Focusing on God's essential attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, being eternal and omnipresent, being a creator and sustainer, and being a person, I examine how far recent discussion has been able to provide for each of these divine attributes a consistent interpretation. I also consider briefly whether the attributes are compatible with each other.

Dombrowski and Murdoch offer versions of the ontological argument which aim to avoid two types of objection – those concerned with the nature of the divine, and those concerned with the move from an abstract concept to a mind-independent reality. For both, the nature of the concept of God/Good entails its instantiation, and both supply a supporting argument from experience. It is only Murdoch who successfully negotiates the transition from an abstract concept to the instantiation of that concept, however, and (...) this is achieved by means of an ontological argument from moral experience which, in a reversal of the Kantian doctrine, depends ultimately on a form of the cosmological argument. (shrink)

It is argued that philosophy of religion should focus not only on the epistemic justifiability of holding religious beliefs but also on the moral justifiability of commitment to their truth in practical reasoning. If the truth of classical theism may turn out to be evidentially ambiguous, then pressure is placed on the moral evidentialist assumption that one is morally justified in taking a theistic truth-claim to be true only if one's total evidence sufficiently supports its truth. After investigating some contemporary (...) attempts to retain evidentialism in the face of ambiguity, a modest fideism is proposed which may serve both to ground an important ‘political turn’ in contemporary philosophy of religion and to prompt re-examination of dominant assumptions about the content of core theistic beliefs. (shrink)

Transcendental materialism is a philosophical perspective that uses German Idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and natural science to offer a materialist account of subjectivity and culture. This essay compares this philosophical framework with recent work in the study of religion and philosophy of religion. While transcendental materialism has until now been unconcerned with religion, it offers parallels with this recent work. It differs, however, in its specific understanding of the material dimension of the dialectical relationship between abstraction/conceptuality and practice/embodiment.