Paul Helm

The paper begins by describing two episodes of personal grief recounted by Augustine in the Confessions, that at the death of an unnamed friend and thatat the death of his mother, Monica. It is argued that Augustine intended to show that the earlier fried, and an early phase of his grief for his mother, were sinful. However, contrary to arecent account of Augustine's grief, it is argued (by an examination of the later phase of his grief for his mother) that Augustine does not hold that it is wrong to grieve at the death of a loved one, provided that one grieves for the right reason.

Faith and Reason displays in historical perspective some of the rich dialogue between religion and philosophy over two millennia, beginning with Greek reflections about God and the gods and ending with twentieth-century debate about faith in a world which tends to reserve its reverence for science. Paul Helm uses as a case study the question of whether the world is eternal or whether it was created out of nothing, following this theme from Plato through medieval thought to modern scientific speculation about the beginnings of the universe. This Oxford Reader also includes discussion of many other fundamental issues raised by the juxtaposition of faith and reason, including arguments for and against the existence of God, the relationship between religion and ethics, the contrast between reason and revelation as sources of knowledge, and the implications of religious belief for freedom of the will.

The article examines a central methodological tenet of Grace Jantzen's Becoming Divine. In this book she turns her back on what she calls Anglo-American philosophy of religion in favour of what she calls a continental approach. I argue that for her, belief is as indispensable in religion and in the philosophy of religion as it is for the Anglo-American philosophy of religion which she rejects. Further, the only argument that she offers for her position is a genetic argument for the origins of religious belief. Consistently with her position, she does not consider any empirical evidence relevant to this causal claim. However, the logic of such genetic claims is that for every empirically grounded genetic argument for A there is a corresponding genetic argument for not-A. So if such an argument invalidates A, it also invalidates not-A.

In recent years the doctrine that God exists in a timeless eternity has achieved something of the status of philosophical heterodoxy, if not of downright heresy. The arguments against the idea of God's timeless eternity come from two sources. The first of these is Professor Kneale's paper ‘Time and Eternity in Theology’ in which, alluding to the famous definition of eternity by Boethius as ‘the complete possession of eternal life at once’ Professor Kneale confesses ‘I can attach no meaning to the word “life” unless I am allowed to suppose that what has life acts… life must at least involve some incidents in time and if, like Boethius, we suppose the life in question to be intelligent, then it must involve also awareness of the passage of time’

In Part One Paul Helm provides a general discussion of these themes, seeking both to contextualize the debate and to engage with contemporary philosophical discussion of the relation between faith, reason and understanding. Part Two contains five case studies that illustrate the work of seminal figures in the tradition. They include treatments of Augustine on time and creation, Anselm on the ontological argument and the necessity of the atonement, Jonathan Edwards on the nature of personal identity and John Calvin and the ’sensus divinitatis’, focusing on the way in which Calvin has been appealed to by contemporary reformed epistemology

In thinking about God's relation to the world philosophical theologians have taken two lines of thought. In some cases these two views have been held side by side, in others separately. The first has been to conceive of God as existing timelessly, or outside time, and as contemplating the world in one timeless creative gaze. 1 As has often been pointed out, this view is subject to the difficulty of making sense of a temporal order of events in a tenseless mode. God may know that e is earlier than f . But A. N. Prior has forcefully argued that if God's knowledge is outside time this restricts what God knows to those truths that are themselves timeless. The idea of something's being over , or going to happen , or happening now cannot fall within the knowledge of God if he exists timelessly. To replace the indexical words such as ‘now’ and ‘then’ with dates and definite descriptions of places will not suffice because what we know when we know that e is over but f is not is not simply that e is before f. 2