Paul Elmer More's philosophy was self-styled ‘dualism’, and because developed initially from a student's enthusiasm instigated by a book on Manicheism, has often been misinterpreted. In this paper, on the basis of More's long development, I shall try to survey the nuances of his ‘dualism’ or ‘dualisms’, the various aspects of ‘dualism’ which he developed largely through case studies of thinkers of the past. In a significant way, to parody William James, the Shelburne Essays might well be called ‘The Varieties of Dualistic Experience’, and of course for More ‘dualistic’ was virtually a synonym for ‘religious’. Out of these studies issued a Christian Platonism, or more precisely, a philosophy of the Incarnation, particularly in Christ the Word. The subsequent volume in a series called ‘The Greek Tradition: From the Death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon’ is The Catholic Faith. Although More called his dualism ‘absolute’, and it is sometimes presented as ‘absolute dualism’, the ‘sacramental idea’ at the heart of Christianity is said to rest ‘ultimately upon a dualistic conception of the world, in accordance with which matter and spirit are essentially distinct yet mutually interdependent. It implies on the one side that matter can be indefinitely adapted to spiritual uses, and on the other side that spirit requires now, and, so far as our knowledge and imagination reach, will always require the aid of some sort of corporeal instruments. It points to a divine purpose unfolding itself in a continuous process wherein the stuff of existence is…transmuted into an ever finer medium of order and beauty and righteousness and joy.

In spite of many claims by people who have had the kind of mystical experiences that I want to discuss, such experiences do not reveal any reality beyond the experience itself; nor does the experience itself constitute a cosmic principle such as the Godhead, Absolute, One or Chaos. These experiences are in the last analysis merely subjective experiences. I say ‘merely’ here only to deny that the experiences have any significance for the cosmologists; not to deny that the experience has significant value for the experiencer. It may be that the experiences are the ultimate goal attainable by human beings. Their value does not depend on their being the ultimate truth.

‘I can't believe that,’ said Alice.

‘Can't you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes.’

Alice laughed. ‘There's no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can't believe impossible things.’

‘I dare say you haven't had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

In recent decades, particularly since the publication of Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1917; Eng. trans., 1923) and Gerardus Van der Leeuw's Religion in Essence and Manifestion (1933; Eng. trans., 1938), what is known as the ‘phenomenological’ approach to the study of religion has become extremely popular. I myself, in teaching courses in religious studies, have for a number of years used Van der Leeuw's classic study; it is a work of amazing insight and scholarship, and perhaps the single greatest example ofjust how successful the method of phenomenology can be when applied to a distinct field of study. But it is not only in the domain of religious studies that phenomenologists have made important contributions; in the spheres of social and political theory, for example, as well as in the philosophy of art, the philosophy of psychology, and other areas, there have been notable accomplishments.

It has often been charged that the doctrine of papal infallibility is either false or incoherent. These charges stem, I believe, from a misunderstanding of the logical character of infallible papal utterances, a misunderstanding shared alike by friends and foes of the doctrine. In this paper, I shall argue that the doctrine is both coherent and correct. I devote section I to uncovering some of the sources of this misunderstanding and thereby defending what might be called my negative thesis, namely, that infallible papal utterances are not statements. In section II, I continue defending my negative thesis, not now as an end in itself, but rather as a means of advancing my positive thesis that infallible papal utterances are declarations and have the same logic as other declarations. The latter thesis requires a discussion of the difference between statements and declarations. Section III contains a formal speech act analysis of successful and non-defective statements and declarations with some additional explanatory notes. In section IV, I speak rather generally about the task of philosophical theology in the light of the results and procedures of sections I–III.

I. The argument from design or ‘teleological argument’ purports to be an inductive proof for the existence of God, proceeding from the evidence of the order exhibited by natural phenomena to the probable conclusion of a rational agent responsible for producing that order. The argument was severely criticized by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and it was widely conceded that Hume's objections had cast serious doubt on the adequacy of the teleological argument, if not destroyed its credibility entirely. However, there has been a recent reappraisal of this claim by R. G. Swinburne, who maintains that none of Hume's criticisms have any validity against a ‘carefully articulated version of the argument’. Using an analogical argument based on temporal regularities rather than on spatial regularities (or arrangement of parts), Swinburne claims to have shown that the teleological argument is a legitimate inference to the best explanation whose force depends only on the strength of the analogy and on the degree to which the resulting theory makes explanation of empirical matters simpler and more coherent. Moreover, he claims to have shown that the argument provides support for the Christian monotheistic hypothesis and not merely for the weak claim that the universe was designed (somehow). This is an important claim since it has long been thought that Hume's most devastating blow was dealt when he showed that the teleological argument (if it is admitted to have any force at all) provides just as much support for the negation of certain propositions considered essential to Christian monotheism as it does for their affirmation.

Martin Heidegger's explication of Pindar's assertion that ‘to glorify was the essence of poetry’ puts it quite well. He tells us that for Pindar the word does not derive its force from what is already complete in itself. For then man would be glorifying what is already glorious, that which already has the power to impress men. At best the word then would denote an acknowledgment or a confession of being impressed. Instead, he insists, the word denotes the power of making to appear, or to extol a place.1

‘God is dead’ can mean many things. It can mean that the way God has been thought of is no longer adequate, or that there is no God and never has been, or that human consciousness of God has receded.1 Our concern in what follows begins with ‘the death of God’ in this last sense, in the specific sense of the death of an awareness of God or of an affective consciousness of God. Or rather, this is where half of our concern begins. The other half begins with a phenomenon which is the mirror image of the death of God:the death of persons. By ‘the death of persons’ I mean something analogous to the sense specified for ‘the death of God.’ I mean the death or at least the decline of a consciousness of the inherent worth of persons, of the worth persons have as persons. In Kantian terms the death of persons is the loss of a consciousness of persons as ends in themselves. The death of God and the death of persons are parallel, and, furthermore, they are connected. The connection is not difficult to see, particularly if we remind ourselves of what Nietzsche said about the death of God.

Often we feel there is something odd about death, and especially about our own. This latter at least we often feel beyond our ken. Well, I think in a sense it may be; but in another, clearly is not. Among those who have felt this strangeness is Ramchandra Gandhi who, in an excellent recent work, The Availability of Religious Ideas (Macmillan, 1976), maintained –

There is no difficulty in seeing that I cannot intelligibly conceive of my own death – the ceasing to be, for good, of myself, my consciousness. I can conceive of temporary lapses into unconsciousness, always overcome by a return to consciousness. The difficulty is this: in asking myself the question 'What will it be like to be irreversibly unconscious?' (and the state of affairs here sought to be visualized would exclude all dream activity and dream-thinking of all types), I want both to remain self-conscious and visualize actual loss of capacity for self-consciousness. This cannot be done (p. 39; italics mine).

Although not a great deal has been said about heaven in the Christian tradition, it is part of the traditional notion of heaven that the blessed are in a condition of perfect happiness. In this life we can be happy to a certain degree, but mixed with earthly happiness is disappointment, frustration, and even sorrow. In heaven, by contrast, there is no sadness, nothing is lacking, happiness is complete. The usual way of explaining this perfect happiness is in terms of the ‘beatific vision’ – the face to face relationship of knowing and loving God which the blessed enjoy. On earth we experience only finite objects; nothing that we come to know ever completely satisfies our desire to know, and nothing that we love ever completely satisfies our will. But in the beatific vision we shall be in a direct relationship with the infinite God, who in his boundless perfection will completely ‘fill up’ our capacities to know and love. As the completely adequate object of these capacities, God will make us perfectly happy. As Aquinas puts it, ‘…But if God alone were seen, who is the fount and source of all being and of all truth, he would so fill the natural desire for knowledge that nothing else would be desired, and the seer would be completely happy.’

Of fundamental importance for any epistemology is what philosophers today call ‘semiotics’ which entails a consideration of the issues of semantics, logical syntax, and pragmatics. Semantics has to do with the significations or meanings of the terms or expressions in any particular language. It concentrates on the expressions and their designata. Syntactical analysis is concerned with the rules governing the formal relations among the signs of the language such as in inference or the relation of derivability. And pragmatics is concerned with the meanings the speaker intends to convey by his use of language.Obviously, linguistic and logical nonsense and/or failure to take into account the context of the concrete world, especially that of human interests and intentions, and the issue of applicability would produce a death blow for any attempt at an epistemology.

The concept of revelation is a pivotal one, both in the study of religion in general, and with regard to Christianity in particular. Yet it is a fluid concept that has undergone notable transformations down the ages as succeeding generations have re-interpreted it in the light of fresh presuppositions which they have come to share. My purpose here is to offer a re-interpretation in the light of some contemporary presuppositions which, though not universal, are, I shall argue, sufficiently widely held, sufficiently basic, and sufficiently secure, to warrant accommodation. I shall be concerned primarily, though not in principle exclusively, with the concept of revelation in a Christian context.

There is some important data which has not as yet found its way into philosophic discussions on the problem of evil. Some religious people report that suffering, instead of being contrary to the love of God, is actually a medium in and through which his love can be experienced. This looks highly paradoxical, but it will be our purpose to show that it is intelligible and that it has important consequences for philosophical discussions of the problem of evil.

We have been so much preoccupied with the concept of God lately – Ogden has suggested that it is the central problem in theology – that it is something of a jolt to realize that the doctrine of the incarnation has come suddenly under the sharpest attack from two very different theological directions. There is, coming from one side, the critique of the English theologians in the recently published The Myth of God Incarnate; and then, with a very different kind of agenda, there is the critique of the radical feminist theologians summarily and forcefully stated in the christological chapter of Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father.

Professor H. D. Lewis' distinguished achievements in philosophy of religion are complemented by his admirable and original contributions to philosophy of mind. His Gifford Lectures, The Elusive Mind, are a model of philosophical clarity and acumen; his account of the elusive mind in the Gifford Lectures is developed and elaborated in a later work, The Self and Immortality. Professor Lewis' ability to connect philosophy of mind with philosophy of religion at a fundamental level is an outstanding feature of his work. Philosophical reflection on religion must, at some stage, include an adequate concept of person, thus the importance of the relationship between philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind. Everyone who is concerned with the philosophical aspects of religious studies has good reason to be indebted to H. D. Lewis as a thinker.

In this century the major insight in the field of moral philosophy has been that moral arguments need not proceed by way of the deduction of moral conclusions from non-moral premises. This realisation sprang from a recognition that the purpose of moral argument was not just to get one party to a moral disagreement to assent to a proposition that at the outset of the discussion he denied. If a moral argument was to be able to be considered successful it was insufficient for someone to recognise that an action he had previously considered right was wrong; it was essential that this recognition have an influence on his subsequent conduct. The change in belief was important only in so far as it led to a change in action. And although this insight led people to over diminish the importance of belief and propose various types of non-cognitive theories of ethics, it is none the less true that the acceptance of a proposition of the form ‘action X is wrong’ must have an impact of some kind on the behaviour of those who accept it.

Reacting against philosophers such as Braithwaite, Hare and Van Buren, caught in what not a few would believe to be an essentially positivist rut, John Wisdom and Ilham Dilman forcefully argue that there is more to religion than commitment to a way of life and yet they both are, like Braithwaite and Hare, adamant in maintaining that believers and non-believers need not differ, and indeed will not differ, when they are informed, reflective and philosophically sophisticated, ‘in what they expect by way of a life after death’ and more importantly still – they will not differ in what ‘they infer about what lies beyond the reach of the senses’ (494).1 Moreover, they agree that not only can we not make any valid inferences about what lies beyond any possible reach of the senses, we cannot directly know - encounter, become acquainted with - such a reality either.

While reflecting one day on the enormous difficulties that men have in knowing that there is a God, a completely unexpected and unfamiliar question drifted into my purview – perhaps as a kind of ultimate expression of my philosophical frustration. ‘Indeed’, the question asked, ‘can even God know that he is God?’ At first I thought this query merely amusing. ‘Wouldn't it be funny if God cannot know that he is God! But of course he can.’ So my mind wandered on to other things. The question did not leave me alone, though. It insisted that I take it seriously, and the more I did, the more legitimate, complex, and significant it came to seem - and still does.

Although C. A. Campbell's account of the problem of suffering is articulated in the context of making out a case for rational Theism, it does not stand or fall with the case for rational Theism. It has independent merit as a sustained effort of reason to grapple with the problem of whether the goodness and omnipotence of God are consistent with the prima facie badness of so much of the suffering that exists in God's world. Campbell's views on suffering are to be found in On Selfhood and Godhood (SG), pp. 287–306, and in an earlier article ‘Reason and the Problem of Suffering’ (RPS), published in Philosophy, x 1935, pp. 154–67. In the first section of what follows, I give a summary of Campbell's line of argument. In the second I offer some critical comments on certain aspects of his treatment.1

Whether or not any notion of probability is meaningful in the philosophy of religion has been the subject of considerable discussion. Ranging from our common sense usage in which probability implies ‘possibly’ but not ‘certainly’ to its highly sophisticated usage in pure mathematics, the question of its philosophical foundations is one of the most controversial in logical theory. Some thinkers argue that statistical frequency is the only legitimate notion of probability, and, inasmuch as such frequency is tied to discrete observable phenomena, probability judgments have little, if any, application to religious explanations of the entire universe. Foremost, perhaps, among philosophers of religion in Anglo-American thought who support this concept is John Hick. In this article, I shall delineate Hick's attitude towards probability and evidence and how it relates to his concept of faith. Then I shall raise some critical questions about his analysis and try to show that his view is unnecessarily restrictive – even inconsistent – in places. To look at Hick and probability in focus, however, we must look through the lens of his general approach to epistemological issues.