A comprehensive and authoritative overview of the most important ideas and arguments in this resurgent field. The text moves beyond the borders of Western theism to more accurately reflect the nature of the twenty-first-century world. Featuring eighteen original essays from leading scholars, this collection offers a wide variety of viewpoints for a well balanced perspective on both traditional and cutting-edge topics in philosophy of religion. Designed for course use, this accessible text includes study questions and annotated further reading lists to stimulate reflection and provide opportunities for deeper exploration of the fundamental questions of the nature of religion.

What kinds of things are redness, hairiness, and humanness. We take such things for granted. And yet, there is great controversy about the ontological nature of such properties. There are three basic approaches: "Extreme Nominalism (properties do not exist), Nominalism (properties exist and are themselves particulars), and Realism (properties exist and are universals)." Moreland argues for the superior explanatory power of Realism in accounting for these realities. While this argument may seem academic, there is a lot at stake for the Naturalistic world view in at least one respect. If, in fact, non-physical properties exist, then the universe is not comprised solely of matter and energy. The door creaks open for other kinds of non-physical entities like numbers, consciousness, and perhaps even God. ~ Afterall

This important new book is a combined anthology and guide intended for use as a textbook in courses on philosophy of religion. It aims to bring to the student the very best of cutting-edge work on important topics in the field. The anthology is comprised of six sections, each of which opens with a substantive introductory essay followed by a selection of influential writings by philosophers of religion: -Religious Epistemology (by Kevin Meeker, Department of Philosophy, University of South Alabama) deals with the rationality and warrant of theistic belief. -Existence of God (by William Lane Craig, Philosophy Department, Talbot School of Theology) presents the cosmological, teleological, axiological, noological, and ontological arguments for the existence of God. -Coherence of Theism (by William Lane Craig, Philosophy Department, Talbot School of Theology) covers the divine attributes of necessity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness. -Problem of Evil (by Timothy O'Connor, Department of Philosophy, Indiana University) treats both the internal and external challenge posed by evil to theistic belief. -Soul and Immortality (by J. P. Moreland, Department of Philosophy, Biola University) explores the substantiality and immateriality of the soul and the implications for life after death of the body. -Christian Theology (by Michael Murray, Department of Philosophy, Franklin and Marshall College) handles problems posed by the Trinity, incarnation, atonement, damnation, and prayer. Presenting a sympathetic view of the topics it treats, Philosophy of Religion provides an ideal resource for studying the central questions raised by religious belief. Features · A combined anthology of readings and guide to the subject · Focuses on contemporary issues in the philosophy of religion · Emphasis placed on the Christian tradition · High quality introductions to each section provide a survey of each topic · Cutting-edge readings chosen by specialists.

As for dualism, much has been said of the violence it does to our unity as psycho-physical creatures, but this is questionable. Multiplicity and disunity are as strong a feature of our existence as psychosomatic unity. We are legion, as the demons say. It is a marvel that all our different parts work together. At best, we are a symphony; but the second violins have quarreled with the wind section, and as we age these quarrels increase. Why should it surprise us if at death the soul separates from the body? Separating is the order of our lives as we tend toward death. If a man's jowls can sink down while his brow stays up, why can't his soul rise up when his body sinks down? All of our flesh is being pulled downward by the gravity of the grave; every day our skin is sloughing off cell by cell; at each stage of life we slough off the skin of a previous stage; and at death we lose what was left of those skins. Perhaps that will be the chance to emerge as the person one was meant to be.

Although social surveys indicate that roughly 80 percent of Americans believe in life after death, it is a belief cherished against the grain of perceived official skepticism; and among academically trained religious thinkers, one finds a greater measure of skepticism than in the population at large. For many, immortality is not a matter for reasoned debate, but is simply ruled out of play, along with guardian angels and statues that weep. It is taken for granted, as if it were a premise accepted by all reasonable people, that no one seriously believes in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, in the life of the soul, the resurrection of the body, or the personality of God as the concrete realities they were once imagined to be.

To medieval Christendom, it was the world beyond the world that made all the difference in the world to this world. The Heaven beyond the sun made the earth "under the sun" something more than "vanity of vanities." Earth was Heaven's womb, Heaven's nursery, Heaven's dress rehearsal. Heaven was the meaning of the earth. Nietzsche had not yet popularized the serpent's tempting alternative: " You are the meaning of the earth." Kant had not yet disseminated "the poison of subjectivism" by his "Copernican revolution in philosophy," in which the human mind does not discover truth but makes it, like the divine mind. Descartes had not yet replaced the divine I AM with the human "I think, therefore I am" as the "Archimedean point," had not yet replaced theocentrism with anthropocentrism. Medieval man was still his Father's child, however prodigal, and his world was meaningful because it was "my Father's world" and he believed his Father's promise to take him home after death.

Despite the wide variation in the circumstances surrounding close calls with death and in the types of persons undergoing them, it remains true that there b a striking similarity among the accounts of the experiences themselves. In fact the similarities among various reports are so great that one can easily pick out about fifteen separate elements which recur again and again in the mass of narrative that I have collected. On the basis of these points of likeness, let me now construe a brief, theoretically "ideal" or "complete" experience which embodies all of the common elements, in the order in which it is typical for them to occur.

A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a low ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.

After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a "body," but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before — a being of light — appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences.

Paradoxically, the problem of man arises more frequently as the problem of death than as the problem of life. It is an important fact, however, that unlike other Oriental religions, where the preoccupation with death was the central issue of religious thinking, the Bible rarely deals with death as a problem. There is no rebellion against death, no bitterness over its sting, no preoccupation with the afterlife. In striking contrast to its two great neighboring civilizations — Egypt with its intense preoccupation with the afterlife, and Babylonia with the epic of Gilgamesh who wonders in search of immortal life, the story of the descent of Ishtar, and the legend of Nergal and Ereshkigal — the Bible is reticent in speaking about these issue. The Hebrew Bible calls for concern for the problem of living rather than the problem of dying. It's central concern is not, as in the Gilgamesh epic, how to escape death, but rather how to sanctify life.

Here we must stress a paradox to which we cannot, I think, direct our attention too closely; theoretically one might have imagined — and this indeed was what many people did in the nineteenth century — that as soon as the majority of men in a given society ceased to believe in an afterlife, life in this world would be more and more lovingly taken care of and would become the object of an increased regard. What has happened is something quite different, the very opposite in fact: this cannot, I think, be overemphasized. Life in this world has become more and more widely looked upon as a sort of worthless phenomenon, devoid of any intrinsic justification, and as thereby subject to countless interferences which in a different metaphysical context would have been considered sacrilegious.

The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.

Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend — man can sympathize with a horse but a horse cannot sympathize with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.

"No, Frank, not here", said the Lady. "Listen to reason. Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know that now. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. No, no, no. Come to us. We will not go to you. Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?

"Son", he said, "ye cannot in your present state understand eternity"; when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless, he brought no message back. But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all this earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering. "No future bliss can make up for it", not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me but have this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conform to his badness and is felled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Bless will say, "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven," and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.

For it is one thing to see the land of peace from a wooded ridge... and another to tread the road that leads to it.

The one principle of Hell is "I am my own".