 The Philosophy of Religion. Broad’s writings on this subject have the virtues characteristic of everything he wrote—thoroughness, lucidity and fairness. Broad rejects the traditional arguments for the existence of God. His essay “Arguments for The Existence of God” (1939) features a searching critique of the cosmological argument and the ontological argument (regarding the argument from design, Broad states that he has nothing to add to the critique of Hume and Kant). He argues inter alia that the conclusion of the cosmological argument has a consequence that few would stomach, viz. that there are no really contingent facts, although many facts “seem contingent relative to our ignorance”. As to the ontological argument Broad claims that the notion of the greatest possible being is “meaningless verbiage” unless the properties that are essential to the notion of God admit of an intrinsic maximum. He argues that that condition is not satisfied. Therefore, the argument is “wrecked before ever it leaves port.” In the latter part of his essay Broad turns to the argument from religious experience (in what might quite well be the first systematic treatment of the argument). The position he takes is, in a nutshell, this. If a person has an experience that she takes to be an experience of an X, it is reasonable to conclude that she did experience an X unless there is some positive reason to think otherwise. To refuse to apply this principle to religious experiences is not reasonable. The question then is whether there is some positive reason to think that religious experiences are delusive. But on reflection it turns out there is no such reason. We may therefore conclude that religious experiences are probably veridical.