What is religious faith? Contemporary philosophy of religion and philosophical theology provide a bewildering abundance of different answers to this question. In this essay I shall sketch an over-view of some of the literature, in the form of a classificatory schema. I hope that this schema will enable the reader to distinguish with greater clarity some of the various kinds of issue which arise. My focus will be on contrasts between faith and belief.

In general, there are two main approaches to settling the alleged conflict between religion and science. On the first approach, one argues that there is not even the possibility of such a conflict, since the uses of religious utterances are sufficiently different from those of scientific ones to constitute them a distinct logical type. Thus, if religion appears to conflict with science, either this is merely an appearance, or else one of them, at least, is also performing the function of the other, in which case their conflict is really either a scientific conflict or a religious conflict. In no case, however, can the truth of a scientific utterance be any reason for inferring the falsity of a religious one, and much less can it be any reason for entertaining doubts about the religious utterance's logical propriety.

To me the decisive reason in favor of our minds meeting in some common objects at least is that, unless I make that supposition, I have no motive for assuming that your mind exists at all.

It is a current commonplace that if the concept of deity is incoherent then no significant truth-claim is made for a formula like ‘God exists’, for it is neither true nor false but meaningless. This is the problem of factual meaning on which such emphasis is laid by critics like A. Flew, R. W. Hepburn, C. B. Martin, K. Nielsen and P. Edwards. I wish here to counter their challenge.

In a recent articles David Mouton has argued that immortality is compatible with one sort of physicalism. I believe that he fails to establish this thesis and that, moreover, this article contains several misconceptions having to do with the topic of immortality.

In his recent comment (Religious Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, June 1973, pp. 233–5) on my brief essay on concepts of God in this journal (Vol. 8, No. 2, June 1972, pp. 147–52) Peter Slater raises some pivotal questions that I feel obligated to answer.