Great observations and great questions! There are three views that are defended today by philosophers in the theistic tradition (the tradition that holds that there is a God who exists necessarily, is all good, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and the creator and conserver of the whole cosmos). On a traditional view (going back to Boethius and Aquinas) God is eternal in the sense that there is not before, during, or after for God. God's creating the cosmos as well as all God's acts are timelessly willed. On this model, God timelessly wills successiveness (the origin and sustaining of a changing cosmos) but God does not successively will (God wills at one time to do X and then do Y). This position is defended by many philosophical theists such as Brian Leftow at Oxford University. He is the author of the book Time and Eternity, which you might check out. Then there is the view called Open Theism which holds that God is in time God is present throughout all the created order NOW and is...

Good question. Today it seems that there are versions of Christianity which are very heterodox, treating the incarnation more as a saving metaphor rather than a real event and so on. On the traditional concept of God in Christianity, I think few Christians would describe God as "anthropomorphic." Yes, the Bible and Christian creeds refer to God as a creator, a being who has power, knowledge, super-abundant goodness, and one might think of this as anthropomorphic insofar as humans are also creators and have power, knowledge, and some of us are good (!), but the attributes of God in traditional Christianity God is omnipresent, eternal or everlasting, Triune, not just knowing but omniscient and this seems to amount to thinking of God as quite distinct from an anthropomorphic deity such as we find in Greco-Roman contexts of Zeus / Jupiter, etc... A more vexing issue today is over the question of whether the God of Christianity should be thought of as personal or as three persons (in the Triune Godhead...

My colleagues may disagree, but I think philosophical reflection on religion (pro and con) has never been stronger. Leading journals like Religious Studies, the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Sophia, Faith and Philosophy, Philo, Philosophia Christi, and others are vibrant places to find contemporary debate on all major topics in terms of religion (the existence of God, the relationship of religion and ethics, religious pluralism, etc). 'Philosophy of religion' is the top pick for topics in philosophy at Oxford by students, and in a poll of several years ago, it was the second preferred area of philosophy in the USA by students (the first choice was ethics). The profession of philosophy today contains many secular atheists and some are hostile to religion and its practices, but it also contains many Christians, people of Jewish faith, Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist philosophers.... So, I would say there is no consensus on religion among all philosophers today, but there is also no...

Interesting! There are significant numbers of self-identified "religious persons" throughout the world in different philosophy departments. You may find mostly Muslim philosophers in countries where the culture is Islamic, but that is not always true, as can be seen in the UK and USA. My own school includes a Hindu professor who shares a position with the religion and philosophy and you can find a guide to the many Christian philosophers working in the English-speaking world by looking at the Society of Christian Philosophers website. As for philosophy and spirituality, there are a few secular philosophers who have sought to promote a kind of spirituality without any religious affiliation or theistic framework (this was a project of Robert Solomon, for example). For a fascinating essay by one of the greatest living philosophers on the desire for some kind of spirituality, you should check out Thomas Nagel's essay "Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament." I think this is on his NYU ...

There is quite a good literature on aesthetics that gets at spirituality. I co-authored a recent book (out last year) with the American artist Jil Evans: The image in mind (Continuum) that gets at the aesthetic dimension of different ways of viewing the world (principally theism and naturalism) and we have a co-edited book Turning Images with Oxford that deals with aesthetics and religion / spirituality. An older book which has an excellent collection of different thinkers is: Art, Creativity, and the Sacred edited by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. Gordon Graham has a good book: The Re-enchantment of the Word (OUP 2007), and Oxford has published an amazing series of five books on aesthetics and theology or the sacred by David Brown. It is disappointing that the Routledge volume did not include more on spirituality, as many of those who contributed to aesthetics historically and quite recently have had spiritual concerns. Plato's dialogue on beauty, the Symposium, is partly about the ascent of the soul to...

The doctrine of the Trinity has been receiving more attention today than almost ever before by philosophers. One can easily parody the Trinity as holding that one plus one plus plus one equals one! But there is a huge, nuanced body of literature in which philosophers have proposed various models in which there can be one God and yet the divine nature is not homogonous, but constituted by three persons. Really easy access to the latest work can be found on the free Enclopedia of Philosophy (online) for the entry "Trinity." I myself favor the periochoretic model, defended by Stephen Davis. Here are three recent books: Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? by Thomas McCall An Introduction to The Trinity by Declan Marmion and Rik van Nieuwenhove And just published last month, I think, you might consider The Cambridge Companion to The Trinity edited by Peter Phan. The Stanford article is written by Dale Tuggy, a Christian philosopher who is skeptical of the different models, and so that entry will...

I thought I would add just a tad more. Here is one argument against the Trinity and a reply: It has been argued that the Trinity involves Tri-theism or the supposition that there are three Gods (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). There cannot be three Gods for this reason: If there is a God, God is omnipotent. A being is omnipotent if it is maximally powerful; there can be no being more powerful than an omnipotent being. But if the Trinity is true, neither of the persons in the Godhead are omnipotent, because the power of each can be challenged by the power of the other. The Father cannot make a universe, unless the Son or Holy Spirit consent. That is less powerful than if only the Father exists. Here is a reply: If God exists, God is essentially good. That is, God cannot will that which is not good. If the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share an essentially good nature, their wills cannot conflict. This seems more plausable when one takes up what I mentioned in my earlier reply: the...

It would be interesting to draw your friend out a bit more on what he means by the scientific method. Is he including non-behaviorist psychology, in which it is permissible to describe and explain people's subjective experiences, employing introspection? Does he include history? Or is his domain only the natural sciences? Even addressing these questions will, I believe, bring to light that your friend is operating on something that goes beyond the "scientific method"; he is employing a philosophy of science. Science alone (physics....) will not tell you that it is the only reliable basis of knowledge, and if a physicist says this, then she is being more than a physicists; she is a philosopher of physics or science. In any case, questions about ethics, religion, and meaning go beyond science (I suggest) and in fact science as a practice must presuppose some ethics (minimally one must be trustworthy / not falsify data, etc) in order to be practiced at all. Questions about whether or not there is a...

This seems like a very insightful interpretation of what may unite some compassionate secular persons with people of faith who are also compassionate agents today. I especially appreciate your implied view that persons of faith who care for others and are compassionate are not doing so simply in obedience to (for example) divine commands. Both the religious and secular person may well transcend narrow self-interest, but I suggest there still is a significant difference between the two. A religious person in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition as well as in Hinduism and Buddhism and other faiths believe that there is something sacred about caring for others. For Abrahamic faiths,for example. it is not only good to care for others because they are valuable in themselves, but also because they are created and loved by God. I am not suggesting that people who are secular and compassionate are thereby at a disadvantage or somehow working with an impaired view of vaues. Someone like George Kated ...

As a theist, I would love to welcome you back, but in all honesty I suggest that atheistic philosophers have worked quite hard to argue that life without God can be deep and satisfying and while pleasurable not hedonistic. In fact, one member of this panel, Louise Antony has edited a book called Philosophers without God which you might find hopeful and uplifting. You might also look for Robert Solomon's Spirituality for the Skeptic or The Really Hard Problem:: Meaning in a Material World by Owen Flanagan. Some atheists do place a premium on caring for other persons, but some also care about other things --for example, caring for nonhuman animals or wildlife areas, artwork, science, and so on. If you want to compare atheistic and theistic views of values, you might check out a recent book I co-authored with the American artist Jil Evans' The Image in Mind; Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination (Continuum, 2011). Sorry to hear that you're feeling down! I hope things turn around for you asap.

I suspect that there is no general consensus at this point, though some atheists take the argument seriously (for example, Thomas Nagel in his recent book Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament) and the argument is now often included in stanard anthologies in philosophy of mind. Robin Collins is probably one of the best and clearest advocates of the argument, and I believe he has a book coming out defending the argument. Philosophers who are in the Humean tradition tend to be skeptical about arguments about the cause of the universe, owing to the uniqueness of the universe. In the words of another philosopher, universes are not as common as blackberries --which one might compare and contrast in determining whether our own universe is designed or not. The uniqueness objection does not (in my view) pose a serious problem as there are a range of areas in which we do reach reasonable philosophical conclusions notwithstanding uniqueness (such arguments may be found in epistemology and metaphysics...