I try in this article to shed some light on what it is and what it is not to understand certain kinds of beliefs, of which religious belief is the most prominent instance. Much has been written on the subject, and I make no apologies either for taking for granted a context for discussion, or for disregarding a number of familiar issues. I try, in particular, to explain why a rather curious thesis about understanding religious belief has found wide acceptance when, on the face of it, it cannot possibly be correct. I begin with one or two points about belief; I then take what I hope is a fresh look at two theses about understanding religious belief; and finally I draw some tentative conclusions about puzzlement, understanding and understandability.

Old philosophical problems never die, but they can be reinterpreted. In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of the problem of reconciling divine omniscience and human free will. Classical discussions of this problem concentrate on the nature of God and the concept of free will. The present discussion will focus attention on the concept of knowledge, drawing on developments in epistemology that resulted from the posing of a certain problem by Edmund Gettier in 1963.

The next contrast, like that between grammatical beliefs and non-grammatical beliefs, has to do with what is believed. My labels for the contrast may be misleading, but I have not found better ones. Some beliefs are ‘existential’, others are ‘non-existential’. You will be misled if the labels suggest my earlier contrasts between intentional and non-intentional or attitudinal and non-attitudinal, or the contrast often made between what exists and what is non-existent. The existential/non-existential contrast is a contrast made in terms of conditions of understanding. By an ‘existential’ belief I mean a belief where what is believed can only be understood to the extent that one has fulfilled certain existential conditions—that is, conditions which existentialist philosophers emphasise, conditions having to do with the personal depth and authenticity of one's commitments, attitudes and general life-experience. A non-existential belief is one which has no such conditions for understanding (though it is often a belief concerning what exists).

In his recent comment (Religious Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, June 1973, pp. 233–5) on my brief essay on concepts of God in this journal (Vol. 8, No. 2, June 1972, pp. 147–52) Peter Slater raises some pivotal questions that I feel obligated to answer.

In a recent book, J. R. Lucas presents an argument to show that if God has infallible knowledge of the future, our will is not free. Thus, Lucas concludes, like the medieval Jewish philosopher Gersonides, that God in creating beings with genuinely free will, abdicates some of his omniscience as well as some of his omnipotence. God could, but will not, determine our choices, since such an exercise of his power would rob us of free will. Similarly, Lucas holds, God could but does not foreknow our future choices since this also would rob us of free will. This argument, from so formidable a foe of determinism as Lucas, merits our most serious attention. However, I believe that there is a way to evade its conclusion, a way which Lucas considers but rejects (in my view too hastily).

In ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’ Moritz Schlick expressed the following view: ‘Everything is knowable which can be expressed, and this is the total subject matter concerning which meaningful questions can be raised. There are consequently no questions which are in principle unanswerable, no problems which are in principle insoluble.’ (page 56 in Logical Positivism edited by A. J. Ayer.) I will refer to this as Schlick's principle, although it is shared by many others. What it amounts to is the view that all meaningful questions can be answered by rational procedures, that is by logical argument or appeal to evidence. It is this view which I wish to challenge, at the same time relating what I have to say to belief in God. For it follows from Schlick's principle that provided the question ‘Does God exist?’ can be meaningfully asked, it is in principle possible to answer it either affirmatively or negatively. Having done so, we would then know, and not merely believe, that God does or does not exist. I will try to show that provided the question ‘Does God exist?’ can be meaningfully asked, no such consequence need be taken to follow.

The rival claims of religion, philosophy and science as dispensers of light have come to the fore in successive periods of history. Betwixt and between them all is the discipline known as theology, a rational study of the concept of God and attendant concepts connected with theistic belief. The dominant period of the connection between religion and philosophy in the west extends from Neo-Platonic thought to the seventeenth century. Before that for the most part philosophy tried to steer clear of ‘mysteries’, and after that philosophy made strenuous efforts to free itself from religion, and even more, from theology. Secular influences on religious language are legion. I mention only a few: governmental analogies (King, government, etc.), agricultural analogies (Shepherd, flock, sower and the seed), analogies from art (Design and Designer), historical approaches of the early Romantic movement (used by Renan and others), and influences from science (Paley's ‘watch’ metaphor, the idea of evolution as shown in the concept of ‘progressive revelation’, the ‘new theology’ of the twentieth century and so on). Recent interest in religious language is part of the last of these influences (influences from science) in so far as the desire to find some empirical moorings for various types of discourse is one of the early springs of the analytical movement. This interest is symptomatic of the trend to rethink ontological matters in terms of epistemology, a trend for which Galileo and Kepler bear a considerable responsibility. Earlier interest in religious language, it must be remembered, was deeply rooted in ontological concern. I refer to the skilled use by Catholic theologians of the method of analogia entis. The basis of this method, and it was a method of argument, was specific beliefs concerning the distinction between finite and infinite being and the relation between them.

It is arguable that without a decline in the credibility of life after death, Western civilisation, with its frenetic attempts to manipulate man's physical environment, could hardly have developed as it did. As long as human life is regarded sub specie aeternitatis, changes in the conditions under which it is lived can hardly be thought of as being of supreme importance. Conversely, current indications of a renewal of interest in the great theme of personal immortality may owe something to the eclipse of our science-based culture and the increasingly precarious nature of life in this world. It is still far too soon to be sure. In the circumstances it may be of interest to look at a work written almost 200 years ago by a man who has often been hailed as the first Russian revolutionary. Though it has never been translated, it is generally known in English as the Treatise on Immortality. Highly literate and articulate, the author affirmed his belief in the indestructibility of the human spirit in face of imminent bodily dissolution. The arguments he deploys are not essentially dissimilar to the terms of the immortality debate today. First, however, a minimum of information about the writer is necessary if his views are not to be presented in a vacuum.

The purpose of the present paper is to formulate and (hopefully) resolve a certain puzzle surrounding God's existence and the standard attributes traditionally assigned to God (omnipotence, perfect goodness, omniscience, and the like).

This paper is a reply to Stephen Davis' ‘A Defence of the Free Will Defence’. With the aid of some elementary modal logic, some of the inner workings of Davis’ argument are explored, and the nature of the opposition of the Davis argument to the Mackie thesis is made plainer. It is concluded herein that while the Davis argument is interesting and illuminating, it is not conclusive, as Davis appears to think, and that the burden of proof remains on the opponent of the Mackie thesis, i.e., the Free Will Defence defender.

The ‘traditional’ view among philosophical (and many other) theologians, that God is eternal not merely in the sense of being everlasting but in the sense of being outside time altogether, has come under sharp criticism in recent years, both from biblical theologians and from philosophers. It is against the latter form of attack, particularly as represented by the detailed criticisms of Professor Nelson Pike, that I wish to try and defend the notion of a divine timelessness.

In two recent papers, Mr Robert Young maintains that all attempts by philosophers to bolster the-violation-of-law concept of miracles are bound to fail and propounds what he claims to be a novel non-reductivist concept of miracles which avoids the conceptual difficulties of the violation-model. His view of miracles is of god being ‘an active agent-factor in the set of factors (out of perhaps several sets sufficient for the event's occurrence) which actually was causally operative’ [p. 123] in an event dubbed a miracle. God is put in among ‘the plurality of causes’ [p. 122, S p. 33] that could determine the event, but if he acts in a miracle, then ‘his presence…alters the outcome from what it (perhaps) would have been if, contrary to fact, he had not been present’ [p. 122]. Young claims that his concept ‘is neither a violation of … laws nor is it a coincidental occurrence religiously interpreted’ [p. 122, S p. 33], and so it avoids the difficulties, which he thinks are faced by the violation-model, of having an intelligible notion of an occurrence of the physically impossible, and also the reductivism inherent in taking mere coincidences as miracles. He also suggests a procedure of settling the epistemological issue regarding particular alleged miracles, an inquiry he thinks he has made possible by having first given a sense to miracles. [p. 126]

Mircea Eliade's book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom has deservedly become a classic, and has reached, as he intended, a far wider audience than the narrow circle of Indologists. The book's popularity may justify the following remarks. It was originally published in French in 1936, then in an enlarged French version in 1954, and in English translation in 1958. There has thus been ample opportunity for revision, and indeed in the second English edition (1969), which we are taking as our text, Eliade notes (p. xi) that he has made ‘numerous minor corrections’. However, the accuracy of his observations on early Buddhism still leaves much to be desired. Let us try to set the record straight.