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Participation in religious liturgies and rituals is a pervasive and remarkably complex form of human activity; this book opens with a discussion of the nature of liturgical activity and then explores various dimensions of such activity. Over the past four or five decades there has been a remarkable surge of interest, within the analytic tradition of philosophy, in philosophy of religion. Most of what has been written by participants in this movement deals with one or another aspect of religious belief. Yet for most adherents of most religions, participation in the liturgies and rituals of their religion is at least as important as what they believe. One of the aims of this book is to call the attention of philosophers of religion to the importance of religious practice and to demonstrate how rich a topic this is for philosophical reflection. Insofar as philosophers have written about liturgy, they have focused almost exclusively on its formative and expressive functions. This book focuses instead on what liturgical agents do. What they do is basic; it is what they do that functions formatively or expressively.

The concept of God according to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism minimally includes the following theses: (i) There is one God; (ii) God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent; (iii) God is the creator ex nihilo of the universe and the sustainer of all that exists; and (iv) God is an immaterial substance that is ontologically distinct from the universe. Proponents of alternative concepts of God, such as pantheism, panentheism, religious anti-realism, developmental theism, and religious naturalism, exclude at least one of (i)–(iv). A number of prominent philosophers, theologians, and scientists have expressed sympathy with alternative concepts of the divine. However, voices raised in defense of these concepts tend not to be taken seriously in philosophy of religion. This book aims to shed light on alternative concepts of God and to thoroughly consider their merits and demerits.

Anselm stated the first modal “ontological” argument for a perfect being’s existence. The argument’s key premise is that necessarily, if anything is a perfect being, it necessarily exists. The modalities here are what we now call metaphysical, broadly logical, or absolute. Anselm’s modal metaphysics is based on power and prevention. Despite this, it is adequate to these modal concepts. Anselm’s Argument defends all premises of Anselm’s argument but the claim that possibly there is a perfect being. In particular, it blocks all extant objections to the key premise. It also provides two arguments for it. One contends that existing necessarily is equivalent to lacking three “less-makers,” and so a perfect being would exist necessarily. The other contends that there is no viable way fully to explicate a perfect being’s contingency. In some possible worlds with no perfect being, a perfect being would possibly exist. But there is (the book argues) no adequate metaphysical account of what would make a perfect being possible in those worlds.

This volume of the ‘Symposium Aristotelicum’ constitutes a running commentary of the first book of Aristotle’s Physics, a central treatise of the Aristotelian corpus that aims at knowledge of the principles of physical change; it establishes that there are such principles and determines what they are and how many. After a general introduction, the ten chapters of the volume, written by distinguished scholars of ancient philosophy, comment on the entirety of the Aristotelian text and deal in detail with the philosophical issues raised in it. Aristotle is here in dialogue with the divergent doctrines of earlier philosophers, namely with the Eleatics’ monism, with Anaxagoras’ theory of mixture, and finally with the Platonist dyadism that posits the two principles of Form and the Great and Small. He employs the critical examination of his predecessors’ views in order to present and formulate his own theory of the principles of natural things, which are fundamental for the entire Aristotelian study of the natural world: form, privation and the substratum that underlies them. Moreover, Aristotle provides us with his own solution to the problem about coming to be and passing away, by distinguishing between coming to be in actuality and in potentiality. The exhaustive analysis of the Aristotelian doctrines as well as the critical discussion of the prevailing current views on their interpretation make this volume an obligatory reference work for Aristotle studies.

Augustine’s Confessions is a masterpiece of world literature. Written by Augustine at the height of his philosophical and rhetorical skills, the Confessions is at once autobiographical, philosophical, theological, and psychological. The aim of the eight essays commissioned for the present volume is to provide an examination and discussion of some of the philosophical issues raised by Augustine. What constitutes the happy or blessed life and what is required to achieve it? What role can philosophical perplexity play in the search for truth? What mental discipline is required for conducting the search? How does Augustine depict the acquisition of truth as a vision of God? What problems arise in the attempt to understand minds, both our own and others’? What is the interplay between what reason tells us is right and what we will to do? What are the impediments to an individual’s moral progress? What impediments to that progress are created by the temptations to indulge in such fictions as dramas and dreams? What is the nature of eternity, and how does eternity differ from time? How should Scripture be interpreted, especially the account of creation of the material world in Genesis? Readers who know only a bit about Augustine may think of him simply as a powerful definer and defender of religious orthodoxy, a figure who ranks behind only Jesus and Paul in the development of a distinctively Christian world view. For such readers the intellectual honesty and psychological candour of the Confessions should come as a pleasant surprise.

In The Philosophy of Philosophy, Timothy Williamson wrote that Peter van Inwagen’s work is among the “liveliest, exactest, and most creative…of the final third of the 20th Century.” This collection of original essays addresses some of the most important and interesting themes from van Inwagen’s work, with selected replies by van Inwagen himself. It is no accident that the themes of this volume are also some of the most cutting-edge and important topics in philosophy today. The volume contains rigorous, original, but readable essays, by some of the most prominent living philosophers, on free will, the structure of ordinary objects, time travel, the problem of evil, God and evolution, and the nature of philosophical success. As such, it will be appealing to readers with diverse interests, and will be essential reading for those working on free will, relational vs constituent ontologies, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of philosophy.

Can it be justifiable to commit oneself ‘by faith’ to a religious claim when its truth lacks adequate support from one's total available evidence? After critiquing both Wittgensteinian and Reformed epistemologies of religious belief, this book defends a modest fideism that understands theistic commitment as involving ‘doxastic venture’ in the face of evidential ambiguity: practical commitment to propositions held to be true through ‘passional’ causes (causes other than the recognition of evidence of or for their truth). It is argued that the justifiability of religious faith-ventures is ultimately a moral issue — although such ventures can be morally justifiable only if they accord with the proper exercise of our rational epistemic capacities. The book canvasses issues concerning the ethics of belief and doxastic voluntarism. William James's ‘justification of faith’ in The Will to Believe is extended by requiring that justifiable faith-ventures should be morally acceptable both in motivation and content. The book conducts an extended debate between fideists and ‘hard line’ evidentialists, who maintain that religious faith-ventures are never justifiable. It concludes that, although neither fideists nor evidentialists can succeed in establishing their opponents' irrationality, fideism may nevertheless be morally preferable, as a less dogmatic, more self-accepting, even a more loving, position than its evidentialist rival.

This volume contains fourteen original Chapters by philosophers, theologians, and social scientists on challenges to moral and religious belief from disagreement and evolution. Three main questions are addressed: Can one reasonably maintain one’s moral and religious beliefs in the face of interpersonal disagreement with intellectual peers? Does disagreement about morality between a religious belief source, such as a sacred text, and a non-religious belief source, such as a society’s moral intuitions, make it irrational to continue trusting one or both of those belief sources? Should evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral beliefs and our religious beliefs undermine our confidence in their veracity? This volume places challenges to moral belief side-by-side with challenges to religious belief, sets evolution-based challenges alongside disagreement-based challenges, and includes philosophical perspectives together with theological and social science perspectives, with the aim of cultivating insights and lines of inquiry that are easily missed within a single discipline or when these topics are treated in isolation.

This book brings together a series of short essays by Chaturvedi Badrinath on diverse topics related to Indian philosophy and thought. Drawing mainly from the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, and the Yoga-vasishtha, Badrinath explores the concept of dharma, central to any understanding of the Indian civilization. The book engages the ordinary reader, who is perhaps unacquainted with formal philosophy, but is in search of meaning in the midst of the pressures of modern life. The moral dilemmas faced by human beings today are not new. In a world increasingly filled with fear, violence, and terrorism, ordinary people seek ways in which to order their lives. An understanding of the foundations of human liberty, happiness, self and the other, self-interest, the basis of fear, and a movement towards freedom or moksha are essential to that quest. Badrinath had an entirely original approach to the six darsanas or world views. In the essays, he has rendered the most sophisticated ideas in language that is simple and accessible. His thoughts were crystallized over a life spent in deep reflection and engagement with Eastern and Western philosophies. In his writing, the most ancient philosophy is shown to have immediate relevance to modern times.

This book is about what it is for there to be a God, and what reason there is to suppose that God to be the traditional Christian God. Part 1 (Chs.1 to 5) analyses the metaphysical categories needed for this purpose – substance, cause, time, and necessity. Part 2 (Ch. 6 to 10) begins by setting out some of the different ways in which the doctrine that there is a divine individual (an individual with the traditional divine properties) can be developed. There can be more than one divine individual so long as a first such individual is necessarily the cause of the existence of the others. Given the supreme moral goodness of cooperating with one individual in sharing everything with a third individual, it follows that if there is one divine individual, there will be three and only three such individuals; hence the necessity of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity – that there is one God consisting of three divine persons. One of these persons may choose to become incarnate, i.e. human, and there are reasons why he would do so.

Investigates whether the claim that there is a God can be spelt out in a coherent way. Part 1 analyses how we can show some claim to be coherent or incoherent. God is supposed to be a personal being, omnipresent, perfectly free and creator of the universe, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, a source of moral obligation, and eternal. Part 2 analyses how these divine properties can be understood in a coherent and mutually consistent way. Part 3 considers divine necessity and claims that God's existence necessarily must be understood as this being the ultimate brute fact on which all else depends, but his having the divine properties necessarily must be understood as his having these properties being logically necessary for his existence. The final chapter argues that, if a God of the kind analysed in earlier chapters exists, he is worthy of worship.

This book investigates on which understandings of the nature of God, it is coherent to hold, that is it is metaphysically possible, that God exists. Part I analyses what it is for a proposition to be metaphysically possible, and shows how this normally reduces it to being logically possible; and then analyses how we can show a proposition to be logically possible. Part II analyses what it is for God to be a person, omnipresent, perfectly free, creator of the universe, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and eternal. It claims that it is metaphysically possible that there exists a being with all these properties—given certain definitions of ‘omniscient’ and eternal’. Part III considers whether that being could have these properties essentially, and exist (in some sense) necessarily; and argues that this is possible only if some of the predicates discussed in Part II are understood in analogical senses.

Democratic states must protect the liberty of citizens and must accommodate both religious liberty and cultural diversity. This democratic imperative is one reason for the increasing secularity of most modern democracies. Religious citizens, however, commonly see a secular state as unfriendly toward religion. This book articulates principles that enable secular governments to protect liberty in a way that judiciously separates church and state and fully respects religious citizens. After presenting a brief account of the relation between religion and ethics, the book shows how ethics can be independent of religion—evidentially autonomous in a way that makes moral knowledge possible for secular citizens—without denying religious sources a moral authority of their own. With this account in view, it portrays a church-state separation that requires governments not only to avoid religious establishment but also to maintain religious neutrality. The book shows how religious neutrality is related to such issues as teaching evolutionary biology in public schools, the legitimacy of vouchers to fund private schooling, and governmental support of “faith-based initiatives.” The final chapter shows how the proposed theory of religion and politics incorporates toleration and forgiveness as elements in flourishing democracies. Tolerance and forgiveness are described; their role in democratic citizenship is clarified; and in this light a conception of civic virtue is proposed. Overall, the book advances the theory of liberal democracy, clarifies the relation between religion and ethics, provides distinctive principles governing religion in politics, and provides a theory of toleration for pluralistic societies. It frames institutional principles to guide governmental policy toward religion; it articulates citizenship standards for political conduct by individuals; it examines the case for affirming these two kinds of standards on the basis of what, historically, has been called natural reason; and it defends an account of toleration that enhances the practical application of the ethical framework both in individual nations and in the international realm.

A theology aims to explicate what God is like, and a metatheology investigates more fundamental issues concerning how to structure such a project and where it should begin. Approaches that ignore this more fundamental investigation risk presupposing stances that do not withstand scrutiny and perhaps would never have been endorsed if considered directly. In addition, approaches that ignore the issue of fundamentality often switch from one set of assumptions to another without noticing the change in perspective that results, giving rise to a chance of incoherence and to an approach that is theoretically disorderly and thus failing to as systematic and elegant as we would like. This work begins with the more basic question of where to begin thinking about God, where it is best to start the project of theology, in a way that offers some hope of a defensible metatheory, from which a complete theology, displaying the kind of theoretical elegance and structure we find in our best scientific and philosophical theories, can be developed.

This book presents new work in philosophical theology on the universe, creation, and the afterlife. Organised thematically by the endpoints of time, the volume begins by addressing eschatological matters — the doctrines of heaven and hell — and ends with an account of divine deliberation and creation. This book develops a coherent theistic outlook which reconciles a traditional, high conception of deity, with full providential control over all aspects of creation, with a conception of human beings as free and morally responsible. The resulting position and defence is labelled ‘Philosophical Arminianism’, and deserves attention in a broad range of religious traditions.

This book is a speculative philosophical theology based on three themes: that a version of materialism is a help, not a hindrance, in philosophical theology; that God develops; and that this development is kenotic, an abandonment of power. The materialism considered in this work is non-reductive: of metaphysical necessity, the mental supervenes on the physical. Materialism leads to the thesis that the primordial God is metaphysically necessary, the limiting case of supervenience. It is speculated that the brain-analogue of the primordial God consists of all the possibilities for creation. It is also speculated that God changes. In the beginning there was a God which loved no one and which was not lovable, but was all-powerful and all-knowing. A sequence of acts resulted in a community of divine love, the Holy Trinity, and a world with many creatures who were autonomous agents. God loved us so much that one Divine Person became fully human and was willing to suffer to show us divine love. This is the kenotic development of God from Pure Will to Unbounded Love. In addition, kenosis provides a new resource for understanding evil. The Primordial God is good but in an inhuman way; why should anyone expect otherwise? But as a result of God's kenotic development, God is now like a loving parent, as the great monotheistic religions teach.

The striking extent of religious disagreement suggests that religious conviction is very often the result of processes that do not reliably produce true beliefs. For this reason, many have argued that the only rational response to religious disagreement is to adopt a religious skepticism that eschews confident religious belief. This book contests this conclusion, explaining how it could be rational to maintain confident religious (or irreligious) belief even in the face of persistent disagreement. Part I argues against the commitment to rigorous epistemic impartiality that underlies the case for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism, while also critiquing highly sanguine approaches to disagreement that allow for an unproblematic privileging of one’s first-person perspective. According to the position defended in part I, justified confidence in the face of religious disagreement is likely to require that one have rational insight into reasons that favor one’s outlook. It is argued that many of the rational insights that are crucial to assessing religious outlooks are not achievable through analytical reasoning but only through having the right sort of emotional experiences. Part II considers the implications for religious commitment of accepting the impartiality requirement favored by “disagreement skeptics.” Challenges are raised to the assumption that a commitment to rigorous epistemic impartiality rules out confident religious belief. But it is further argued that such a commitment would likely make it irrational to pursue one’s favored form of religious life and might lead to normative uncertainty that would prevent rational engagement in any religious or irreligious way of life whatsoever.