Series Editor’s Preface     15
Author’s Preface     17
Acknowledgments     22

Chapter One: Religion and Philosophy: Notes on Method for the General Reader     27

Introduction to Chapter 1

Truth and Authentic Religion

The Perils and Promise of Speculative Thought

Philosophical Theology

Doing Philosophy
    Language and logic
    Philosophy and responsibility
    Words, mere words
    Philosophy as a developmental discipline
True Religion

Chapter Two: God’s Meaning     55

Introduction to Chapter 2

God’s Meaning as Religion’s Meaning
    God’s religious significance must rest on reasons
    The case against explaining what we do by reasons

Feelings, Mind, and Spirit
    Feelings and their object: The testimony of language
    Feelings and justification: The testimony of practice
    Feeling, spirit, and the religious: The testimony of philosophy
    Feelings and phenomena: Are we self-contradictory?
    Feeling, spirit, incarnation: An exercise in philosophical
    theology
    Feelings, spirit, and truth: The affirmations of traditional religion
    Feeling, spirit, and popular culture
    Feelings and utility: The empirical reduction of spirit
    The human way of being: a reflection on the ultimate

God’s Meaning as Creator
    Beyond physical reality
    Otherness
    God’s explanatory meaning
    Some anomalous aspects of “creation”
    Creation, truth, and meaning
    Creation and meaning: William Barrett’s “Death of the Soul”
    Creation and the false dilemma
    Rationality and truth need no proof
    The familiar argument for Creation
    The “problem” of an eternal universe
    Science falsely found wanting
    Conflating causation and existence
    Creation cannot succeed as an explanatory theory
    Creation as intelligent design
    Why God is ultimate
    The self-contradictoriness of God’s necessity
    God’s “necessity” as God’s legitimacy
    The turn to faith
    Creation as the search for meaning
    Creation versus absurdity
    God’s meaning as purpose
    Mere purpose
    Irreligious Purpose
    God’s meaning as dependent on prior meaning
    The role of inherent meaning
    God’s meaning as authority
    The fallacy of immaculate communication
    The God’s-word-not-man’s dilemma
    Counter-argument
    The attack on logic
    The doctrine of inspiration
    The horrors of ventriloquism and absolute followership
    Meaning without God

God’s Meaning as Ultimate Context: the Logic of Religion
God and Truth: Theism, Skepticism, Scientism, and the Person
    Theism
    The issue at hand
    Absolute creation means mindless obedience
    God’s Absolute creation homogenizes all thought
    Skepticism and Scientism contra the person

Chapter Three: God’s Humanity     149

Introduction
Religion and Knowledge
    Our dependence on the “other”
    Knowledge, belief, faith, and revelation
    Is our talk about “God” reductionist?  
    Epistemology and religious experience
    Knowledge and error
    Logic, knowledge, and reason
    The gap

The Skeptical Challenge
    Skepticism
    Empirical skepticism
    Hume’s indirect deconstruction of the world
    Empiricism as metaphysics
    Skepticism undefeated
    Perspectival skepticism
    Cultural relativism
    Perspectivism rampant
    We cannot “get out of our skin”
    Linguistic perspectivism
    Moral and aesthetic skepticism
    The possibility of moral and aesthetic truth
    The logical barrier to evaluative truth
    Morality as emotional expression
    Emotive skepticism and fundamental moral judgments
    Emotivism’s inescapable skepticism
    Moral judgments as prescriptions
    Prescriptivism’s moral skepticism
    Moral language as prescriptive language
    Moral principles as reasons
    Reasons and truth
    The strangeness of moral obligation
    That moral principles command us
    Moral obligation and the human situation
    The justification of moral principles
    Moral skepticism and the golden rule
    Moral truth and human being
    Morality’s question and the importance of language
    Morality, reasons and human being
    Free will

Knowledge as Miracle
    Miracles and the impossible
    Miracles and mind
    Miracles, mind and God’s will
    Rationality and God’s will
    Knowing and the criteria for “miracles”

Knowledge
    Knowledge cannot be philosophically undone
    Knowledge has no foundation
    The futile search for a foundation
    Knowledge is foundational for mind
    Knowledge is linguistically foundational
    Miracles and contradictions
    Empiricist skepticism redux
    Perspectival skepticism redux
    Evaluative skepticism
    The third-person fallacy
    Doubting “doubting.”
    Knowledge of “things in themselves”
    The secular miraculous
    A note: probability is not enough

Belief
    “Belief” presupposes knowledge
    The importance of belief derives from knowledge
    Belief is intellectual
    The theory of properly basic beliefs
    The idea that knowledge is a kind of belief
    Knowledge is categorical
    Alvin Plantinga’s “properly basic” belief
    Locating one’s basic belief
    Conflating belief and knowledge
    Can circumstances justify belief?  
    Belief and responsibility
    Belief and believing
    Belief for no reason
    The role of evidence
    Fear of knowledge
    Knowledge and “noetic structure”
    The mind at risk

Faith
    Faith and belief are different ideas
    Faith as practical
    Faith and religion
    Objections to faith as practical: Kenny
    Objections: Tillich
    Objections: Kierkegaard
    Objections: John Henry Newman
    Faith as knowledge
    Responsible faith

Revelation
    Revelation through mystical experience
    Revelation and discrimination
    Knowledge as revelation
    Revelation as openness
    Revelation and reality

Chapter Four: God’s Body     321

    Introduction to Chapter Four
    God and Reality
    A Closer Look at Necessity and Existence
    No God Without Necessity
    Barriers and Clarifications
    Divine Necessity and Divine Intention.
    Things in Themselves: Reality
    Reality, Roughly
    Necessity and Reality: Logic and Ideas
    Necessity and Reality: The Physical World
    Physical Necessity Denied
    The Myth of “Regular Connections”
    Necessity Revisted
    The Incompatibility of Science and Theism
    Examples of Incompatibility
    A Counter-Argument
    Necessity and Moral Reality
    Feelings and Necessity
    Feelings Revisited
    Feelings and Normative Reality
    Feeling, Necessity, and Art
    Necessity and Possibility
    Necessity and Irreligiousness: Materialism
    Respecting Necessity: Confucianism and Native American
    Religion
    Orthodoxy, Modernity, and Meaning

Chapter Five: Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Truth, Love, Death     397

    Truth
    Love
    Death

Chapter Six: Responses     412

    Sharon L. Baker
    Herbert W. Simons
    Daniel Liechty

Bibliography     421
Index     427
The Author     431