In Part I, I present two traditional arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge with human freedom; the first of these is clearly fallacious; but the second, the argument from the necessity of the past, is much stronger. In the second section I explain and partly endorse Ockham’s response to the second argument: that only propositions strictly about the past are accidentally necessary, and past propositions about God’s knowledge of the future are not strictly about the past. In the third part I point out some startling implications of Ockham’s way out; and finally in part IV I offer an account of accidental necessity according to which propositions about the past are accidentally necessary if and only if they are strictly about the past.

This essay is concerned with the definition of religion. This definition is developed within a context which recognizes the impossibility of value-neutrality in the definition of words. The definition proposed is applied to three complex borderline cases: Spinozism, Marxism,and economism or free-market ideology.

William James states “Immortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man,” yet the arguments presented in his LECTURE ON IMMORTALITY, while interesting and ingenious, are somewhat less than conclusive in proving that human beings can survive bodily death. Therefore I attempt to clarity the notion of “individual survivor” through an analysis and discussion of various approaches to the problem, before returning to a further examination of James’ thought in the “Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher,” the THEORY OF THE SOUL, the PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY, the VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE and a PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE. James’ often neglected Christian position provides the key to a better understanding of his thought on the topic, and allows me to conclude on a cautiously optimistic note on the possibility of a philosophical proof for human survival.

Philip Quinn’s “On Finding the Foundations of Theism” is both challenging and important. Quinn proposes at least the following four theses: (a) my argument against the criteria of proper basicality proposed by classical foundationalism is unsuccessful, (b) the quasi-inductive method I suggest for arriving at criteria of proper basicality is defective, (c) even if belief in God is properly basic, it could without loss of justification be accepted on the basis of other propositions, and (d) belief in God is probably not nowadays properly basic for intellectually sophisticated adults, There is much to be said about each of these four theses; I shall say just a bit about them. I take the fourth claim to be the most important and devote the most space to it.

In this paper I try to show that three of William L. Rowe’s criticisms of my book, Theism, are much less than conclusive.(1) Rowe agrees that I have established, via my defense of Descartes’s Meditation Five argument for God’s existence, that God is not a non-existing being. He denies, however, that it follows that God is an existing being. In reply, I reject the thesis that something might be neither an existing nor a non-existing object.(2) Rowe maintains that the impossibility of God’s non-existence might consist simply of its being the case that no one can destroy God---a kind of impossibility which is not strong enough to sustain my (S5) modal argument for God’s existence. In reply, I argue that the impossibility of God’s non-existence must be logical.(3) Rowe maintains that it may well be that religious experiencers have experienced God without experiencing him qua maximally great being, so that religious experiences do not provide us with a reason to believe that a maximally great being is logically possible. I argue in reply that if religious experiencers do not experience God qua supremely perfect, then they have no reason to believe that they experience God.

In a recent article in Faith and Philosophy, Wesley Morriston argues that Plantinga’s Free Will Defense is incompatible with his version of the ontological argument because the former requires that God be free in a sense that precludes a requirement of the latter---that God be morally perfect in all possible worlds. God’s perfection, according to Morriston, includes moral goodness, which requires that God be free in the sense that entails that in some possible worlds God performs wrong actions. I argue that Morriston’sintention is based upon a faulty conception of both God’s perfection and His freedom. God’s perfection does not entail that He has moral obligations which in some possible worlds He fails to discharge, and His freely performing an action does not entail that there are possible worlds in which He does not perform it.