What is a religion? As Socrates might have asked: What feature do all and only religions share in virtue of which they are religions? This question may seem misguided. Confronted with the diversity of behaviour called ‘religious’, we may easily doubt the existence of a single feature that explains the religiosity of every religion. To use Wittgenstein's term, there may only be a `family resemblance’ between religions, a network of features generally shared, most of which belong to each religion, no one of which belongs to every religion. Efforts to produce the single defining feature tend to streng-then the doubt that one exists. Is a religion an attempt to approach God or appropriate the sacred? Then Theravada Buddhism is not a religion, for God and the sacred are irrelevancies in this tradition. Is a religion a practice that expresses and advances the ultimate concern of a large number of people? Then the stockmarket is a religion and so is the drug trade. Such accounts are typically too narrow or too general, unless they are circular. Perhaps religion has no essence.

It is Alvin Plantinga's contention that a belief in the existence of God constitutes a rationally justified ‘basic belief’ for which evidence is neither required nor desired. This defiant proposal to jettison any evidential requirements for justifying one's theistic belief has led to a great deal of discussion, with some theists welcoming the possibility that evidence may no longer be necessary to justify one's convictions, and others finding themselves expressing a deep concern that such a move might border on a type of ‘noninitiates-be-damned’ withdrawal from academic discourse. Whatever the outcome of these initial reactions to his project, Plantinga has at least succeeded in ‘changing the subject’, to borrow a phrase from Richard Rorty, though it is most certainly not the sort of change of subject which Rorty himself would welcome - a renewed defence of religious rationality.

If the contemporary rebirth of the ontological argument had its conception in Norman Malcolm's discovery of a second Anselmian argument ([2]) it had its full-term delivery as a healthy philosophical progeny with Alvin Plantinga's sophisticated modal version presented in the tenth chapter of The Nature of Necessity ([8]). This latter argument has been the centre of a huge body of literature over the last fifteen years, and deservedly so. One is impressed that this version of Anselm's jewel is valid and sound if any is.

In a footnote to ‘Of Miracles’, David Hume defined the miraculous as ‘… a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.’ In the opening pages of the essay itself, however, Hume dropped the reference to agency in favour of the simpler declaration that any ‘ … miracle is a violation of the laws of nature …’ This preference for the simpler formulation was deliberate. According to Hume, it was their violation of natural law that provided the genuinely intimidating obstacle against miracles. As the course of his argument makes clear, Hume believed that the massive accumulation of evidence supporting the regularity of nature invariably would overwhelm any meagre reports to the contrary. For this reason alone, questions of divine agency could be ignored as purely academic.

Thinking about God often leads to thinking about ‘God’. And it has never been completely clear how best to understand this little English word. Traditionally, ‘God’ has been taken to be either a description or a name. However, a third option has recently captured the attention of philosophical theologians. It is claimed that just as one should think of, say, ‘humanity’ as a kind term, so one should think of ‘God’, or perhaps ‘divinity’, as a kind term. But given the tight link between semantics and metaphysics, if one is tempted to understand ‘humanity’ or ‘divinity’ as kind terms, then one will naturally begin to think of humanity and divinity as kinds. Characterizing divinity this way, a primary task of philosophical theology is to give a characterization of the divine kind-essence. In this paper, I want to consider the claim that divinity is profitably construed as a kind-essence, and argue that the way that this has typically been understood is not altogether adequate. I shall then present and develop an alternative understanding of this kind-essence approach that takes the analogy of `supernatural kinds’ and natural kinds much more seriously. I will conclude by considering some objections.

Let us think of faith theistically, or at any rate Christianly, as an all-embracing personal relationship between a human person and the divine person, God. Such a relationship essentially involves some act ostensibly ‘by’ the human person and directed towards God – for example, an act of believing propositions about God because one believes God because one loves (‘believes unto’) God. Among many puzzles about this conception of faith, there is one which concerns the authorship of faith; this problem may be initially expressed as a question: Who is the agent-cause or ‘author’ of the essential act(s) of faith? There seem to be religiously compelling reasons for each of two diametrically opposed views.

The Dalai Lama is fond of quoting a statement in which the Buddha is said to have asserted that no one should accept his word out of respect for the Buddha himself, but only after testing it, analysing it ‘ as a goldsmith analyses gold, through cutting, melting, scraping and rubbing it’. The Dalai Lama is often referred to as the temporal and spiritual leader of Tibet, but in truth as a spiritual figure His Holiness, while respected, indeed revered by almost all Tibetans, usually speaks from within the perspective of one particular tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, that of the dGe lugs (pronounced ‘Geluk’). Founded in the late fourteenth century by Tsong kha pa, the dGe lugs has always stressed the importance of reasoning, analytic rationality, on the spiritual path. This dGe lugs perspective is by no means shared by all Buddhists, at least not in the form it there takes. Nevertheless it does represent an important direction in Buddhist thinking on reasoning and the spiritual path which can be traced back in Indian Buddhism a very long way indeed, and it is in the light of dGe lugs thought that I want to contemplate two points which seem to be crucial in Raimundo Panikkar's approach to interreligious dialogue and understanding: first, that Reality, Being, transcends the intelligible, the range of consciousness, and second, that understanding this is the only basis for tolerance, not seeking in one way or another to overcome the other.

One of James's earliest philosophical essays sounds a note which will echo through his writings. Criticizing Spencer's definition of truth as (‘mere’) correspondence, James asserts that a ‘correspondence’ between the mind and reality is a ‘right mental action’, and rightness is determined by ‘pure subjective interests …brought… upon the scene and corresponding to no relation already there’ (EP 11).

Toward the end of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Philo catalogues the ‘frivolous observances’, ‘rapturous ecstasies’ and ‘bigotted credulity’ of ‘vulgar superstition’, concluding that ‘true religion, I allow, has no such pernicious consequences: But we must treat of religion, as it has com monly been found in the world’ (Hume, 1947: 222–3). This would be a mild enough sort of caveat were it not nigh on impossible to determine exactly what counts as true religion, and how it figures in Hume's argument. Typically, answers to this puzzle have required identifying the positions of the discussants, and then arguing that one of them represents Hume's views. A catalogue of the options may prove instructive.

(I). In a number of papers I have sought to discuss and cast some doubt on a certain strategy of response to an argument that purports to show that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. This argument proceeds from the alleged ‘fixity of the past’ to the conclusion that God's foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom. William Lane Craig has (rather vigorously) criticized my approach to these issues. Here I should like to respond to some of Craig's claims. My goal is to attempt to achieve a clearer, more penetrating view of some of the issues pertaining to the relationship between God's foreknowledge and human freedom. The focus here will be on a strategy of response to the incompatibilist's argument which is associated with William of Ockham.

In his recent paper ‘Gratuitous Evil and Divine Existence’. Keith Yandell declares the deductive argument from evil solved. He notes, however, that what persists is a probabilistic version of the argument from evil, one concluding from the evidence of evil (gratuitous evil in particular) that it is ‘highly improbable’ that God exists. Yandell attempts to refute this probabilistic argument from gratuitous evil; as shown below, however, he fails.

Modern historical criticism of the gospels and Christian origins began in the seventeenth century largely as an attempt to debunk the Christian religion as a pious fraud. The gospels were seen as bits of priestcraft and humbug of a piece with the apocryphal Donation of Constantine. In the few centuries since Reimarus and his critical kin, historical criticism has been embraced and assimilated by many Christian scholars who have seen in it the logical extension of the grammatico-historical method of the Reformers. The new views of New Testament exegesis and of early Christian history are important and well known. Many New Testament scholars would now hold with Schweitzer and Bultmann that Jesus was a preacher of the imminent end of the world. He may have secretly considered himself to be the Messiah, or he may have simply sought to pave the way for another, the apocalyptic Son of Man. After his execution, his disciples' experiences of his resurrection forced on them a conclusion already implicit in his teachings and personal piety: that Jesus was indeed, or had become, the Messiah, and was in fact God's Son. They expected he would soon return as the Son of Man he had predicted.

It is said that faith in a divine agent is partly an attitude of trust; believers typically find assurance in the conception of a divine being's will, and cherish confidence in its capacity to implement its intentions and plans. Yet, there would be little point in trusting in the will of any being without assuming its ability to both act and know, and perhaps it is only by assuming divine omniscience that one can retain the confidence in the efficacy and direction of divine agency that has long been the lure of certain religious traditions.

The problem at the heart of the faith/reason relationship can be set out as follows. Faith implies total commitment whilst reason requires a certain detachment. One cannot be totally committed yet rationally detached at the same time. Therefore faith and reason are two mutually exclusive approaches to religion. Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has offered a very interesting perspective on this problem. He has argued, albeit indirectly, that this faith/reason question is a modern problem generated by a certain set of liberal and relativist presuppositions. This paper will summarize Maclntyre's contribution to the discussion, and then point to some of the inadequacies of his account. I will be arguing that commitment to a tradition is largely justified by internal explanations for disagreement. Faith seems to need an intolerant explanation for different traditions. Therefore, MacIntyre is, in fact, handling liberalized forms of the traditions. By tackling MacIntyre's work from the faith/reason angle, I hope to show certain more fundamental problems with his work.

Have process philosophers understood what Christian theologians are trying to say? The process critique of the broad tradition of Christian theology is motivated, at least in part, by the belief that the God of the Church's traditional confession is too unreservedly transcendent; that is, that he is insufficiently related to his creation. In response, process philosophers have defended a ‘dipolar’ concept of God according to which God is fully transcendent in his ‘primordial nature’ and fully immanent (i.e. ‘surrelative’) in his ‘consequent nature’. The dipolar construction undoubtedly solves the ‘problem’, but the question remains whether there really is a problem to be solved in the first place. Many Christian theologians, after all, have understood their faith, as well as their attempts at the rational exploration of their faith, to depend upon the divine-human relationship constituted by God's own self-disclosure. They have further understood the meaning of the terms of their theological explication to be immanent to this same experiential context of divine-human encounter, within which relationship with God is the primary reality experienced. As a particular aspect of the controversy aroused by the process critique of Christian theology, therefore, the question arises whether process philosophers have taken adequate account of the manner in which Christian theology has been conditioned by this context of divine-human encounter. I have no pretensions within the scope of this brief essay to address this question in its full generality, either with respect to the multifarious theological positions which the process critique has engendered, or with respect to the wide range of difficulties involved in any attempt to understand the relation of the Creator to his creation.

Rudolf Otto has often been criticized for not showing enough interest in mystical experience. In this article I want to demonstrate how misplaced this criticism is and to show that it is based on an erroneous interpretation of the relationship between numinous and mystical experience in his work by most of his students. I shall argue that, particularly in The Idea of the Holy, Otto offers an account of the nature of mystical experience which should be of considerable interest to students of mysticism today, not least because it calls into question many of the assumptions that are presently made about mysticism by phenomenologists and philosophers of religion. Most of this article will be devoted to an examination of references to mysticism in The Idea of the Holy and to an evaluation of Otto's observations about the nature of mystical experience, and I shall conclude that Otto's account of the relation-ship between mystical and devotional forms of religion provides a significant, but frequently overlooked, insight into the nature of mystical experience.

Recently Robert Forman has attempted to muster support for the largely abandoned position that mystical experiences cross-culturally include an unmediated, non-relative core. To reopen the debate he has solicited essays from likeminded scholars for his book, The Problem of Pure Consciousness. Predictably the focus of the volume rests on the refutation of the position most notably expounded by Steven Katz in his influential article of 1978, ‘Language, Epistemology and Mysticism’.