Most arguments against God’s existence aim to show that it is incompatible with various apparent features of the world, such as the existence of evil or of human free will. In response, theists have sought to show that God’s existence is compatible with these features of the world. However, the fact that the proposition that God exists is necessary if possible introduces some underappreciated difficulties for these arguments.

This article extends the metaphorical trial posed by the authors of In Defense of Kant’s Religion by cross-examining them with two challenges. The firstchallenge is for the authors to clarify their claim that they are the first interpreters to present “a holistic and linear interpretation” of Kant’s Religion that portrays it as containing a “transcendental analysis” of religious concepts, given that several of the past interpreters whose works they survey in Part 1 conduct a similar type of analysis. The second is to compare the assumption pervading Part 2 of their book, that Kant conducts his first “experiment” in the first three Pieces and the second experiment in the Fourth Piece of Religion, with the previously defended view that the two experiments are weaved throughout all four Pieces. After observing several dangers this assumption poses for affirmative interpreters of Kant’s philosophy of religion, I conclude by showing how the authors’ problem-driven hermeneutic led them to downplay various portions of Kant’s text.

This essay replies to four critics of In Defense of Kant’s Religion (IDKR). In reply to Gordon E. Michalson, Jr., I argue that the best pathway for understandingKant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Religion) is to conduct close textual analysis rather than giving up the art of interpretation or allowing meta-considerations surrounding Kant’s personal and political circumstances to govern one’s interpretation. In response to George di Giovanni, I contend that his critique is dismissive of theologically robust readings of Kant for reasons that have very little to do with what Religion actually asserts. Pamela Sue Anderson’s essay, I argue, reads Kant on God according to an empirically-biased stream of British interpretation which makes Kant’s transcendental philosophy appear foreign to its rationalist heritage. Lastly, in response to Stephen R. Palmquist, I suggest that his reading of Kant’s two experiments is done not only in a vacuum, but also according to a perspectival interpretation of Kant that goes beyond what Kant’s writings actually maintain.

In this comment on Firestone and Jacobs’s book, In Defense of Kant’s Religion, I take issue with (1) the authors’ strategy in demonstrating that it is possibleto positively incorporate religion and theology into Kant’s critical corpus, and (2) their intention to focus on the coherence of Kant’s theory without necessarily recommending it for Christianity. Regarding (1), I argue that in pursuing their strategy the authors ignore the fact that Kant has transposed what appear to be traditional religious doctrines to a completely different level of reflection, in effect turning them into imaginary tropes intended to mask otherwise irreducible contradictions in his view of human agency. As for (2), I claim that the authors’ intention runs the risk of being disingenuous, since Kant presented his religion as the true religion, opposing it to historical Christianity (unless the latter, of course, is re-interpreted according to his own precepts).

In this essay, I reply to the above four critics of In Defense of Kant’s Religion (IDKR). In reply to George di Giovanni, I highlight the interpretive differencesthat divide the authors of IDKR and di Giovanni, and argue that di Giovanni’s atheist reading of Kant does not follow, even granting his premises. In reply to Pamela Sue Anderson, I show that if her reading of Kant is accurate, Kant’s own talk of God becomes empty and contemptible by his own lights, and I then show how her empirical bias prompts a significant misreading of IDKR. In reply to Stephen Palmquist, I expose four fallacious maneuvers in his paper, which comprise the bulk of his essay. And in reply to Michalson, I address a series of minor concerns raised in his essay, and then set the record straight on the motives behind IDKR in general and my own take on Kant’s compatibility (or lack thereof) with Christianity in specific.

I briefly describe the unusually contentious author-meets-critics session that was the origin of the book symposium below. I then try to situate the presentsymposium within broader contemporary scholarship on Kant.

In my response-paper, I dispute the claim of Firestone and Jacobs that “Kant’s turn to transcendental analysis of the moral disposition via pure cognition is perhaps the most important new element of his philosophy of religion” (In Defense of Kant’s Religion, 233). In particular, I reject the role given—in the latter—to “pure cognition.” Instead I propose a Kantian variation on cognition which remains consistent with Kant’s moral postulate for the existence of God. I urge that we treat this postulate as regulative. So, in place of pure cognition, “belief in” God grounds our hope for perfect goodness.

There are at least five types of innocence. Innocence of various, but not all, types can be possessed, then lost, and later still regained or even surpassed. The most important of these I call “mature innocence,” which is a confirmed state of character, attained reflectively and by an individual’s exercise of effort and agency, that is highly resistant to sin and moral wrongdoing. Mature innocence can be either a secular or a specifically Christian ideal. To surpass mature innocence is to attain a related ideal of purity of heart.

This essay underscores the significant contribution Firestone and Jacobs make through the very thorough way their book surveys the wide range of recent scholarship bearing on Kant’s Religion. The essay then argues, however, that the complex scaffolding designed to summarize and categorize the varied responses to Kant has the effect of muting the authors’ own very bold interpretive stance. This point is particularly true with respect to their account of the compatibility of Kant’s Religion with the Christian tradition. In addition, the essay suggests that the judicial metaphor of “defense” is overplayed, forcing certain interpretations of Kant into potentially misleading positions for the sake of the interpretive scheme.

Analytically inclined philosphers of religion have commonly assumed that 1) “God” must be defined before arguments for or against his existence can be evaluated 2) the history of religious beliefs is irrelevant to their justification. In this paper I apply the causal theory of reference to “God” and challenge both assumptions. If, as Freud supposes, “God” originates in the delusions of the mentally ill then it does not refer. On the other hand, if “God” originates in encounters with some Entity, no matter how vaguely conceived, then That is God.

According to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the Son of God is truly but only contingently a human being. But is it also the case that Christ’s individual human nature is only contingently united to a divine person? The affirmative answer to this question, explicitly espoused by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, turns out to be philosophically untenable, while the negative answer, which is arguably implicit in St. Thomas Aquinas, explication of the Incarnation, has some surprising and significant metaphysical consequences.

God’s revelation is not uncommonly represented as a past speaking---“God has spoken,” “We have heard.” In order to study how the possibilities of reasoning are affected when the crucial evidence to which reasoning may appeal is a remembered speaking, a parableis offered in which three young brothers dispute whether their mother has called them home. Their arguments necessarily take an ad hominem tum. It is found that the claims of the brother who remembers hearing are provisionally, partially, and prescriptively reasonable. This brother’s position resembles that of St. Paul at Romans 1 :18-32 (“So they are without excuse” ).

The fact that many who are currently interested in spirituality tum to non-Christian sources is related to Augustine’s view of divine omnipotence. which was expressed supremely in his anit-Donatist and anti-Pelagian writings. Distinguishing cosmological, theological, and axiological freedom helps us see Pelgius as right on the second even though Augustine was right on the third. Process theology, by defending cosmological freedom against modem thought, theological freedom against pre-modem thought, and an element of truth in Donatism, provides the basis for a post-modem spirituality.

This paper examines the principle of creation ex nihilo as formulated by St. Augustine and contrasts it with the common-sense principle that “something cannot come from nothing.” It is argued that these two principles, if suitably interpreted, are logically consistent and a creation scenario is described in which their compatibility is demonstrated.

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.

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.

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.

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.