In a recent issue of Religious Studies Kevin Corcoran has criticized my arguments for the impossibility of theistic experience (i.e. an experience which is phenomenologically of God). Building on, and amending, criticisms already levelled against my views by Nelson Pike (in the latter's Mystic Union), Corcoran argues that my views are based on an account of what it is for an experience to be ‘phenomenologically of’ an individual (or kind of thing) which leads to ‘wildly implausible’ results. I here try to show that Corcoran's criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of my views.

Friedrich Schleiermacher is known as the theologian who said that the essence of Christian faith is a state of mind called ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’. In this respect, Schleiermacher's reputation owes much to the influential translation of his dogmatics prepared by Mackintosh, Stewart and others. I argue that the translation is misleading precisely as to the terms which Schleiermacher uses in order to refer to the religious state of mind. I also show that the translation obscures a problem of some substantive depth regarding what Schleiermacher thought to be the nature of pious feeling.

Yong Huang has recently claimed that after the demise of foundationalism, philosophy and theology can turn to Ludwig Wittgenstein's non-foundationalist or coherentist religious epistemology where, it is said, religious beliefs are justified by a ‘reflective equilibrium’ with other kinds of beliefs, with action, and with different ‘forms of life’. I argue that there are very good reasons to reject this reading of Wittgenstein: not only unsupported, it is seriously mistaken. Once the epistemological terms of the debate are properly understood, the evidence indicates that Wittgenstein's view of religious beliefs is a form of foundationalism, not coherentism.

The doctrine of Middle Knowledge presupposes that conditionals of freedom (statements of the form ‘If A were circumstances C, he would perform X’) can be true. Such conditions are, where true, not true in virtue of the truth of any categorical proposition. Nor can their truth be modelled in terms of comparative similarity of possible worlds, because the structure of possible worlds is a necessary one, whereas the connection between antecedent and consequent of a conditional of freedom is a contingent one. Lewis and Stalmaker are committed to ‘conditional fatalism’, the view that things only would go a certain way if they would have to go that way. Although commitment to conditional fatalism does not itself import a commitment to fatalism, it is hard to find a separate motivation for it.

This paper examines Richard Swinburne's definitions of ‘mental property’ and ‘physical property’. After some preliminary tidying up (Section 1), the paper introduces eight putative counter-examples to Swinburne's definitions (Section 2). The paper then considers amendments to Swinburne's account of ‘mental property’ (Section 3) and ‘physical property’ (Section 4) which deal with these counter-examples. Finally, the paper closes with some brief remarks about the metaphysics of properties (Appendix). Along the way, the paper provides various reasons for thinking that Swinburne's definitions are hardly likely to be acceptable to non-theists.

As a personal agent, God's act of creation involves deliberation about His possible courses of action, a decision to act in a certain way, and the execution of that decision. In this paper, I argue that there is good reason to suppose that God's deliberation of the possible worlds cannot make Him temporal. Furthermore, whether we favour a deterministic and indeterministic version of freedom, a model can be constructed of how God timelessly decides to create this world and respond to His creatures. Finally, I argue that the problem of how God executes His decision dissolves, if we adopt a pantheistic viewpoint. This rather unorthodox viewpoint is compatible with other important theistic doctrines.

Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. vii+144.

Swinburne's Is There A God? presents a brief, updated version of his book, The Existence of God, in which Swinburne argued that criteria used in scientific reasoning could be used to argue that God probably exists. This new book is designed for a wider audience than professional philosophers. Nonetheless, there much that is new and of interest to philosophers in Is There a God? For example, there is a discussion of Stephen Hawking's cosmology, some new ideas in the philosophy of mind, and a new way of formulating the argument that theism is a simpler explanation of the universe than is materialism.

The problem of infant suffering and death is one of the most difficult versions of the problem of evil, especially when we consider how God can be thought good to the infant victims by the infant victims. In the first portion of this paper, I examine two theodicies that aim to solve this problem but fail. In the final section, I argue that the problem can be better dealt with by maintaining not that God must redeem the suffering of such children, but that such children are not the sort of beings whose suffering God can or must redeem.

God is good, God is just, God is almighty: only a madman doubts this… Doubtless when their elders suffer these afflictions we are wont to say either that their goodness is being tested…or that their sins are being punished. But these are older people. Tell me what we are to answer about children!

St Augustine, in a letter to Jerome