The philosophy of religion is an examination of the meaning and justification of religious claims. Claims about how the world is, often embodied in creeds, are more typical of Western religions - Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - than of Eastern religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism, which tend to concentrate much more on the practice of a way of life than on a theoretical system by means of which (among other things) to justify that practice. Hence Western religions have proved a more natural target for the philosophy of religion. The central claim of Western religions is the existence of God; and the two major problems here are: Can a coherent account be given of what it means to say that there is a God, and, if it can, are there good reasons to show that there is or that there is not such a God?

God is said to be personal, bodiless, omnipresent, creator and sustainer of any universe there may be, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and a source of moral obligation, and to have these properties eternally and necessarily. It has been a major concern of the philosophy of religion to investigate whether a coherent account can be given of each of thes

All religions have set a high value on faith. But how is 'faith' to be understood? If it is understood as believing what is probably false, there would seem to be little merit in it. But if it is seen as giving oneself totally to attain a great good (e.g. the vision of God for oneself and others) when it is no more than probable that that goal is attainable, it would seem more plausibly a virtue.

Other claims, common to all Western religions, include the claims that God hears prayers and answers them, sometimes by miracles; that God has revealed certain truths; and that there is a life after death in which the good will enjoy the vision of God and the bad will be deprived of it for ever. A miracle has often been understood as a violation of a law of nature by God's intervening in the world. But then, how can something be a law of nature if it is violated, and so there are exceptions to its operation? Is a purported law of nature which does not always predict accurately really a law of nature? One answer to this is to regard exceptions to the operation of a purported law of nature as showing it not to be a true law of nature only if there are repeatable exceptions: you only show 'All metals expand when heated' not to be a law of nature if you show that when a certain metal is heated under certain conditions, it regularly does not expand. The occasional non-repeatable exception is a violation; and, if brought about by God, a miracle. Hume (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. 10) has a famous argument purporting to show that there could never be a balance of evidence in favour of the occurrence of a miracle thus understood. To show a miraculous event E to have occurred at time t, we need to show first that there is some law of nature which its occurrence would violate. We need a lot of evidence from what has happened on many other occasions to show some purported law L to be a law of nature (e.g. evidence of observers to show that, on many other occasions, objects have behaved in the way predicted by L). But then that evidence will tend to show that L will be obeyed at other times also, including at t. The evidence in favour of the occurrence of E will consist only of the testimony of a small number of observers; and so the force of their evidence will always be outweighed by the force of the testimony of many observers who testify to the operation of L on many other occasions. An obvious response is that the sums are not quite so simple: evidence of observers for what happened on other occasions is only indirect evidence for what happened at t, whereas the evidence of the observers at t is direct evidence and so has much more force.

A very different answer, in the form of a doctrine often called 'Wittgensteinian fideism', has seemed to be implicit in the writings of some modern philosophers. Wittgenstein pointed out that there are very different ways of using language, very different 'language-games', e.g. the language of theoretical physics, of ancient history, of medical ethics, etc. Those who have applied his writings to the philosophy of religion have then seemed to claim that the religious language-game may be understood on its own. Religion has its own criteria for sentences of creeds being true or false, and its own criteria for when and where worship and prayer are appropriate.

There has been a long tradition in Western philosophy of arguments for the existence of God. Most of these arguments are arguments from observable phenomena to a God who, it is claimed, provides the explanation of their occurrence. The cosmological argument argues from the universe to a God who creates it; the teleological argument argues from the orderliness of the universe (either in respect of conforming to laws of nature, or in containing animals and humans in an appropriate environment) to a God who makes it thus; and so on. (One exception is the ontological argument, which has as its premisses pure conceptual truths.) The ar

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