Philip Devine

Many of us want to say that there is an absolute—or at least a virtually absolute—prohibition on torturing people. But we live in a world in which firm moral restraints of all sorts are hard to defend. Neither contemporary conventional morality, nor any of the available moral theories, provides adequate support for the deliverances of the “wisdom of repugnance” in this area. Nor do they support casuistry capable of distinguishing torture from (sometimes legitimate) forms of rough treatment. I here make some suggestions concerningthe improvement of this situation

Despite the bad reputation of the legal profession, law remains king in America. A highly diverse society relies on the laws to maintain a working sense of the dignity and inviability of each individual. And a persistent element in contemporary debates is the fear that naturalistic theories of the human person will erode our belief that we have a dignity greater than that of other natural objects. Thus the endurance of the creation vs. evolution debate is due less to the arguments of creationists, or to the continued influence of the book of Genesis, than to the reading of the evidence provided by Phillip E. Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley, Law School

It seems clear that the ontological argument can no longer be dismissed as a silly fallacy. The dogma of the impossibility of necessary existence is seriously threatened by the case of necessary existential truths in mathematics, and as for the claim that the ontological argument must beg the question, since by mentioning God in the premise his existence is presupposed, it is undermined by the fact that we often refer to things—Hamlet for instance— we do not for a moment think exist. The doctrine that existence is not a property , insofar as it does not reduce to one of the foregoing points, is very murky, for the sense in which ‘red’ is a predicate and ‘exists’ is not has never been clearly defined. Moreover, the way many believers hold that ‘God exists’ is immune to empirical refutation strongly suggests that we are dealing here with an analytic statement, which is just what the ontological argument should be expected to produce. It seems in order, then, to conduct theological discussion under the supposition that the argument is in fact sound

Caroline Franks Davis here undertakes an assessment of the value of religious experiences as evidence for religious beliefs. She distinguishes this question from that of the veridical character of particular experiences or their value for the person undergoing them or his community. She attends both to the phenomenological variety of religious experiences and the variety of cultural settings in which they take place. She concludes that religious experience can form an important part of the case for what she calls "broad theism"--the belief that there is a "true self" behind the phenomenal ego and that the highest good for a human being is union or harmonious relation with this holy and eternal ultimate reality. Broad theism, she argues, can explain the two most persuasive forms of religious experience--the numinous and the mystical--though it is not enough to ground a living religion.