proof of incompatibility have encountered difficulties. The root difficulty is perhaps that the surface plausibility of incompatibility is ultimately mistaken. In what he calls a Free Will Defence against natural atheology, Alvin Plantinga has presented what seems a definitive proof, on rather modest assumptions, of the logical compatibility of God's nature and the existence of evil. Logic alone can neither prove nor disprove God's existence, since the defence rests on the empirical assumption that evil exists in this world. What Plantinga shows, put very simply, is that God may have created a world as good as any that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent being might have created given that human beings must exist in that world. Whether Christianity ought to court logical rationality may seem highly dubious, but on the supposition that it does, Plantinga's proof that the existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of evil seems to me to (provisionally) settle the issue of whether Christianity is a possible object of rational belief, at least insofar as the problem of evil is considered the major obstacle to rationality of belief. Perhaps it is now clear that I do not intend here to attack the validity or the significance of Plantinga's proof. At the same time, I think it possible to argue for Plantinga's conclusion on other grounds, grounds that seem to me philosophically more appealing, and grounds that are manifestly compatible with the Biblical record. After briefly summarizing Plantinga's argument, I shall propose an alternative free will defence that circumvents some of the presuppositions of his arguments, an alternative that may be attractive to philosophers who are not interested in an ontology involving Plantinga's conception of possible worlds.

People who are agnostics, rather than theists or atheists, frequently defend the claim that their position is more rational than either theism or atheism in the following manner:

It looks [they say] as though there is some reason to believe that God exists (in the form, say, of one of the classical arguments for God's existence); but it also looks as though there is evidence that God does not exist (in the form of the atheistic argument from evil); and whenever there is evidence that a given proposition, p, is true and also evidence that it is false, the most rational thing for anyone who knows that this is the case is to suspend judgement with respect to p. It follows that agnosticism is epistemically preferable to theism and to atheism.

It has recently been suggested by Richard R. La Croix that there is a logical incompatibility between the doctrine of divine omniprescience — the notion that God knows what will happen in the future — and the commonly held belief that literary authors are creative with respect to the compositions they produce. This suggestion is, I take it, part of the overall claim that God's omniscience rules out human free choices, since if what one does is known before one does it, then one can hardly be said to have chosen it. I will not, however, be concerned with this general controversy in the present paper, but rather with the specific one regarding literary creativity and divine omniprescience. La Croix defends this claim by defining literary creativity as follows:

literary authorship is creative in the sense that by means of his composing activity an author is an agent who brings about the existence of some thing (e.g. a play, a poem, a novel, etc.) which did not exist prior to the composing activity of that agent and which would not exist without the composing activity of that agent or some similar agent.

The concept of orthodoxy is not prominent in the thinking of mid-twentiethcentury writers on religion. There are many reasons for this. It is, for instance, always more interesting to challenge accepted traditions than to defend them, and publishers know that radical questioning generally attracts more attention than defence of received ideas. But the task of defending orthodox beliefs is an absolute necessity for the adherents of a revealed religion. It may be unpalatable to have to examine a long succession of ‘reinterpretations’ of Christianity, but it is important, since the new thinkers may often get things badly wrong, and the faithful (often woefully ill-armed–considering their individual capacity–for the intellectual fight) may be seduced by superficial plausibility or flashy modernity.One can well imagine a person who has found Christianity attractive enough for him to pray and to attend church services occasionally, but whose world-view has been largely formed by the mass media, discovering one of the modern ‘reinterpreters’ of the Christian faith with an enormous feeling of relief.

Josiah Royce wrote three major works dealing with religion, The Religious Aspects of Philosophy, The Sources of Religious Insight and The Problem of Christianity. In these are insights which I believe need to be recalled today in order to achieve a fresher vision of the nature of religion and more particularly of the nature of Christianity. Moreover, Royce treats various aspects of individual and communal development which I believe are of some philosophic importance.

The common notion of ‘immortality’ presupposes a ‘dualism’ of mind and body, with the former alone surviving death. Such eminent Muslim thinkers as al-Kindi (A.D. 801–873), known as the Father of Muslim philosophy; al-Farabi (870–950) called ‘The Second Teacher’; ibn Sina (980–1037), that encyclopaedic genius of the Muslim world; and ibn Roshd (1126–1198), have all advocated a very strict kind of ‘dualism’, anticipating Descartes, the Father of modern philosophy, down to the present-day realist-idealists led by Professor H. D. Lewis of the University of London. The dualistic position, however, made even Descartes realize the difficulty of explaining ‘interaction’, or for that matter any kind of relation, which we experience between mind and body in our everyday life - a problem which he and his followers found hard to solve. As every student of modern Western thought knows, Descartes resorted to –interactionism’, Spinoza (like ibn Roshd) took refuge in ‘parallelism7rsquo;, while Leibniz advocated ‘pre-established harmony’ implied in the position of Asharites. Iqbal argues against any such view, ‘I am inclined to think that the hypothesis of matter as an independent existence is perfectly gratuitous. It can only be justified on the ground of our sensations of which matter is supposed to be at least a part-cause other than myself’ (a position taken up by both Locke and Kant). Iqbal contends against the Cartesian hypothesis that ‘We cannot find any observable facts to show how and where exactly their interaction takes place, and which of the two takes the initiative’. Against both ‘parallelism’ and ‘pre-established harmony’ his contention is that they reduce ‘the soul to a mere passive spectator of the happenings of the body’. Thus, Iqbal rejects both ‘interactionism’ and ‘parallelism’ as unsatisfactory.

Patrick McGrath has argued that my defence of papal infallibility does not succeed. His basic strategy is to establish that, contrary to my arguments, infallible papal utterances are statements and not merely declarations. He wants this result in order to go on to show that the Pope, in possession of no priviliged epistemic access to the world, is not infallible. I agree that the Pope has no priviliged epistemic access; so that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the fundamental question of whether infallible papal utterances are statements or declarations. I want to show that McGrath's arguments against my position do not work. If I am successful, then the Pope's infallibility is secure.

Surely the greatest possible accomplishment for a religious epistemologist would be to show how God's existence might be empirically verified. The most obvious, although certainly not unproblematic, approach to this task is to claim that perceptual evidence is available from which God's existence can be inferred. The only apparent alternative, direct sense perception of God, is ruled out by God's essential unobservability, which is implied by his essential incorporeality. But Robert Oakes, in his essay, ‘Religious Experience, Sense-perception and God's Essential Unobservability’ (Religious Studies, vol. 17, pp. 357–67), boldly suggests a third alternative. God's unobservability may preclude his being perceived directly through the senses, but there are still logically possible, Oakes says, ‘sensory detections of God's presence’ (358). To illustrate, he gives the following quote from William Barclay's The Mind of St Paul:

A great artist tells us that it was his father who taught him to see and to love beauty. His father used to take him out in the evening time…One evening there was a sunset of surpassing majesty and splendour, and at the sight of it his father stood up, removed his cap and looked at the splendour of the dying sun, and said: ‘My son, it is God.’

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Professor P. W. Gooch attempts to wean the orthodox Christian from anthropological materialism by consideration of the question of the nature of the post-mortem person in the resurrection. He argues that the view that the resurrected person is a psychophysical organism who is in some physical sense the same as the ante-mortem person is inconsistent with the Pauline view of the resurrected body; rather, according to him, Paul's view is most consistent with that which affirms the disembodied survival of the person. ‘I want to argue’, he writes, ‘for the thesis that a Pauline resurrection body may well be ontologically the same as a disembodied person (204).’ I intend to show that Professor Gooch has failed to provide any support for this view and indeed that his own view falls prey to the criticisms which he has raised against other views.

The title of A. P. Martinich's article is a misnomer. What he is defending is not the doctrine of infallibility as defined by the First Vatican Council and as understood by Roman Catholic theologians, but his own highly personal and, to my mind, entirely mistaken interpretation of the doctrine. This interpretation derives from the fact that some purportedly infallible utterances contain the expression ‘we declare that…’. This leads Martinich to believe that such utterances are declarations rather than statements and since declarations, as he appears to understand the term, create facts rather than express them, he concludes that it is logically impossible for an ‘infallible utterance’ to be false. The papal claim to infallibility is thus no longer open to question since ‘the fact-making quality of infallible utterances guarantees their correctness’.

In the above reply Professor Reichenbach repeatedly announces or suggests that my thesis is this: the view that persons are resurrected in some physical sense is inconsistent with the Pauline view of the resurrected body. Having consulted both my original intentions and my text, I must affirm again my basic point in section III of the article: the belief that resurrected persons are not embodied is not incompatible with what Paul says about resurrected bodies. While not wishing to attribute such a belief to Paul himself (pp. 205, 211), I claimed that seeing resurrected persons as non-corporeal is a ‘supportable interpretation’ of the Pauline concept (p. 205), not forbidden by the text (p. 211), whereas the materiality of the resurrected body is ‘not necessarily implied’ (p. 209). So, of two interpretations, I have not attempted to show one inconsistent with the text; I have instead tried to argue that a rival interpretation is also consistent with the same text.