What is the traditional relation of religion to politics in India? Recent scholarly debate has generated at least two divergent answers. According to one view there is a long standing traditional opposition between religion and politics in India because its highest value (moksa) is renunciatory and asocial. According to another view a separation of religion from politics is contrary to Indian ways of thinking and the present currency of such a picture is the product of various colonialist strategies.

I want to address the question from the perspective of classical Indian philosophy. To be able do so, however, I shall also need to utilize some work in Western philosophy. In particular, I need to say something about the crucial terms ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ and their relevance to the classical Indian tradition. My theoretical approach will be influenced by Western philosophy but my historical focus will be on the Sanskrit philosophical tradition. In this sense there are two distinct philosophical perspectives offered here.

‘...the whole process of human thought, what we call Reason, is ... valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Hence every theory of the universe which makes the human mind a result of irrational causes is inadmissible, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs. Which is nonsense. But Naturalism, as commonly held, is precisely a theory of this sort.’ Thus C. S. Lewis, in the first edition of Miracles. Forceful objections from Elizabeth Anscombe led Lewis to drop this passage from the second edition of his book. But even there he still clung to the general idea that while theism involves no such difficulty Naturalism somehow defeats itself: ‘...our conviction that Nature is uniform ... can be trusted only if a very different Metaphysic is true. If the deepest thing in reality, the Fact which is the source of all other facthood, is a thing in some degree like ourselves – if it is a Rational Spirit and we derive our rational spirituality from It – then indeed our conviction can be trusted. Our repugnance to disorder is derived from Nature's Creator and ours.’ Similar claims have frequently been made by Lewis's supporter Stephen Clark. In a typical passage Clark insists that ‘if we are to be able to trust our seeming capacity to understand the world, we must suppose that our minds mirror or share in the pattern and life which is the foundation of the world’. And now, in the last chapter of his Warrant and Proper Function, Alvin Plantinga has endorsed and developed what he duly acknowledges to be Lewis's idea. Plantinga does not pretend to have formulated a totally cogent argument for Naturalism's self-defeat. But he does think that he has said enough to indicate ‘a promising research program’. In what follows I scrutinize the argument which he sketches out.

Many philosophers as well as many non-philosophers assume that there is no problem about just what religious belief is. They assume that it is something its adherents would like treated along the lines of (if not wholly in the same way as) any other form of belief. But because religious belief does not relate to any empirical entity or person then the belief element in it is conceived of as directed to some trans-empirical or metaphysical realm.

Both Tolstoy and Wittgenstein conceived of religious belief in a very different way from this. They conceded, I believe, that some forms of religious belief do seem to be directed at some apparently trans-empirical Being. However, for them, the genuine religious spirit involves something else. We can best appreciate their shared conception in terms of what I shall call an ‘authentic orientation to the world’.

My purpose in this paper is to elucidate just what this ‘authentic orientation’ consists of and to show how it can be said to be something that both Tolstoy and Wittgenstein had essentially the same view of.

In The Existence of God (1979), Richard Swinburne gave formal expression to his utilization of the cumulative case argument and his application of the probability calculus to the theistic arguments. It is generally agreed, I believe, that this work is meticulous in detail and rigorously argued; it is also, I believe, generally agreed that the conclusion is disappointingly bland – particularly in light of the high-powered apparatus brought to bear on the question of God's existence. It is my intent to show that, perhaps, those disappointed by Swinburne's conclusion were justified in so feeling and that a stronger conclusion follows directly from Swinburne's own arguments and methodologies. Let me state at the outset, however, that this paper is not intended to be either an endorsement or a rejection of cumulative case arguments in general or of the employment of the probability calculus in such applications as the question of God's existence. Rather, I merely seek to assess Swinburne's conclusions on the grounds he lays out in The Existence of God.

It is sometimes held that there is something in the very nature of religious pluralism that undermines the rationality of religious belief. This view, I am happy to note, is beginning to receive the sort of attention it deserves from philosophers of religion. Various arguments from religious pluralism against religious belief have recently been canvassed. But in all this activity, as in the relevant historical discussions, one argument – a probabilistic argument from pluralism – seems largely to have escaped notice. In what follows I develop and discuss a version of the argument, and give an estimate of its force. As I hope to show, it is not an argument to be taken lightly.

It has become almost a commonplace in theological circles that despite the Augustinian echoes sounded by his doctrine of radical evil and his discussion of the need for divine forgiveness in his Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, Kant's understanding of salvation remains through and through Pelagian. Such was the verdict of Karl Barth; more recently, Gordon E. Michalson has made the charge that, ‘Kant's conception of grace and divine aid reintroduces an obviously Pelagian element based on human effort and merit’. Michalson has noted further that ‘if the implicit point of a Kantian view of morality and religion is to equate salvation with the individual achievement of virtue, then there seems to be little role left for a heteronomous grace or divine act to play’. And in a similar vein, Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued that on Kant's scheme God is morally required to forgive the person who has altered her fundamental maxim for the good; salvation is thus understood in terms of a system of rights – that is, it is something that the moral individual can expect as that which is her due. It is something that she merits. Wolterstorff reads Kant's project as ‘probing the implications of our human rights and obligations’, and argues that

If we have a moral claim on someone's doing something, then for that person to do that is not for the person to act graciously, but for the person to grant what is due to us, it is to act justly, not graciously. … Thus Kant cannot have it both ways: he cannot hold that we can expect God's forgiveness, since God's failure to forgive would violate the moral order of rights and obligations, and also hold that God's granting forgiveness is an act of grace on God's part. … God must be understood on the Kantian scheme as required to forgive. Of course this means that a gap begins to open between Christianity, on the one hand, and Kant's rational religion, on the other.

Against those who would dismiss Kant's project on the grounds that it is Pelagian, I hope to show that an analysis of the deep structure of Kant's views on divine justice and grace shows them not to conflict with an authentically Christian understanding of these concepts. To the contrary, Kant's analysis of them helps us to understand the implications of the Christian understanding of grace. An unfolding of these implications will also uncover the intrinsic relations that must hold between God's justice and his grace.

In the course of my argument I will show that Kant works with at least three different concepts of grace, all of them operating on distinct levels. Getting clear on what these concepts are and how they operate is of decisive significance if we are to understand correctly Kant's stand on divine aid. Accordingly, the paper will be organized into three parts. In my first section I deal with Kant's general conception of grace. An in-depth analysis of this most general notion should reveal why Kant is not Pelagian. In the second part of the paper I identify two more particular concepts of grace. While the general description still applies to both of them, they are distinguishable from one another in important ways. Not taking account of the differences between the two will make it very difficult to understand Kant's project in the Religion coherently. In fact, it is because the differences between the two concepts have been ignored that commentators such as Gordon Michalson have principally viewed the Religion as a failed attempt to weave together two world views, that of Bible and that of the Enlightenment. While I distinguish between these two concepts in my second section, there I focus on the one which I identify as practically useful. The third section is devoted to an investigation of Kant's understanding of the last of these concepts.

The doctrine of hell has always been troublesome for philosophical theology and has particularly captured the attention of philosophers in the past decade. Those contemporary philosophers who defend the doctrine of hell inevitably argue that it is the result of free choice on the part of the damned. Richard Swinburne in his ‘Theodicy of Heaven and Hell’ says that ‘It is good that God should not let a man damn himself without much urging and giving him many opportunities to change his mind, but it is bad that someone should not in the all-important matter of the destiny of his soul be allowed finally to destroy it.’ William Lane Craig believes that hell is consistent with God's justice and love since ‘Those who make a well-informed and free decision to reject Christ are self-condemned ... By spurning God's prevenient grace and the solicitation of His Spirit, they shut out God's mercy and seal their own destiny.’ Similar passages could be culled from the recent books of Jerry Walls and Jonathan Kvanvig.

Disregarding variations in approach, the strategy common to these philosophers is to argue that hell is neither unjust nor unloving if it is freely chosen by the damned. Such a strategy is moot if it turns out that no one can choose hell. In a much discussed passage, Thomas Talbott denies that the notion of freely choosing hell is coherent. I will first examine Talbott's argument in an attempt to understand it. Then I will show how the published responses to Talbott fail to strike at the heart of the argument. Finally I will present my own defence of hell, based on two strands in early church theodicy.

Our Western society has been much shaped by scientific thought and discoveries. We not only depend practically on science in our ways of living. Our thinking and attitudes are also shaped by the theories and methods of science. The overwhelming intellectual and practical successes of science that lie behind this impact of science on our culture have led some people to think that there are no real limits to the competence of science, no limits to what can be achieved in the name of science. Or, if there are limits to the scientific enterprise, the idea is that science, at least, sets the boundaries for what we humans can ever achieve or know about reality. There is nothing outside the domain of science, nor is there any area of human life to which science cannot successfully be applied. This view (or similar views) has sometimes been called scientism. (It has also been labelled scientific naturalism or scientific materialism. I will, however, try to show why we should not attribute the same meaning to these three terms.)

In this essay I analyse and criticize George Lindbeck's treatment of truthand meaning in his book The Nature of Doctrine. After an explication of his general project in this work, I turn specifically to his discussion of truth and of its interaction with his understanding of meaning. Although he is primarily concerned with these issues as they relate to religious doctrines and language, he insists that the distinctions he makes are not religiously derived. Rather, he borrows and adapts widely from philosophy, anthropology and social theory, bringing the insights adopted to bear on the issues of religion generally, and the development and change of religious doctrines in particular.

I argue that his treatment of truth and meaning is very problematic on several counts: on truth, his theory fails as an adequate theoretical description of our pretheoretic intuition of truth, and it is finally parasitic on this intuition. On meaning, his reduction of meaning (and sometimes truth) to use or usefulness leads him to an incorrect categorization of doctrines as (essentially) performative utterances and second-order, non-assertive discourse, rather than as propositional attitude statements. I contend that they most properly fit in the latter category. Finally, I suggest the inadequacy of his treatment of truth and meaning redounds to the failure of his theory of religion and doctrine as a whole.

In a number of recent articles D. Z. Phillips has presented an exposition and defence of his views on theological realism, views which are based on his reading of Wittgenstein. Eschewing the label ‘anti-realist’ so often applied to his philosophy, Phillips claims that realists and anti-realists alike have ‘failed to appreciate how radical a challenge Wittgenstein makes to our philosophical assumptions’ (SL 22). Far from supporting non-realism above realism, Phillips – following Wittgenstein – wishes to upset the realist/non-realist debate by showing that the two theories offer equally confused accounts of belief and language, and specifically religious belief and language. If this claim could be substantiated it would, of course, be an extremely significant conclusion, and it is unfortunate that Phillips vacillates in his expression of it. Realism and non-realism are variously described as ‘empty’, ‘idle talk’ or like opposing ‘battle cries’ (RB 35), but despite being vacuous they are ‘not intelligible alternatives’ (RB 34) and ‘equally confused’ (RB 34). Furthermore, realism is ‘not coherently expressible’ (RB 45) and involves an ‘incoherent supposition’ (SL 23) and at least some forms of it can be ‘refuted’ (RR 194). In addition to their vacuity, unintelligibility and incoherence, both theories are also said to be guilty of a misguided reductionism (RB 47), and realists are charged with being ‘foundationalists’ who espouse a theory that ‘cannot take seriously the central religious conviction that God is at work in people's lives’ (RB 47).

In this paper we will evaluate the arguments Phillips advances for rejecting realism and non-realism, and consider the sort of problems they might pose for realists. Phillips opposes the positions the realist and non-realist take on two crucial issues: first, whether religious practices and life are grounded in the belief that God is real, second, whether God may be considered to be an object. These are the two principal questions that occupy Phillips in his work on realism; it is in connection with the former that he puts forward his ‘refutation’ of realism. We aim to assess his arguments for their philosophical cogency and value.

In ‘The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions’ (Religious Studies 32, June 1996) Gavin D'Costa argues that ‘pluralism must always logically be a form of exclusivism and that nothing called pluralism really exists’ (225). He sees himself as doing a ‘conceptual spring cleaning exercise’ (225). However the result is to obscure clear and useful distinctions by confused and confusing ones. Some further spring cleaning is therefore called for.

The religious pluralism that D'Costa is referring to is the view that the great world religions constitute conceptually and culturally different responses to an ultimate transcendent reality, these responses being, so far as we can tell, more or less on a par when judged by their fruits. And the religious exclusivism to which he refers holds that one particular religion – in his case Christianity – is alone fully true and salvific, the others being either wholly misleading, or inferior imitations of or inferior approximations to the one ‘true’ religion.

The free will defence attempts to show that belief in an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God may be rational, despite the existence of evil. At the heart of the free will defence is the claim that it may be impossible, even for an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God, to bring about certain goods without the accompanying inevitability, or at least overwhelming probability, of evil. The good in question is the existence of free agents, in particular, agents who are sometimes free with respect to morally significant actions and who are thereby responsible, at least in part, for those actions and the personal character which is a function of and exhibited in those actions. The free will defender contends that if an agent is to be truly responsible for her actions, then she must be free to bring about both good and evil, and God cannot be blamed if such agents choose to bring about the latter rather than the former.

I have argued that since (i) intentional agency requires intention-acquisition, (ii) intention-acquisition implies a sense of an open future, and (iii) a sense of an open future is incompatible with complete foreknowledge, then (iv) no agent can be omniscient. Alternatively, an omniscient being is omni-impotent. David Hunt continues to oppose this reasoning, most recently, in Religious Studies 32 (March 1996). It is increasingly clear that the debate turns on larger issues concerning necessity and knowledge, but let me here offer a few comments in defence of my position.

William Lane Craig has given an extended defence of the following version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God:

Since everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence, and since the universe began to exist, we conclude, therefore, that the universe has a cause of its existence. We ought to ponder long and hard over this truly remarkable conclusion, for it means that transcending the entire universe there exists a cause which brought the universe into being ex nihilo ... we may plausibly argue that the cause of the universe is a personal being.

This ‘Kalam’ version of the Cosmological Argument may be laid out formally as follows:

(i) The universe began to exist.

(ii) Everything which begins to exist has a cause. (The Causal Principle.)

(iii) Therefore the universe had a cause.

Anselm begins his famous ontological argument by describing God as the being greater than which none is conceivable. His description seems coherent and intelligible. Consequently a divine being thus described may be spoken of as existing in the understanding. But if so, He must actually exist as well, otherwise a being greater than Him could possibly exist, namely, one of whom the additional great-making-term ‘actual existence’ may also be predicated. The result would be a contradiction, for we would now have to concede, that contrary to our initial claim, the being harbored in our understanding is inferior to the greatest since another being who had actual existence would be greater. To avoid the contradiction we must concede actual existence to the absolutely perfect being.

In his recent two volumes on epistemology, Alvin Plantinga surveys contemporary theories of knowledge thoroughly, and carefully defends an externalist epistemology. He promises that in a third volume, Warranted Christian Belief, he will present John Calvin's sensus divinitatis as an epistemic module akin to sense perception, a priori knowledge, induction, testimony and other epistemic modules. Plantinga defines the sensus divinitatis as a ‘many sided disposition to accept belief in God (or propositions that immediately and obviously entail the existence of God) in a variety of circumstances’. Like other epistemic modules, it produces beliefs in an appropriate cognitive environment, aims at the production of true beliefs, and generates beliefs which have a high statistical probability of being true.

Everyone will die. Death is your fate, whatever your virtues or vices, whatever your hopes, whatever good or evil deeds you might otherwise have committed. Although millions died in Nazi and Stalinist concentration camps, some escaped death – but only temporarily. For in the world at large billions have died and will die, and no one will forever escape the grave.

No one doubts that Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is one of the most important, one of the most artistically contrived, and certainly one of the wittiest works in the history of philosophy. Further, the Postscript has often been accorded a kind of centrality in the Kierkegaardian corpus. Kierkegaard himself seems to have assigned it some such role. He informs the reader in the ‘First and Last Declaration’ that he originally intended the Postscript to be his last word before retiring from his authorship (hence part of the significance of the word ‘concluding’). In The Point of View for My Work as an Author he himself calls it both ‘the turning-point’ (repeatedly) and ‘the middle point’ in the sense that ‘this work concerns itself with and sets “the Problem”, which is the problem of the whole authorship: how to become a Christian’. Aside from the way in which Kierkegaard may have conceived the Postscript as being central or pivotal to his whole enterprise, certainly scholars have sometimes treated the Postscript as, at least in some ways, his magnum opus and summum verbum – as I would also. But our concern here is not with the centrality of the Postscript but with the centrality within the Postscript. Most everyone would, I think, acknowledge that a central section of the Postscript may be identified, though I would go farther and claim that within this a central, pivotal, solitary statement may be identified.

Much recent Kierkegaard scholarship has paid particular attention to various aspects of the literary form of his authorship, such as the significance of his writing under various pseudonyms. The focus has been upon ‘style’ as much as ‘content’; the ‘how’ as much as the ‘what’ of Kierkegaard's writing. Within this context, James Conant has argued, in a series of articles, that there are important parallels between the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (authored by the Kierkegaardian pseudonym Johannes Climacus) and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. However, Conant argues that these parallels have been misunderstood by previous commentators. The main aim of this article is to challenge Conant's argument that the Postscript should be read as containing ‘nonsense...simple, old garden variety nonsense’. This, we shall see, relies upon a particular view of the significance of Climacus's ‘revocation’ of the text. The commentators whom Conant wants to criticize allegedly hold that the Tractatus and the Postscript provide ‘essential preliminary noise’ to the realization that those issues which really matter – in particular, ethics and religion – cannot be spoken of. These commentators, according to Conant, insist on the existence of a kind of speech ‘that lacks sense while still being able to convey volumes’.

Opinions differ on the importance of epistemology for Tillich. While Dorothy Emmet suggests that epistemology is in the centre of Tillich's thinking, Henel believes that Tillich did not take any serious interest in epistemology proper. Since Tillich tries to downplay the relevance of epistemological concerns, it would seem that Henel's judgement is closer to the truth. Yet, as a consequence of his German philosophical education, Tillich employs a rather specific notion of ‘epistemology’ which relies heavily on (Marburg Neo-) Kantian usage. But if we utilize a notion of ‘epistemology’ that is not informed by this rather specific philosophical background, as I intend to do, we will come to classify several tenets of the Tillichian approach to be epistemological ones that he himself might not have labelled thus. Given such a notion of ‘epistemology’, epistemological concerns cannot be denied to play an important role in Tillich's approach.

I will proceed in three steps, each representing one section of the paper. First, I will begin with what I call Tillich's attempt to ground the transcendent on the transcendental in his German period. Second, I will demonstrate in which way Tillich's epistemology undergoes changes after his emigration to the U.S., utilizing his ‘critical phenomenology’ as a paradigmatic case. Third, I will provide a critical evaluation of Tillich's epistemology and suggest ways of reconstructing it.