The post-war expansion of university faculties climaxed in the early 1970s. Since then, there have been more professional philosophers than ever before in history: a startling claim, but sober truth. In analytic philosophy, they have worked with more rigour and better training than even the Scholastics. It would take a surprising lack of talent among us, or perhaps argue some deep defect in the questions we ask, if the result were not more progress in philosophy than most periods can boast. And in fact, those who know what progress in philosophy looks like can see a lot of it: just compare Malcolm's 1960 piece on the ontological argument with Plantinga's 1974 treatment in The Nature of Necessity, and then both with Oppy's book on the subject.

Perhaps it's been a golden age. If the age in general has been golden, in analytic philosophy of religion you could make a case for platinum. My first request, which comes along with the back-pat, would be simply: keep it up, please, in the same rigorous, creative mould.

There is, to begin, the theist–atheist debate. If argument is war, the war this brings to mind is the First World War. Early on, there were cavalry charges. These ran head-on into massed machine guns. All they produced were dead horses. Aquinas rode five arguments towards atheism, and John Mackie three premises towards theism. Again, most think, dead horses. We're all in trenches now, lobbing books at each other. One way further debate could proceed is Graham Oppy's: get best formulations of theism and naturalism and compare their theoretical virtues, including what sorts of theories they can offer over a wide range of metaphysical issues. I'd like to see this approach prosper. Among the traditional arguments, approached the traditional way, one topic I think has been underserved is the moral argument for God's existence. If I were not a theist, I might well be a moral sceptic. For me, the only games in town metaphysically are theism and naturalism. I have a hunch that the best version of naturalism will have no place for moral realism, and I very much doubt that moral non-realism can give morality the sort of status we think it should have. So I think theists ought to jump on this sort of moral argument, not least because evolutionary naturalists have been making part of the case for them, the part that says ‘no God, no moral realism.’ (It's rude to refuse a gift.) Sketches of this sort of argument are in the literature, but to do it properly would be a huge undertaking, perhaps more for a committee than for a single author. Really to press it home, one would have to do a lot of work in metaphysics (what is the best version of naturalism, and if it does not permit moral realism, why prefer it to others that might be more congenial to that?), in meta-ethics, and even in substantive moral philosophy. Still, I'd like to see it done. Atheists can also get active on the ethics front. Richard Dawkins hurls all sorts of moral opprobrium at the biblical God, and more respectable sorts made that case in the collection Divine Evil (Bergmann et al. (Reference Bergmann, Murray and Rea2010)): I wasn't at the conference that volume came from, but a number of theists have told me they thought the atheists had the better day. Again, there is much more to mine here, and of course each side will thereby keep the other gainfully employed.

Theists and atheists should also look to their flanks. The religious landscape in the West has shifted in the last forty years. In a recent survey, 30 per cent of British adults expressed beliefs fairly classed as pantheist. However you class Hinduism, large-scale migration from India has made it a presence. Many Christian philosophers go into the field because they want to be able to answer questions Christian students have about their faith. Increasingly, I think, those questions will include not just the stock ‘why shouldn't I be an atheist?’ but things like ‘why shouldn't I be a Hindu?’ Atheist philosophers who want to rescue the world from religious belief will also need answers to that one, not least because Hindus will increasingly turn up in their classrooms. So analytic philosophers need to pay more attention to conceptions of God beyond standard Western theism, and to arguments for and against the existence of such a God. As to the latter, any argument for an objective teleology in things would be natural theology for one sort of pantheist deity. Such natural theology would be noxious to theist and naturalist alike, albeit for different reasons.

Turning to questions about the West's divine attributes, there has been a trend toward work not just on the bare theism that dominated discussion till the 1970s, but on the full doctrines of the Western religions. Christians have worked on the Trinity and the Incarnation; the Association for the Philosophy of Judaism is applying analytic philosophy to distinctively Jewish concerns. There is a lively interest in analytic philosophy of religion in Teheran. I suspect that if it ever became politically possible, we'd see this sort of work in the Muslim world as well. All this is entirely proper: the field is called philosophy of religion, and religions have doctrines beyond bare theism. There is a huge amount of room for further work on such topics: apart from Swinburne's volumes, most of Christian theology, let alone its history, has barely been touched. One direction this could go might be called sectarian. The Christian work I've seen has been almost entirely on doctrines shared by the major branches of Christianity. There are also views distinctive of Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox. These also deserve attention, as does the history of arguments between these traditions' theologians. It could turn out that less really separates the traditions than they tend to think. Alternately, it could turn out that sharpening our perceptions of the differences sharpens and revives debate between them. Either would be a good thing in its own way.

I think philosophers of religion should also turn in what for most would be a new direction: towards the general public, with popular books. I'll mention three large benefits this would have, beyond shedding whatever light we manage to shed.

One is specifically for Christians. Christian clergy are, or should be, largely in the business of providing clear, honest, and convincing answers to questions about the Christian faith. Seminaries by and large do not equip them well to do this. But books about religion sell, many to clergy. Christian philosophers of religion who find appealing ways to package their work for the public can help clergy do their jobs better.

The others are for all of us. Popular theist–atheist debate has become hot and shrill of late. Not coincidentally, it has been dominated by people who are not professional philosophers. It's not that way in the guild. We manage to preserve professional courtesy towards one another. Some of us even have friends on the other side of the aisle. That sort of example should be more widely known. It would good if non-professionals got a sense that those who know most disagree amicably and with respect, and that it is not as easy to make a good case on either side of the issue as popular writers suggest. This would tend to lower the temperature generally. Popular books are a way to get this across, as much by the way we speak as by what we say.

My last point addresses large changes that may be coming in the academic world. The British government no longer funds humanities students. The US states of Florida, North Carolina, and Texas have followed suit. These policies mean to shrink humanities enrolments, directing students to technical or science subjects instead. They may well do. Pennsylvania is moving aggressively to use the Internet to close entire philosophy departments in its state university system. California and other states are looking hard at ways to use it to cut ‘instructional costs’, by which they mean faculty posts. Over the medium term, these trends could lead to significant job losses. And we can see what would come with that: reduced graduate student numbers, closure of some graduate courses, higher teaching loads for remaining full-time faculty, fewer people with less time to read books and journals and so fewer books and journals. All of this is possible because the humanities have little support in the general population. People who have never studied philosophy do not know or care about what we do, or if they know about it, they are suspicious or hostile. In the United States, many students pass through philosophy classrooms to fulfil distribution requirements, and come away unconvinced of the value of what they've studied. We can address this in two ways. Those of us who teach the lower-level modules that fulfil distribution requirements must do a better job of evangelizing for the field. And to reach those we have not convinced, as well as those who never pass through our classrooms, we can show people work on subjects they care about – preferably work they like when they see it. People care about religion more than almost anything else philosophers talk about. Popular works on philosophy of religion can play an ambassador role to the mass of voters whose preferences tell politicians what they can get away with. Of course, if we are to tell them that this is (some of) what goes on in major philosophy departments, major departments must hold their noses and spend a post on a philosopher of religion. So perhaps our first order of business is to suggest to them why it is in their medium-term interest to do so.

In this contribution to the panel discussion on ‘whither philosophy of religion?’ I aim to speculate about the next fifty years of philosophy of religion, suggesting a new dimension for change in Religious Studies. Before this speculation, allow me to make a prediction about the future of Religious Studies and philosophy of religion. I see the outlook for both the journal and the field as very positive. We can be hopeful about the future, even in the face of significant philosophical change.

I predict that philosophy of religion in the next fifty years will have to address, however gradually, its own social and material locatedness. In fact, a nascent awareness of philosophy of religion's location was apparent in Victoria Harrison's ‘Seeing the Dao: conceptual metaphors and the philosophy of religion’; and Brian Leftow has mentioned the need to be aware of other religious beliefs, or gods, and the proofs given for them. But I will stress that philosophy's locatedness is not a question of sociology. Instead it is a truth about the reality of analytic philosophy today: conceptual change coming from our social and material locations in the world has already begun to transform the nature of contemporary epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy.

For instance, old assumptions about scientific objectivity and value neutrality in philosophy are being challenged and, in some case, given up. This does not mean that philosophers of religion will give up trying to be objective and neutral (or fair) in their argumentation. Similarly, rigour, precision, and clarity will remain important to Religious Studies. As we have already heard from the previous Editors of Religious Studies, these qualities are virtues, which remain at the heart of analytic philosophy of religion. Nevertheless, my prediction for the future is something else. Philosophers of religion will be widening the subject matter and conceptual frame of what is written in precise and clear terms. In particular, old conceptions of objectivity and neutrality will be recognized as having been neither objective nor neutral. We have too often been extremely narrow, thinking within the bounds of Christian theism and avoiding more urgent, less materially comfortable matters to do with religions. This cannot last, if we are going to keep up with debates in philosophy and about religion. Becoming more open-minded will be necessary, if we are to keep up with conceptual changes in analytic philosophy, and with the widening field for philosophy of religions – and not just for Christianity. In brief, I propose that analytic philosophy in inevitably ‘going global’ will increasingly become aware of new concepts, in giving up old concepts. For me, this includes what I would like to discuss, ‘thick ethical concepts’ (Williams (Reference Williams and Moore2006), 140, 215–216).

Some of you have previously heard me speak about Bernard Williams's thick ethical concepts and A. W. Moore's distinction between an engaged and a disengaged grasp of these concepts.Footnote ¹ What I will say now assumes both Williams's and Moore's work on thick ethical concepts; yet I freely appropriate their accounts for speculating about our grasp of such theistic concepts as omni-benevolence. So, let me propose that God's omni-attributes are theistically thick ethical concepts. What would make these concepts ‘thick’ and ‘ethical’? Roughly, these concepts – the omni-attributes of God – are recognized as ethical in being action-guiding; that is, they give us normative reasons for action; and these concepts are thick, since understood within, and guided by, the Christian world in which they are grasped in an engaged way. An engaged – rather than disengaged – grasp of a thick ethical concept means that the concept is both action-guiding and guided by its social location, or world. To have an engaged grasp of a thick ethical concept is, according to Moore, for a person to live by it. And note, for Williams, all thick ethical concepts have both evaluative and factual content; so they are never about mere facts or mere values.

Take the omnipotence of God as divine lawgiver. In the social world of theists, in which omnipotence is grasped in an engaged way as a thick ethical concept, it enables theists to act consistent with God's law, while also confident of both divine goodness and divine power. In this way, the Christian world guides the theist's use of its thick ethical concepts. The action of Christian theists is ideally guided by the perfect goodness and perfect power (in the moral laws), which determine their God-given normative world. So, this is a social world where theists share the thick ethical concepts of omni-benevolence and omnipotence, understanding their morality accordingly. Basically, these thick ethical concepts guide the good action of theists. Moreover, they constitute, to some degree at least, theistic knowledge of God, while His omni-perfect attributes make sense within the social world in which these concepts are employed. But note that this knowledge of God will also be vulnerable to what Williams's calls ‘reflection’ (Williams (Reference Williams and Moore2006), 148, 167–171). Upon reflection, the philosopher might decide that a concept like omnipotence no longer guides her action; it might be that the problem of evil has led her to doubt God's power.

To this picture, which I've appropriated from Williams's account of thick ethical concepts in his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, I would like to add the claim that the social world(s) of theists would also come under William's description of a ‘hyper-traditional’ society (ibid., 142–148). This is a society in which both the evaluative and the factual content of its thick ethical concepts derive directly from the Christian tradition; that is, the divine attributes make sense in, and are guided by, a (hyper-traditional) Christian society.

Remember, though, my picture of theistically thick ethical concepts appropriates Moore's distinction between an engaged and a disengaged grasp of these concepts. This is meant to allow me/us to discuss the knowledge evident in our use of theistically thick ethical concepts, in guiding Christian (theistic) action, both as philosophers who have an engaged grasp of the same concepts and as philosophers who might have a disengaged grasp of them. It follows that the Christian theist has an engaged grasp of the concept of omni-benevolence, while it is the non-theist – possibly someone who was formerly a Christian theist – who would have a disengaged grasp of omni-benevolence.

Now, the reason that I have speculated about thick ethical concepts and their role in both guiding action and generating knowledge of a perfectly good, all-powerful divine lawgiver, God, is that this fits with my prediction that philosophers of religion in the next fifty years will become increasingly aware of the philosophical nature of their social and material locatedness. Many will have a disengaged grasp of thick ethical concepts – such as omnipotence – yet they still have to understand the concepts and social world of Christian theists, alongside those of both past philosophers who were theists and some philosophers who remain theists with an engaged grasp of the omni-attributes. This relation of theist and non-theist needs to continue to allow productive discussions about divine attributes, as well as new concept-formation across very different societies, different religious settings, different races, cultural and sexual orientations.

For me, this globally interrelational picture of philosophers of religion will inevitably lead each of us to recognize the social and material locatedness of both our own philosophical point of view on religion and other philosophers' views on religion(s). The social and material diversity of philosophers' thinking and writing today is already becoming evident in the topics and concepts, which they are discussing. Despite a philosophical assumption in philosophy of religion and in the journal, Religious Studies, of gender neutrality and of the equality of all rational subjects in what they think and write, I suggest that we will have to speculate about our assumption of, as already mentioned, scientific objectivity. Has our concept of objectivity been too restrictive? Has it limited too much of what we count as appropriate topics in philosophy of religion? What counts as scientific knowledge has been changing, too. Formerly normative concepts are being replaced by new epistemic norms and new epistemic practices.

One highly relevant, new area of philosophical debate is taking place at the fundamental level of epistemic norms to do with authority, trust, and in/justice. I see these debates being led by two notable women philosophers, the Anglo-American Christian philosopher of religion, Linda Zagzebski (Reference Zagzebski2012) and by the British analytic philosopher, Miranda Fricker (Reference Fricker2007). Previously, I have insisted that Fricker's philosophical discussions of testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice are deeply significant for the assumptions which philosophers of religion have made in their epistemic practices; it is these which I think will continue to challenge the current field of philosophy of religion with ethical and political questions concerning (gender) injustice and implicit bias. But equally we could develop significant discussions between Zagzebski's theory of trust and Fricker's epistemic injustice.

At this point, I arrive at my own philosophical concern with the assumptions concerning gender in the epistemic practices of philosophers of religion, in their debates about the divine attributes, as well as religious knowledge and the problem of evil. Generally philosophical theists have assumed that gender is either irrelevant, or purely a matter of observation, without any philosophical significance. The thought has been that we dismiss gender as unphilosophical or merely a question of biology and/or sociology.

However, recently one of the leading philosophers in the ‘analytic theology’ movement has written about the characterization of God as masculine, raising a question about gender as a divine attribute in perfect being theology, as well as an attribute of God in Christian prayers and creeds. Can it be that God wants philosophers of religion to refer to God as He, a Father and person without a body? Roughly, the assumption has been that no one has ever thought that God really had a gender, where gender is what we can see. In contrast, for a human person we merely have to observe a body to know whether that body/person is masculine or feminine; and God could not have a gender because He does not have a body; we cannot observe Him. And yet, we say ‘Him’. As this hyper-traditional reasoning goes, gender is simply a matter of human observation and not a philosophical matter.

Nevertheless, I would appeal to other contemporary analytic philosophers – especially to their work on the metaphysics of gender, and gender in epistemology – to develop a counter argument that gender is just as much a speculative matter as is God's perfect goodness – and that new understandings of gender are philosophically significant (for Religious Studies) precisely because the traditional theistic God is supposed to have no gender, even while we readily assign one to Him by calling him ‘Father’; even leading analytic theologians are asking about this. Moreover, thinking about gender – and sex – has not traditionally mattered for debates about the theistic God, precisely because it is said that He does not have a body. But this no longer seems to get the philosopher of religion off the hook of philosophical debates about gender: because, for one thing, each of us will give some normative and descriptive content to the claim that God is Father, in the same way in which we give evaluative and factual content to God as all good; or, as I have suggested, to God as a thick ethical concept. This will also affect what we think – whether we state it or not – about our personal relation with Him. All of our other personal relations are gendered; so it would seem impossible to think of God as personal and as Father without speculating about his gender, as a normative and descriptive concept.

Thus, I suggest that gender is a much deeper speculative matter, since we need to speculate about our gender, including the gender of persons and of personal relations. We must speculate because gender is, in one part, determined by our ramified religious beliefs and, in another part, different and changeable according to the thick ethical concepts we grasp in an engaged way; and possibly, according to those thick ethical concepts we give up, while still grasping them in a disengaged way. This latter possibility will become increasingly true, if philosophers change their religious beliefs, give up old concepts and/or address injustice in their epistemic and religious practices. Philosophers of religion will increasingly engage with thinking subjects whose genders are very different from their own.

Moreover, analytic philosophers – young philosophers at the very best Anglo-American departments of analytic philosophy – are engaging with the metaphysics of gender, while showing a renewed interest in the phenomenology of the body as lived in a situation; debating the way our situated bodies determine our gender and sex is a hot philosophical topic currently among BPhil students in Oxford. The process of gendering itself has been shown to be a philosophical matter of speculation. Again we do not know how a person has been gendered by a glance at what we observe. The process of gendering, which marks each of us, it would seem cannot be separated from other social and material mechanisms of subject formation. Speculation about gender is inevitable in a global world, where multiple mechanisms of religion, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality intersection with gender.

It could be said that ‘my gender’ is closer to that of my Christian male colleagues in the Oxford Philosophy Faculty than it is to the young homeless Asian teenager who is a single mum without a Christian upbringing. Gender is not simply being born a woman, being a mother, or having a feminine nature; it is about being a subject shaped by intersecting mechanisms of social and material formation; when race, religion, class, and circumstance intersect with gender they affect what we see as our gender. Similarly when Christian norms (as in thick ethical concepts) intersect with class, social, and economic inequalities they render the gender of the non-philosopher different from the Christian gender ideal of an upper-class, socially mobile, and materially well-off male professor of philosophy of religion living in the US Bible belt.

Thus the speculative nature of gender is going to require debates across philosophy and religions, in order to recognize that traditionally narrow assumptions in Anglo-American philosophy of religion about the role of the body and gender in philosophical debate will no longer be sufficient. New concepts and new knowledge will be required when it comes to articulating points of view in philosophy and in religions. When it comes to philosophy of religion, as I have tried to suggest in this article, gender will matter increasingly, in so far as the concepts and issues debated in traditional theism are both recognized as socially and materially located and challenged by other philosophers in very different social and material locations. Some philosophers would argue that gender affects how it is that we speculate and what it is we speculate about.

Speculation about a personal being who is perfectly good, all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal, free, and without a body might in fact be speculation about a masculine ideal for some philosophers. This was clearly the case for the late Grace M. Jantzen who published many significant articles in Religious Studies in the 1980s and early 1990s; but in the last years of her life, she rejected the masculinism, which, she argued, had marginalized women and some men in the field. Jantzen was clear: the gender assumptions of traditional theism run deep (and, she insisted, are pernicious). But this is/was not generally recognized within hyper-traditional societies; and this is where a narrow-mindedness which claims to be rigorous, precise, and clear undermines its own ability to be self-aware – and so, its reflection in philosophy of religion.

Reflection enabled Jantzen's gendered understanding of (the thick ethical) concepts which were guided by her own society and which had guided her ethical actions. Now, it will be necessary, if we are to reflect (ethically), to begin to speculate about gender and religion, and about the impact of these gender matters upon concepts in philosophy of religion in particular. These speculations will not only raise epistemological issues, but lead to ethical and political questions of right and wrong, justice and injustice. At least I think that philosophers of religion will be forced to recognize what they have been assuming, or not, about gender and philosophy, and that this recognition will open up new horizons for both Religious Studies and philosophy of religion in the next fifty years.

The questions that we philosophers of religion tend to find interesting – for example, questions about the existence of a personal God or about whether such a God could be timeless – seem to us sufficiently general and fundamental to count as philosophical. But still we will admit that some philosophical questions about religion are more general and more fundamental than these. Furthermore, even if we have happened on some of the very most general and fundamental such questions, we may not have thought for a minute about the parameters of our field – about the general and fundamental issues appropriately called meta-issues, issues not in but about philosophy of religion: its proper subject matter, aims, most basic concepts, relations to neighbouring fields, and so on. Of course these two areas are linked, if only because it will be easier to identify with specificity the deepest issues in a field once its parameters have been located.

Now it seems to me that while philosophy of religion owes a great deal to the Christian philosophers who got it going again in the twentieth century, the particular contingent circumstances of its renewal under their auspices have been such that both the most fundamental issues in philosophy of religion and the fundamental issues about philosophy of religion just mentioned have been underserved. Philosophy of religion really got going again when people such as Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga, who held that Christian faith and Christian doctrine had been underestimated or poorly represented in the intellectual realm, decided to do something about it using the latest tools of analytic philosophy. I expect you can see how contingent is this starting point and how particularly focused. And the particular interest in Christianity has continued to define and to dominate work in the field. This is no criticism of pioneers such as Swinburne and Plantinga. As I've said, we should all be grateful for their work. But an adequate or even admirable motive for reviving philosophy of religion need not result in much work that addresses the parameters of the field or penetrates to its deepest issues. It all depends on what that motive is. The motive may indeed be such as to prevent this. And so it has been, I suggest, with the pioneering work of Christian philosophers over the past fifty years.

It is therefore left to others who come after to think in a more focused way about the important matters left to one side by the pioneers. This, I think, is the work we should regard as especially pressing today. If the question is what themes should dominate in the next fifty years, I don't think we could give a much better answer than to say ‘themes arising in connection with the parameters of the field and its most fundamental issues’. For a more specific example of questions about the former than I have so far given, consider the question whether there is a most basic religious idea, which the personal God idea elaborates. And without much work on such questions, we should be able to see that the latter – the most fundamental issues in philosophy of religion – would have to include such questions as whether some form of religious life is overall justified, be it theistic or other.

One way of thinking about whether I'm on to something here might involve comparing philosophy of religion as we see it today with other ‘philosophy ofs’, and thinking about what makes us regard the latter as on the right track or as maturing, when we do. Perhaps these latter would include the philosophy of science or the philosophy of art. So take the philosophy of art. Philosophers of art think, obviously, about what art is, and thus, at least implicitly, about the parameters of their field. Wouldn't we consider it odd if they didn't? But philosophers of religion apparently find the need to think about what religion is – or how it should be understood for philosophical purposes – much less pressing. Reflection on the particular concerns of our founders will suffice to make this unsurprising. At the same time, I hope we will see how many interesting issues those concerns have kept out of our discussions, or pushed to the periphery! Again, philosophers of art, obviously, discuss a range of basic concepts entering into our experience and assessment of art, such as that of beauty or sublimity or the ‘world’ of the artist. But one hears much less about similarly general and fundamental concepts in philosophy of religion – concepts, say, of holiness, or of conversion, or of the sacramental, or of ultimacy. And although the concept of faith is much discussed, generally it has been with the assumption that faith entails belief, an assumption again to be associated with a Christian starting point rather than with a simple philosophical desire for fundamental understanding. Richard Swinburne, to his credit, has developed more nuanced views about faith and has made an attempt at wider religious inclusivity when discussing its nature. And very recently, Christians following the example of William Alston have seen the need for a closer look at the idea of non-doxastic faith. But these are exceptions who, it may be hoped, will, together with non-Christians seeking a fundamental understanding of faith, find themselves in a wider and more noticeable stream of thought in our field's future.

Another way to think about what's missing from philosophy of religion – and this time I have in mind mostly deeper work in the field (rather than the meta-project) – is to think about how much of philosophy, so far, has managed to penetrate the subject, and how deeply and richly it has done so. The larger part of philosophy of religion today is epistemology of religion. The dominance of epistemology, I hypothesize, comes mainly from the felt need among Christian philosophers to show that Christian belief is intellectually respectable. But if we want to get at more fundamental issues about the overall justifiability of a religious way of life, we will need to let ethics into our discussions. I don't have in mind here a discussion of pragmatic justifications for religious belief, which we have already seen in our past. Rather, I mean investigations, fed by work on the meta-project mentioned earlier, into such questions as the following: in what ways can religious faith, whether doxastic or non-doxastic, plausibly be held to realize virtue? (Ironically, the results of such investigation might yield more ways of defending theistic and even Christian faith than would otherwise be available.) Here we have an example of the sort of rigorous interaction between the best ideas of contemporary moral philosophers and fundamental questions about religion that is needed to get something worthy of the label ‘ethics of religion’ going.

It's true that periodically we see discussions of divine command ethics; occasionally, we also see discussions of love or goodness in connection with the divine attributes or the problem of evil. But such discussions hardly dip below the surface of the ethics of religion. To go further, we need the sort of rigorous interaction just mentioned. And we might look for a reciprocal activity as well, which, for example, examines in rigorous detail what various forms of the religious life might contribute to the good life, so obviously a concern of moral philosophers. (Of course the completion of such work would depend on a simultaneous pursuit of the meta-project earlier discussed, whose results would be needed to identify the various forms of the religious life.) It could be that one result of such work would be the overshadowing or complexification of much present work in epistemology of religion, which, as I've suggested, tends to assume that religion must include metaphysical beliefs and that the proper evaluation of religion is to be given in its own (that is, in epistemological) terms. Whether religiousness entails, or most properly includes, metaphysical propositional belief or non-doxastic propositional faith even when it involves positive interaction with religious metaphysical ideas is, I think, another of the fundamental questions we ought to be talking about (this one belonging again, at least in large part, to the meta-project). And the results of doing so may require significant adjustments to our conception of the place of epistemology in our field.

But those metaphysical ideas just mentioned are by any standard important in philosophy, and this brings me to a second point about how we are called to go deeper in philosophy of religion. As I've suggested, much of the metaphysical work that has been done so far in our field has been focused on Christianity or, a bit more generally, on theistic religion. But there are many actual and possible metaphysical ideas in religion falling outside this limit. And there are more fundamental religious ideas outside this limit too, which really ought to attract the interest of philosophers – for example (and it is only an example) the idea of a reality combining metaphysical, axiological, and soteriological ultimacy. Now philosophers of religion have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about the metaphysics of the divine nature on the assumption that the latter is – in some sense relevant to Christianity – personal. But focusing on the fundamental here may lead us to notice, for example, that there is a non-personal category too, which has hardly yet been touched by analytic philosophers (perhaps we'll also notice that ‘non-personal’ doesn't entail ‘impersonal’). This category may well amount to a large disjunction of possibilities each of which could be as subtly treated as personal Godhood, and might need a couple of thousand years of its own to be thus treated! We won't know unless and until we go looking in earnest. Perhaps it will turn out that the disjunction ‘naturalism or theism’ that we so take for granted reflects a seriously immature stage of discussion. Wouldn't it be interesting if both those positions turned out to be false?

The various issues I have mentioned, in and about philosophy of religion, that demand new work can be gathered under the label fundamental issues in philosophy of religion. As I've said, if the question is what should be seen as most pressing now and over the next fifty years, the answer will, I think, point to these issues. We need to become more intentional and less haphazard about what we are doing, and probe more deeply. What Christian and theistic philosophers have done has got philosophy of religion going again, historically speaking, and they have set high standards of clarity and rigour in argumentation that we should meet or exceed in all future work; and their work may very well remain one part of the philosophy of religion no matter how it evolves in the future. But we should also say that a continued focus exclusively or largely on what one finds in Christian or theistic philosophy would be unduly one-sided and force us to settle for less than the deepest and richest conversation we could be having.

In closing, I want to bring some concreteness to these fairly abstract thoughts with a practical suggestion. It is a suggestion about how we might use our journal, Religious Studies, to provide a mechanism for the generation of much more fundamental work in philosophy of religion. Begin by distinguishing between fundamental issues in the metaphysics of religion, fundamental issues in the epistemology of religion, and fundamental issues in the ethics of religion. (Note well that I mean religion here and not just Christian or theistic belief.) Now imagine that we had special issues appearing in these three areas, one following another. Imagine a set of such special issues followed by a fourth special issue focusing on the wider cross-fertilization in thinking about fundamental issues in philosophy of religion, including those belonging to the meta-project I have mentioned, allowed by the ideas and arguments of the previous three. An emphasis on such cross-fertilization, notice, would be an important part of the mechanism because it would ensure that the articles previously published were discussed and that the relevant literature would grow. After the fourth special issue, on cross-fertilization, the cycle could begin again, and this could be repeated indefinitely. There would have to be copious advertising, with an emphasis on how basic and truly relevant to philosophy of religion successful articles will be. Even an indication in such advertising that Religious Studies is particularly looking for such articles might not be enough to generate really good articles sufficient in number to populate a special issue each year, but the plan could be to publish such a special issue whenever it is ready and then to move on to the next one. I think it's not unrealistic to project that if we followed this plan we could in the next ten years complete two cycles.

No doubt this proposal could be refined in many interesting ways, but I hope it will lead to fruitful discussion, and help me to achieve my goal of saying something useful as well as true.