The lord whose is the oracle at Delphoi neither utters nor conceals his meaning, but reveals it with a sign.(Heracleitos fragment)

In the eternal truth from which all temporal things are made, we behold the form … and we have within us like a word the knowledge of what we have conceived.(St augustine, De Trin.)

For the invisible things of Him, since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made.(St Paul, Romans i, 20)

The claim that God is eternal is a standard feature of late–classical and mediaeval philosophical theology. It is prominent in discussions of the relation of God's foreknowledge to human freedom, and its consequences pervade traditional accounts of other kinds of divine knowledge, of God's will, and of God's relation to the world. So an examination of the concept of eternity promises to repay our efforts with a better understanding of the history of philosophical theology and with insight into the concept of God. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann's ‘Eternity’ is a forceful, sophisticated presentation and defence of the notion of eternity. Our treatment of eternity will focus on two of Stump and Kretzmann's claims. First, Stump and Kretzmann contend that eternity isa kind of ‘atemporal duration’. We will see that while this is true, it is only part of the story. Second, Stump and Kretzmann claim to provide a viable account of how the existence of an eternal being can be simultaneous with some temporal event. We will see that and why they have not done so.

Philosphy is not necessary to religion, and philosophy in the modern West proceeds without much reference to religion. In so far as religion is taken to be a matter of reverence for the traditional gods of place and people, its rites and stories are as resistant to philosophical analysis as are the works of poets and dramatists. Yet insofar as a religion makes claims about the nature of the real world, claims based on some allegedly special mode of access proper to that religion, then it is bound to come under critical scrutiny. The Socratic method of seeking an analysis of meanings and an exposition of modes of knowledge can be readily applied to any religious believers who claim to understand what religious concepts mean and who further claim that they know some of their beliefs to be true. Although Plato has Socrates participate in sacrifices to the gods, he never considers the rites of ancient Greek religion to be worthy of serious philosophical comment. Instead, he invented his own austere, mathematical, cerebral religion, the contemplation of the Good, which provides knowledge of how to live justly in society. Ever since that time, philosophers in the West have tended to invent their own vastly unpopular religions of intellectual supremacy, and to leave the mass of popular religion to superstition and illusion. Theologians, however, conscious of the need to provide some intellecutal basis for their faith, have tended to adopt the philosophical positions of a few, or even of a few hundred, years ago, and baptize them, sometimes very roughly, into the Christian or some other faith.

Recently there have been in the journals a large number of papers on miracles. The issue debated centred on whether miracles, as violations of natural law by a deity, are possible. Alstair McKinnon, George D. Chryssides and P. S. Wadia contend that the concept of a violation of natural law is defective. Others like Guy Robinson and Malcolm Diamonds claim that the acceptance of miracles constitutes a challenge to scientific autonomy. There have also been defenders of miracles, to name just a few: R. F. Holland, Richard Swinburne and R. C. Wallace. What is, however, overlooked (at any rate not extensively considered) in these polemical discussions is whether theist religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) require miracles, and if they do, whether the concept of a miracle required is that of a violation of a law of nature by God. In the present paper I shall argue for an affirmative response to both questions.

The issue of incarnation in the formative centuries of the Judaism of the dual Torah concerns not the invention of an essentially new conception of God but the recovery of what was among other Judaisms an entirely conventional one. What concerns us is not so much why in light of the prior Judaic systems and their statements, the Judaism of the dual Torah represented God inincarnate form. It is how the incarnation of God attained realization. For in the earlier stages of the unfolding of the canon of the Judaism of the dual Torah, e.g. in the Mishnah, Tosefta, and related exegetical writings, we have no hint of an incarnation of God, and it is only in the final and complete statement of that Judaism that we confront, in full and whole realization, the notion of God with an individuality, a personality, a corporeal character. The answer to that question requires us to pursue two distinct lines of inquiry. The first concerns incarnation – treating as human and fleshly and corporeal what is to begin with either an object or an abstraction – as a mode of thought, not with special reference to God. Here we want to know the point at which, in the unfolding of the canon of the Judaism of the dual Torah, the conception of incarnation serves as a mode of presenting as a human person or personality some thing or some idea. Within this inquiry, further, we want to know precisely how the conception of incarnation comes to expression. The second addresses the issue why is it that in the pages of the Bavli in particular the process of incarnation reaches the person of God?

Julian N. Hartt once observed that Calvin so accentuates divine causation that he denies all secondary agency. A strong statement of God's omnipotence commits Calvin to the position that divine causation is the only connection that has any foundation in reality. And this claim, Hartt noted, places Calvin dangerously close to Spinozism. I have no stake (nor does Hartt) in any analysis that attempts to indicate affinities between Calvin and the Dutch rationalist whom he predates by several generations. But, as Hartt suggested and as I will demonstrate, a persuasive case can be made for Calvin's commitment to a thoroughgoing causal determinism that has God at the helm directing every event. Now one should note at the outset that Calvin has solid theological reasons for stressing the role of God's all-determining will in the course of events. As a Reformation theologian, he is a persistent defender of the utter gratuitousness of grace, thereby denying that the moral, spiritual, and epistemological chasm separating the human and the divine can in any way be reconciled by human being. Yet, for Calvin, grace possesses an omnicompetence – even faith is the gift of grace – which, when examined within the total context of his thought, reveals the radical dependence of the entire created order upon the will of God.

Human thought is unable to acknowledge the reality of affliction. To acknowledge affliction means saying to oneself: I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose.(Simon Weil)

In the Encyclopedia of Religion the articles on Islam and the religions of Iran prompt very different reactions. On the Islamic side a third are good, a third bad, and the rest either of indifferent quality or merely straightforward, as is natural in a work of reference. But not only are the bad articles extremely misleading: they are cast in a framework which cannot fail to produce a seriously distorted overall perspective. For the religions of Iran, however, we are given an admirable series of contributions by Gherardo Gnoli, and it is a great pleasure for a British reader to find, in English, a balanced summary of the results of recent Continental scholarship in this field.

This inquiry is motivated by the question: if atheism is true, is it nevertheless the case that holiness or sacredness is exemplified? I believe the answer to this question is affirmative, and that the path to its affirmation lies in the rejection of the traditional assumption that holiness is a single and simple property of a divinity that eludes analysis. The opposite view, that there are several complex properties comprising holiness, makes it manifest that there are holy beings, even a holy ‘supreme being’, even if there is no God and no gods.

In the present essay our concern will be with some of the earliest documents that shed light on the development of Indian reflections on the puzzles of personal identity. These texts are derived from the Upanisads, which exemplify a type of literature that some philosophers may regard as classic, but not as philosophy. What I will be proposing here is that we attempt to regard such very ancient sources of Indian thought more philosophically, more in the manner that some recent writers have begun to re–examine the Presocratics. I attempt to show that although philosophical method was not yet developed in the early literature under consideration (as equally it was not in Anaxagoras or Heraclitus), several important arguments are nonetheless already emerging there in limine. In surveying these proto–arguments, we will also have occasion to remark on their historical and/or conceptual affinities with the developed philosophies of later ages.

Theological deconstructionism written in a Derridean manner typically consists of twin announcements about the religious character, and significance, of contemporary experience and culture. The first is the announcement of the death of both the transcendent God and His latter-day substitutes, such as the transcendental self, which have provided the religious underpinnings for classical and modern culture, respectively.

The great increase of interest in the study of spirituality and mysticism is reflected in the large number of articles that the Encyclopedia of Religion devotes to various aspects of this topic. As one would expect, there are long entries for ‘Mysticism’ and ‘Christian Spirituality’ and ‘Religious Experience’. In addition to these broad categories, attention is given to more specific aspects of spirituality such as ‘Asceticism’, ‘Silence’, ‘Prayer’, ‘Meditation’, and so on. This is complemented by entries on many of the spiritual giants of the Christian tradition, both ancient and modern. I shall begin by discussing these articles on individuals, and go on to examine the more general articles later in the review. I shall suggest that, despite many merits, both sorts of entry display an editorial policy about which serious questions must be raised.

I have meditated regularly, following simple Buddhist procedures, for more than ten years, and that seems just about long enough for me to start to offer some preliminary account of it, despite the limitations of my progress and experience, and the difficulty of describing the more intimate and less explored reaches of the mind. I think I have learned enough to say that through prolonged spiritual practice one arrives at the springs of action and at root attitudes, and is in a position to be possessed of them in a purer, stronger form. It may seem difficult to see how the practice of philosophy can be reconciled with the practice of meditation, but I shall describe how I have tried to do so, and say how I think the one bears on the other. In fact all I can do in the present paper is to attempt a limited discussion of moral psychology, and its relation to the foundations of ethics, a discussion, I must concede now, in which I waver uncertainly in my expression of the key issues. But I think that I cannot delay indefinitely, and if I can sketch out the terrain even roughly, better work on it can come later. My references to mindfulness and to meditation will be elementary and not systematic, though adequate, I hope, to what I want to say about ethics. What I am writing in praise of is mindfulness, or awareness, which I take to be a virtue that is developed through the practice of meditation or some comparable contemplative activity. I am also concerned for the future direction of philosophy. It seems to me that our attaining to this virtue will transform its practice, so that it moves closer to traditional expectations, somewhat disappointed in recent years, though supposedly less so now. If I am not deluded, there is an interior route towards the great questions of metaphysics, and we shall be known for not having taken it. It is a task for a new generation of philosophers, and I for one still scan the horizon for their arrival.

It is beyond question that most ordinary religious believers would find talk about God as having beliefs strange, puzzling, and objectionable. God doesn't believe things, he knows them, and if some philosophers, overlooking or ignoring this obvious point, still speak of God as having beliefs – well, that says something about those philosophers!

Recently this view of the ordinary believer has received help from an unexpected source, namely William P. Alston, who in his paper, ‘Does God Have Beliefs?’ makes a strong case for a negative answer to its title question. To be sure, Alston's reasons for this conclusion are rather more complex than those we have attributed to the ordinary believer; he specifically eschews a ‘cheap way of winning a victory’ by means of the claim that knowledge excludes belief by conceptual necessity (p. 292). Nevertheless, by a longer train of reasoning he comes to the same conclusion, and since this reasoning involves a new and more adequate conception of divine knowledge, and additionally solves two outstanding problems in thedoctrine of omniscience (the foreknowledge problem, and the problem of divine knowledge of propositions containing essential indexicals), the trip is well worth taking.

Atheists have argued that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of God. They claim that (1) it would be wrong for a person to allow evil which one could prevent, and (2) because God is omnipotent, He could prevent evil. So, (3) since evil does exist, a perfectly good and omnipotent God does not exist. This is the oldest and most pressing attack on theism, and theists have developed a variety of defensive responses to this argument. In this paper I propose to outline a strategy which appears to have escaped recent attention, and to compare this strategy with two more widely discussed types of theodicy.

In Evil and a Good God Bruce Reichenbach presents a theodicy for natural evil. According to Reichenbach, natural evil consists in suffering and pain and ‘states of affairs significantly disadvantageous to sentient beings’ which have either nonhuman causes or human causes for which no human being can be held morally responsible. He attempts to provide a morally sufficient reason why natural evil exists. In this paper I will evaluate this reason.