Following the warm and enthusiastic reception of his first course of Gifford Lectures, Balfour was asked to give a second course some nine years later, following the end of the First World War, entitled Theism and Thought. The lectures which make up the majority of the volume Theism and Thought complete the project begun in his first course (published in the volume Theism and Humanism in 1914), by buttressing his initial argument with a thorough defence of common sense philosophy and the reliability of sense perception.

John Alexander Smith’s two courses of Gifford Lectures (1929–1930 and 1931) were never published. An outline (see Summary) from the Glasgow University archives is all that is available.

‘Theism and Cosmology’ is the first course of Gifford Lectures offered by John Laird, the second being his 1939–1940 ‘Mind and Deity’. In his 1938–1939 course, Laird explores the general subject of metaphysics and theism, with a particular interest in the relationship between the Divine and the created order.

The lectures seek to demonstrate by historical and epistemological analysis the necessary dependence of the rise of science in the West, and its continuation in the whole world, upon the cultural and metaphysical matrix provided by the Judeo-Christian worldview. The key and unique features of that worldview required for science to be born and mature include conviction of the world’s rationality, intelligibility and contingency, summarized by the Thomistic proofs for the existence of God.