Responding to the rash of books supporting a "new atheism" in recent years, some excellent rebuttals and refutations by Berlinski, Novak, Hart, Day, and others have also been published. The present book, however, is not a continuation of these critical salvos against the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris, but engages in a fresh reexamination of several important aspects of the "God-question," along with an exploration of the theory of the "faith-instinct"---a theory that emerges from a respectably long tradition, (...) but in recent years has been largely relegated to the sidelines in theology and philosophy. In the first chapter, scientific, metaphysical, and theological approaches are utilized and integrated in relationship to the question of God's existence. The second chapter is devoted to the "problem of evil," differentiated into the special categories often lumped into that all-too-generic term---moral evils, natural evils, suffering as an evil. Chapter 3 concerns the obvious follow-up question concerning what sort of characteristics, personal or otherwise, we can attribute to God---going beyond the question of God's mere "existence," even if and when we are intellectually convinced of this existence. In the second half of the book, the various meanings of "faith" are considered; and the apparent discrepancy of many New Testament descriptions of faith with the conventional Catholic and Protestant concepts of faith is investigated. Some "family resemblances" of supernatural faith seem to emerge. Then a monograph by Tubingen theologian Max Seckler, Instinkt und Glaubenswille ("Instinct and the Will to Believe"), which comments on thought-provoking texts concerning a "faith-instinct" in the works of Thomas Aquinas, is considered; Seckler brings out the philosophical and theological basis for this concept, as well as its reverberations for modern theology. The theory of a faith-instinct, however, leads to the question of the proper and improper, real or substitute, "objects," of the proposed instinct. Finally, if this instinct is, as hypothesized, implanted in human nature itself, for all places and all times, what is the function of the various religions in "activating" or placing obstacles to, the activation of this instinct? How are "false prophets," who may be instrumental in redirecting or misdirecting this instinct, to be recognized? Is faith bolstered or hindered by miracles---do miracles have any important relationship to faith? The book ends with a final consideration of the probable mental outlook of the atheist confronted with claims by theists of varying persuasions. (shrink)

The Last Judgement, heaven, hell, purgatory, the wrathful God: today, these notions seem to belong to a remote past we have - thank goodness! - left behind. The more remarkable is that, today, prisoners sometimes refer to the representation of God as Judge, as in the proposition ‘Only God can judge me’ you can find as graffito on a cell wall, or tattooed on the body of an inmate. Is this statement born from defiance of the constitutional state, from fundamentalism, (...) or from the fiction of an all-forgiving God? Nowadays, we, modern democrats, have a suspicion towards criminals and fanatics who seem to think that they can get away with an Only God can judge me. Much more common today is the reversal: not a judging God but people assuming judgement over God and over those who persist in referring to God. But the tradition of the ‘theodicee’ shows that this reversed movement of man judging God is not in the least a gesture limited to those outside the religions. In a theodicee, man summons God to appear in front of an imaginary tribunal, only for God to be defended and subsequently acquitted. As Odo Marquard argues, the modern problem of the theodicee – bringing into question God’s justice – in the end favoured atheism. Human autonomy which exonerates God by eliminating him, would imply something like an ‘atheism ad maiorem Dei gloriam’. But when humankind becomes responsible for the creation of its own history, God can no longer be summoned to any tribunal. Now only man can be summoned, and more particularly: humans which may be held accountable for the persistence of evil, responsible for our enduring discontent, obstacles of human progress or annoying remnants of the past. Here we find the beginning of the secularization of the Last Judgement. As Peter Sloterdijk argues, the vindictive God who judges and punishes at the end on times is succeeded by revolutionary groups from the nineteenth century onwards. These not only transform feelings of humiliated anger and powerlessness into those of pride and hope, but also into an effective force of revenge. In short, the theological constellation of rage and eternity has been succeeded by a political-psychological constellation of rage and history. Our representative democracy can be seen as an answer to the dangerous modern tendency to ‘tribunalising’ , because conditions of division and conflict are regarded as normal and lasting, and not as Fremdkörper or indicative of pathology. The Last Judgement becomes indefinitely suspended. However, a certain kind of ‘populism’ holds that unity and homogeneity can very well be made visible and audible’; and nowadays this seems to be accompanied by the longing to give evil, thus a form of negative transcendence, a face and parade it in front of the tribunal of the people. For prisoners, this is bad news. Against its background, the Only God can judge me may yet well up from a different source than that which I had suggested at the beginning of my argument. (shrink)

According to a common view, belief in God cannot be proved and is an issue that must be left to faith. Kant went even further and argued that he can prove this unprovability. But any argument implying that a certain sentence is not provable is challenged by Gödel’s second theorem. Indeed, one trivial consequence of GST is that for any formal system F that satisfies certain conditions and for every sentence K that is formulated in F it is impossible (...) to prove, from F, that K is not provable. In the article, I explore the general issue of proving the unprovability of the existence of God. Of special interest is the question of the relation between the existence of God and the conditions that F must satisfy in order to allow for its subjection to GST. (shrink)

After presenting the “first and more manifest way” of proving the existence of God by reason alone in Summa Theologiae Ia, 2, 3, Saint Thomas Aquinas continues this project by turning in the “Second Way” to what he somewhat enigmatically calls “the nature of the efficient cause.” The greatest obstacle to understanding his Second Way, though, is determining precisely what Aquinas means by “the nature of the efficient cause” and “an order of efficient causes,” and how the (...) Second Way is distinct from the First and Third Ways. This paper shows that instead of purporting to demonstrate God's existence as the cause of metaphysical being, as is commonly supposed, Aquinas is actually searching for the ultimate cause of immanent activity in rational beings. It argues for this reading both from textual evidence internal to the Second Way and in the First Way. (shrink)

The third Meditation is typically understood to contain two a posteriori arguments for the existence of God. The author focuses on the second argument, where Descartes proves the existence of God partly in virtue of proving that Descartes cannot be the cause of himself. To establish this, Descartes argues that if he were the cause of himself, then he would endow himself with any conceivable perfection. The justification for this claim is that bringing about a substance is more difficult (...) than creating an attribute, so anything that can do the former can do the latter. While current explanations of this justification are either implausible or inadequate, the author argues that this principle derives support from a scholastic distinction between being-as-such and determinate being. With this distinction in view, we can make sense of Descartes's argument without appealing to ambiguous or inadequate notions. (shrink)

This volume provides an analysis of divine aseity in Karl Barth's thought and appreciates the vital role that this doctrine can play in contemporary theology. Brian D. Asbill begins by setting the general theological context, first through a broad sketch of the development of Barth's understanding of the relationship between the life of God pro nobis (pronobeity) and a se (aseity), and secondly through the examination of the basic theological convictions that guide his approach to the divine being in (...) Church Dogmatics II/1. The second section, 'The Love and Freedom of God', turns to the dialectical pairings which guide Barth's accounts of the divine reality in his earliest dogmatic cycle (The Göttingen Dogmatics §§16-7) as well as in his most mature treatment (Church Dogmatics §§28-31). Particular attention is given to how these themes arise from revelation and relate to one another. In the final section, 'The Aseity of God', Asbill identifies this doctrine's basic features and primary functions. Divine aseity is characterized as the self-demonstration and self-movement of God's life, a trinitarian and entirely unique reality, a primarily positive and dynamic concept, and the manner and readiness of God's love for creatures. Divine aseity is said to indicate God's lordship in the act of self-binding, God's uniqueness in the act of self-revelation, and God's sufficiency in the act of self-giving. (shrink)

THE PURPOSE OF THE PAPER IS TO CRITICALLY EXAMINE TWO METAPHYSICAL PRINCIPLES ADVOCATED BY PROFESSOR MORRIS IN HIS BOOK "THE LOGIC OF GOD INCARNATE", NAMELY (I) THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN "COMMON" HUMAN PROPERTIES AND "ESSENTIAL" HUMAN PROPERTIES; (II) THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN BEING "MERELY" X AND "FULLY" X. THE FIRST DISTINCTION IS BOTH DEFENDED AND EXPANDED ON; THE SECOND IS REJECTED ON THE GROUNDS THAT IT INVOKES AN IMPOSSIBLE COMPARISON; A COMPARISON BETWEEN A QUANTITATIVE ASSESSMENT ON THE ONE HAND AND (...) THE QUALITATIVE ASSESSMENT ON THE OTHER. IN THE LIGHT OF THIS IT IS CLAIMED THAT MORRIS’S DEFENCE OF THE ORTHODOX DOCTRINE OF THE INCARNATION FAILS. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:390 HUME'S DIALOGUES AND THE COMEDY OF RELIGION Laughter is the key to Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Indeed, I would suggest that if the Dialogues have not made one laugh, and if one has not experienced the sheer delight of Hume's rhetorical excesses and gaiety, then one hasn't really understood this work at all. From this perspective, the usual questions are irrelevant — Is Hume Cleanthes or Philo? (...) Is Philo a mitigated sceptic or a Pyrrhonian? Such debates are sterile and miss the point, for however consistent or inconsistent the characters may be, the actual drama of the text has an intention and a direction all of its own, destroying the religious hypothesis not so much by 'serious' calculated argument as by ridicule and excess. Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion are the expression of a healthy and cheerful malice which strives at every turn to intensify the sense of the absurdity of religion. Hence their flavour is primarily rhetorical, and it would be a mistake to consider them as merely a collection of paraphraseable proofs directed against the possibility of rational theology. This is not to say, however, that Hume did not take religion seriously; on the contrary, he uses all of the devices of comedy in order to overwhelm it — rather as Nietzsche was to argue: "Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. ml In this paper, I will consider the rhetorical aspect of Hume's Dialogues to show how the literary mode — the elaboration and contrast of characters, the use of parody and sudden turns in the plot, etc. — enables Hume to make a far more compelling assault on the religious hypothesis than the plain recital of 391 'reasonable' objections would ever achieve. I will focus my discussion on three central themes: First, the professed acceptance of God by all of the participants, and the consequent need for an oblique attack upon religion; second, Hume's comic perspectives on the argument from Design; and third, Hume's development of an 'antinomies of religion,' whereby the various religious arguments are used to undermine each other. 1. The Belief in God No man; no man, at least of common sense, I am persuaded, ever entertained a serious doubt with regard to a truth so certain and self-evident. The question is not concerning the being but the nature of God. Ostensibly, the one thing that is never questioned in the Dialogues, the one thing that all the participants remain agreed upon, is that God exists. Indeed, it seems that however limited the scope of natural theology may turn out to be, the actual being of God can never be in dispute, for in the Dialogues, belief in God is often presented as if it were an unchallengeable 'given' of human experience. Cleanthes, for example, apparently follows Locke in arguing for the reasonableness of theism; and yet, when he is pressed he defends the Design hypothesis in terms of its psychological irresistibility, appealing to a natural sentiment of belief rather than the claim of any argument: Consider, anatomize the eye: Survey its structure and contrivance; and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation.... it requires time, reflection and study, to summon up those frivolous, though 392 abstruse, objections, which can support infidelity (D 154). According to Cleanthes, the Design hypothesis is so self-evident that it really does not need any philosophical justification at all. It is simply the articulation of what we all already knew to be true: The comparison of the universe to a machine of human contrivance is so obvious and natural, and is justified by so many instances of order and design in nature, that it must immediately strike all unprejudiced apprehensions, and procure universal approbation (D 216). Demea also denies that religion is based upon argument. He claims that each man is brought to feel the truth of religion within himself through the consciousness of his own complete ignorance and misery. And in this respect, 'reason' can only hamper religious belief. Finally, at the end of the Dialogues, even Philo... (shrink)

The article considers the approaches to theodicy’s problem of Russian and German philosophers with clear religious orientation: Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev and Max Scheler. However, for more explicit insight into our topic we found, the article provides the general overview of theodicy tradition. Standpoints of these thinkers living in different epochs are linked by the steady belief in a reasonability of the world created by God. The main obstacle to acceptance of this argumentation is the problem of evil’s existence. The (...) way of thinking that has the goal to demonstrate the world’s perfectness presumes either necessity of evil as a mean or the evil’s insignificance or even its illusiveness, which is the result of “too human” perspective. Such ways of thought have become impossible since the second half of 19th century, when the concrete person’s experience had been recognized as a main source of philosophy. In Russian culture, this attitude became widespread after F.M. Dostoevsky, in German culture – after F. Nietzsche. Berdyaev and Scheler inherit the impulse of their thought. Distinctive feature of religious philosophies of Berdyaev and Scheler is conceptualization of the assertion of God’s need in human being, for God is in the process of becoming, is in the inner move toward full self-realization. And human being, who is capable to adopt or to reject the God’s “call,” is the crucial stage of God’s formation. For this tradition of theodicy, exactly human creative act and the direction of this act have the main role in world history. (shrink)

The title of this book can be understood in at least two ways. First of all, The Word of God and the Mind of Man is an exploration of the extent to which the human mind can receive and understand divine revelation, insofar as this revelation is understood to include the communication of truth. On a second and more fundamental level, the phrase the word of God recalls its classical context -- the prologue to John's Gospel and the classical (...) Logos doctrine of the early church fathers: all human knowledge is possible because of the unique human participation in the eternal Logos of God, Jesus Christ. - Preface. (shrink)

A considerable group of contemporary philosophers and theologians—including those engaged in the science-theology dialogue, such as Barbour, Clayton, Davies, and Peacocke—supports panentheism, i.e., a theistic position which assumes that the world is in God, who is yet greater than everything he created. They see it as a balanced middle ground between the positions of classical theism and pantheism. In this article, I offer a presentation and a critical evaluation of the most fundamental principles of panentheism from the point of view (...) of classical theism. First, I list six main species of panentheism and the motivations of those who support it. In the second part, I analyze the three main difficulties concerning its ontological and theological principles, i.e., (1) the meaning of the preposition ‘in’ (_en_) in ‘pan_en_theism’; (2) the accuracy of panentheistic definition of divine immanence, and (3) the question of whether panentheism is successful in protecting God’s transcendence. I conclude that panentheism fails as a Christian theistic position. Nevertheless, it might still be valuable and play an important role in addressing the cognitive drama of the modern human beings, often seduced by secular (scientific) or spiritual naturalism, or pantheism. (shrink)

The recommendation that we encourage children to be open-minded has been gathering strength. Yet given the everyday meaning of ‘being open-minded about something’, we may decide to reject this recommendation because it proscribes teaching and learning. There again, recent philosophical accounts of open-mindedness seem to oppose everyday meaning and lead to the absurd conclusion that the Pope is open-minded about the existence of God. This paper suggests two ways of looking at these problems, the second of which reconciles (...) ordinary usage with open-mindedness as a desirable educational objective. (shrink)

The recommendation that we encourage children to be open-minded has been gathering strength. Yet given the everyday meaning of ‘being open-minded about something’, we may decide to reject this recommendation because it proscribes teaching and learning. There again, recent philosophical accounts of open-mindedness seem to oppose everyday meaning and lead to the absurd conclusion that the Pope is open-minded about the existence of God. This paper suggests two ways of looking at these problems, the second of which reconciles (...) ordinary usage with open-mindedness as a desirable educational objective. (shrink)

Our self-image is constructed in the interplay between man and culture. Religious traditions play a key role in this interplay; myths create meaning to the individual and to society at large. Sacred narratives provide man with patterns of behavior, how life should be lived. The other side of the picture is that identity and integrity may lead to intolerance, a dividing line between them and us: the most serious obstacle to peace and intercultural understanding. Religions can reinforce strong feelings (...) of humiliation, of being a victim. This, in turn, may lead to the splitting of humanity into good and evil; one group demonizes the other. This coupled with an idealized, wrathful and punitive deity or leader may lead to violence, and violence is sanctified. Religion may encourage feelings of humiliation, but it can also deliver an antidote. There are theological resources that can counter terror and violence. A merciful and compassionate God can replace a wrathful and punitive deity. A stage of faith known as gerotranscendence is characterised by “an increasing feeling of belonging to the universe”. Representatives of ‘glocal’ spirituality reject claims of exclusivity. A glocal perspective is crucial. What we need today is that a greater number of spiritual leaders stand up and insist on values that touch upon the sanctity of life. (shrink)

In this first part of a two-part paper, we describe efforts in the early decades of this century to restrict the extent of violations of the Second Law of thermodynamics that were brought to light by the rise of the kinetic theory and the identification of fluctuation phenomena. We show how these efforts mutated into Szilard’s proposal that Maxwell’s Demon is exorcised by proper attention to the entropy costs associated with the Demon’s memory and information acquisition. In the (...) class='Hi'>second part we will argue that the information theoretic exorcisms of the Demon provide largely illusory benefits. According to the case, they either return a presupposition that can be had without information theoretic consideration or they postulate a broader connection between information and entropy than can be sustained. (shrink)

One of the less well-researched areas in the recent renaissance of the study of Reformed orthodoxy is anthropology. In this contribution, we investigate a core topic of Reformed orthodox theological anthropology, viz. its treatment of the human being as created in the image of God. First, we analyze the locus of the imago Dei in the Leiden Synopsis Purioris Theologiae. Second, we highlight some shifts of emphasis in Reformed orthodox treatments of this topic in response to the budding (...) Cartesianism. In particular, the close proximity of the unfallen human being and God was carefully delineated as a result of Descartes’s positing of a univocal correspondence between God and man; and the Cartesian suggestion that original righteousness functioned as a barrier for certain natural impulses, was rejected. Third, we show how, in response to the denial of this connection, the image of God was explicitly related to the concept of natural law. Tying in with similar findings on other loci, we conclude that Reformed orthodox thought on the imago Dei exhibits a variegated pattern of extensions, qualifications, and adjustments of earlier accounts within a clearly discernable overall continuity. (shrink)

In this second part of our two-part paper we review and analyse attempts since 1950 to use information theoretic notions to exorcise Maxwell’s Demon. We argue through a simple dilemma that these attempted exorcisms are ineffective, whether they follow Szilard in seeking a compensating entropy cost in information acquisition or Landauer in seeking that cost in memory erasure. In so far as the Demon is a thermodynamic system already governed by the Second Law, no further supposition about information (...) and entropy is needed to save the Second Law. In so far as the Demon fails to be such a system, no supposition about the entropy cost of information acquisition and processing can save the Second Law from the Demon. (shrink)

In his recent work Professor Morris writes: ‘I am suggesting that, armed with a couple of fairly simple metaphysical distinctions we can begin to see how the doctrine of the Incarnation can possibly be true.’ What are these ‘metaphysical distinctions’ and do they stand up to critical examination? My answer to the latter part of this question in regard to the first distinction is a reserved ‘Yes’; in regard to the second distinction a definite ‘No’. If my criticism of (...) the second distinction holds good, then Morris's defence of the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation fails, for his defence crucially relies on the validity of that distinction. (shrink)

Summary This paper seeks to be a systematic reflection on the difficulties raised by the sixteenth century Reformed notion of the atonement, rather than a repetitio of centuries-old methods of conceptualization. I will therefore look beyond the somewhat imprecise confessions of the period, and instead focus on the dogmatic work of John Calvin to find a more robust Reformed notion of the atonement. Yet, as we shall see, Calvin’s account of the atonement is not without its inconsistencies. Namely, if it (...) is the wrath of God that is satisfied on the cross of Christ, as Calvin states, then the divine love becomes obscured from view. In reply, Karl Barth’s theology of the atonement will be surveyed in order to uphold that the holy love of God is effective at every moment in the accomplishment of our redemption. Thus, this paper seeks to found a theology of the atonement guided by the Reformed theology of the sixteenth century, yet at the same time considers it possible to decisively bend the Reformed tradition without breaking with it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bioshock and the Art of RaptureGrant TavinorI am Andrew Ryan, and I am here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No!" says the man in Washington, "It belongs to the poor." "No!" says the man in the Vatican, "It belongs to God." "No!" says the man in Moscow, "It belongs to everyone." I rejected these answers; instead, I chose (...) something different. I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture! A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.Andrew Ryan, opening BioshockIBioshock is the Masterpiece of recent gaming. Genre-wise the game is a first person-shooter survival-horror game—already a complicated mix of gaming forms—and Bioshock is excellent in these gaming terms: playing the game is a consistently engaging, challenging, and tense experience. The narrative of the game, set in Rapture, a dystopian city beneath the sea, fits perfectly with this interactive gaming form. The premise of Bioshock is a parody of Ayn Rand's objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged. Led by the magnate Andrew Ryan, the industrialists, artists, and scientists have retreated from the world and built Rapture through sheer force of will. But when the player enters the city at the beginning of the game, it is evident that nature is pushing back, and that the sea is slowly but surely retaking Rapture, while its citizens have become corrupted by the arts and sciences the city was built upon: as genetically manipulated "splicers" they now creep through Rapture's darkened halls bemoaning their lost humanity. Andrew Ryan "chose the impossible," [End Page 91] and inevitably his hubris is being repaid by the recalcitrance of human nature and the impermanence of human achievement. Much of the immense fun of Bioshock derives from the irony of an objectivist utopia running amok.The immediate visual impact of Bioshock, depending on its employment of cutting-edge high definition 3D computer graphics, is striking. The aesthetic qualities of the water, in particular, have drawn wide praise. The world of Rapture is also presented through an engaging and excellent style. To depict this decaying world, Bioshock draws on the architectural motifs and cultural themes of 1930s and 1940s America. Portrayals of decaying art deco facades, faded Hollywood socialites, and echoes of Hearst, Hughes, and Citizen Kane, are combined with period music and philosophical and literary references to produce a coherent artistic statement.Two features of Bioshock bear out its unique artfulness as a game. First is the role in the game-world of the Little Sisters: cute little girls that pose a game obstacle with which the player must decide how to deal. In Bioshock, the task of harvesting the game-world resources needed to survive is given a moral dimension in that the resources can be extracted only from the Little Sisters by killing them, and so a key part of the gameplay rests on an emotionally provocative moral choice. The second artful aspect of the game that warrants special attention is a narrative twist partway through the game where it becomes evident that player's principle sympathetic source of information in the game-world is a dissemblance. Bioshock has an interactive twist on an untrustworthy narrator, which clouds and complicates the decisions the player has made in Rapture. Rather than an actor, the player-character is a pawn in someone else's game. At the forefront of both of these aspects of Bioshock are considerations of freewill and morality.To really appreciate the art of Bioshock we need to understand its nature as a game, and moreover, to treat the gaming nature seriously and with sympathy. Bioshock is a videogame, and it is also clearly art; but it is not as if the game is art despite its being a videogame and that the art is a mere gloss or veneer. Rather, Bioshock's nature as a game allows it to be art of a distinctive kind. Treating videogames as a kind... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 24.1 (2004) 278-283 [Access article in PDF] The Voice of God on Mount Sinai. Rabbinic Commentaries on Exodus 20:1 In Light of Sufi and Zen-Buddhist Texts. By Reinhard Neudecker. Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2002. 157 pp. Reinhard Neudecker's study of the central event of the first five books of the Bible, namely the revelation of God on Mount Sinai to Moses and the Israelites, is an important (...) contribution to interfaith studies that should be of interest to both the scholar and layperson alike. The clarity of purpose and treatment makes this study very accessible; each chapter is thoughtfully structured, with rich footnotes that provide documentation, further explanation, and information. The appendixes contain the relevant rabbinic texts in the original Hebrew; indices of terms, subjects, and Bible citations; as well as a helpful list of consulted works.The stated purpose of the study is to shed light on enigmatic rabbinical interpretations of Exodus 20:1, the verse that introduces the TenWords (commandments) [End Page 278] that form the basis of the complete Torah by taking into consideration analogous passages from the Sufi and Zen Buddhist traditions. In explaining his methodology, the author makes three important distinctions. First, Neudecker is "not dealing with Judaism, Islam and Zen Buddhism as such, but with the views and experiences of some rabbinic Jews, some Sufi Muslims and some Zen Buddhists" (p. x). Second, the chosen texts are offered for their spiritual and mystical insight, not for their historical context or content, because "the mystic has learned to convert the great events recorded by tradition into symbols which express the ongoing inner revelation to which he has been exposed" (p. 6). Because spiritual and mystical writers generally refrain from explaining deep experiences openly (especially because of the impossibility of putting them into words), the author refrains from adding his own interpretations and instead invites the reader to a meditative encounter with the texts. Third, the author does not intend to offer simple parallels or to readily claim correspondences between the rabbinic, Sufi, and Zen texts, but leaves it up to the reader to judge what the "different traditions may have in common and to what degree and where one tradition may go a step further than the others (p. 11, n. 30). His main purpose, as stated above, is to understand the rabbinic comments better by using the method of "intercultural reading" in drawing upon Sufi and Zen Buddhist texts.After the introductory chapter, which offers the methodological considerations and basic information about the Rabbinic sources and Buddhist terminology, the author presents Exod. 20:1 in its rabbinic translation: "And God spoke all these words to say." This short verse has become the stumbling block for the rabbinic interpreter, just as much as a Zen koan becomes a stumbling block for the Zen student or an obscure verse in the Koran for the Sufi. What these stumbling blocks have in common is that they open up a new way of nondiscursive understanding of the text that leads to profound insights and a deep spiritual experience.Chapters 4-9 of the book are devoted to unraveling the mysteries of these insights. The reader is drawn into an engaging process that opens up layer upon layer of meaning, comparable to the peeling of an onion. A short exposition of the themes of each chapter as introduction to the texts proves very helpful for orientation in this process. Chapter 4 addresses the question of how the people at Sinai heard the Ten Words. The rabbis differ on whether the people heard all of the commandments or only the first two of them, but the important point of comparison is the enigmatic statement that God pronounced all the Ten Words, including the entire Torah, "in one single sound, as the (human) mouth cannot speak and the (human) ear cannot hear" (p. 35). This statement implies that God's revelation exceeds the limits of human speaking and hearing, and that God communicates in... (shrink)

I argue that, all else being equal, theism is more probable than naturalism on the assumption that human beings are able to arrive at a body of moral knowledge that is largely accurate and complete. I put forth this thesis on grounds that, if naturalism is true, the explanation of the content of our moral intuitions terminates either in biological-evolutionary processes or in social conventions adopted for pragmatic reasons; that, if this is so, our moral intuitions were selected for (...) their utility, not their truth; and that, if our moral intuitions were so selected, they are probably false. I defend the argument against three objections: first, that the argument amounts to a generic skeptical challenge; second, that ethical naturalism explains how our moral intuitions could have been selected for their truth; and third, that there is a pre-established harmony between the utility of moral beliefs and their truth-values. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that for Aristotle god is, and is not, virtuous. I consider first the arguments of the EN to show that the gods do not have virtue---beginning with an account of the divisions of the faculties of soul, and of the virtues that belong to those divisions. These arguments suggest that nous is a divine virtue, and so in the second section I consider nous, as a faculty of soul and as a (...) virtue, and examine the differences between nous as a human virtue, and nous as a virtue which is also a substance, and with which the first divine principle is identified. In the third and final section I ask what kind of difference Aristotle takes the difference between human and divine nous to be---and in particular whether this is a difference in kind or in degree. (shrink)

Abstract. Found in the Primeval History in Genesis, the biblical concepts of the “image of God” and the “knowledge of good and evil” remain integral to Christian anthropology, especially with regard to the theologoumena of “fall” and “original sin.” All of these symbols are remained important and appropriate descriptors of the human condition, provided that contemporary academic theological anthropology engages in constructive dialogue with the natural and social sciences. Using Paul Ricoeur's notion of “second naïveté experience,” I illustrate the (...) hermeneutical significance of contemporary bio-cultural or socio-biological evolutionary theory for reformulating these concepts of Christian anthropology today. (shrink)

The paper deals with the "deuteros plous", literally ‘the second voyage’, proverbially ‘the next best way’, discussed in Plato’s "Phaedo", the key passage being Phd. 99e4–100a3. The second voyage refers to what Plato’s Socrates calls his “flight into the logoi”. Elaborating on the subject, the author first (I) provides a non-standard interpretation of the passage in question, and then (II) outlines the philosophical problem that it seems to imply, and, finally, (III) tries to apply this philosophical problem (...) to the "ultimate final proof" of immortality and to draw an analogy with the ontological argument for the existence of God, as proposed by Descartes in his 5th "Meditation". The main points are as follows: (a) the “flight into the logoi” can have two different interpretations, a common one and an astonishing one, and (b) there is a structural analogy between Descartes’s ontological argument for the existence of God in his 5th "Meditation" and the "ultimate final proof" for the immortality of the soul in the "Phaedo". (shrink)

Pragmatism has been rediscovered in recent years and presented as emblematic of modern thinking. At the center of this worldwide interest in late‐nineteenth century Pragmatism stood, first, a rejection of the traditional dualistic construction of the world in philosophy and psychology; second, a distinguishing of the findings of learning theory from those of evolutionary theory; and, third, a consideration of industrial democracy as the context of modern thinking and action. In this essay Daniel Tröhler shows that these innovations were (...) far less secular than has generally been assumed. Underlying early Chicago Pragmatism is a reformed Protestant mentality that was shaped by a vision of a common mission: realizing the “kingdom of God on earth”— a mentality that responded critically to the provocations of modernity and, through this response, developed a distinctive discourse that came to be called “Pragmatism.”. (shrink)

ArgumentIt is argued that the sensorium of God was introduced into theQuaestionesadded to the end of Newton’sOptice(1706) as a way of answering objections that Newton had failed to provide a causal account of gravity in thePrincipia. The discussion of God’s sensorium indicated that gravity must be caused by God’s will. Newton did not leave it there, however, but went on to show how God’s will created active principles as secondary causes of gravity. There was nothing unusual in assuming that God, (...) acting as the First Cause, operated in nature by means of secondary causes; but it was unusual to devote as much time to discussing God’s precise role as to discussing the secondary causes themselves. It is contended that Newton felt the need to do this to persuade readers that what might seem like a second cause that could not possibly work could be made to work by the omnipotent God. (shrink)

What is the constituent nature of God? Most scholars project the idea that God is an absolute, pure spirit devoid of matter. In this paper, I engage this position from the African philosophical place. First, I contend that the postulation that God is pure spirit stems from an ontological system known as dualism. This system bifurcates reality into spirit and matter and sees spirit as good, and matter as evil. Therefore, scholars who subscribe to this theory of dualism, posit that (...) God, the Supreme Being is the ultimate good that is, and is pure spirit. Secondly, I disagree with this position. Using the African theory of duality, I argue that everything that is has both spirit and matter, and that spirit and matter are good. Thus, God as an existent reality consists of spirit and matter. I will support my argument using Asouzu’s Ibuanyidanda ontology and Ijiomah’s Harmonious Monism, two African culture-inspired philosophical systems. In this paper, I employ conversationalism as my philosophical method. (shrink)

John Foster presents a clear and powerful discussion of a range of topics relating to our understanding of the universe: induction, laws of nature, and the existence of God. He begins by developing a solution to the problem of induction - a solution whose key idea is that the regularities in the workings of nature that have held in our experience hitherto are to be explained by appeal to the controlling influence of laws, as forms of natural necessity. His (...) class='Hi'>second line of argument focuses on the issue of what we should take such necessitational laws to be, and whether we can even make sense of them at all. Having considered and rejected various alternatives, Foster puts forward his own proposal: the obtaining of a law consists in the causal imposing of a regularity on the universe as a regularity. With this causal account of laws in place, he is now equipped to offer an argument for theism. His claim is that natural regularities call for explanation, and that, whatever explanatory role we may initially assign to laws, the only plausible ultimate explanation is in terms of the agency of God. Finally, he argues that, once we accept the existence of God, we need to think of him as creating the universe by a method which imposes regularities on it in the relevant law-yielding way. In this new perspective, the original nomological-explanatory solution to the problem of induction becomes a theological-explanatory solution. The Divine Lawmaker is bold and original in its approach, and rich in argument. The issues on which it focuses are among the most important in the whole epistemological and metaphysical spectrum. (shrink)

This article investigates difficulties in defining the concept of God by focusing on the question of what it means to understand God as a ‘person.’ This question is explored with respect to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, in dialogue with Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. Thereby, the following three questions regarding divine ‘personhood’ come into view: First, how can God be a partner of dialogue if he at the same time remains unknown and unthinkable, a limit-concept of understanding? (...) Second, if God is love in person and at the same time a spiritual reality ‘between’ human agents, in what ways are his personal and trans-personal traits related to each other? Third, what exactly is revealed through God’s ‘name’? By way of an inconclusive conclusion, divine personhood is discussed in regard to prayer, where the problems of predication that arise in third-personal speech about God are linked with the second-personal encounter with God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt by Tim MilnesMargaret WatkinsTim Milnes. The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 278. Hardback. ISBN: 9780198812739. $91.00.In his brief autobiography, “My Own Life,” Hume reports that “almost all [his] life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (E-MOL: xxxi). This is one (...) of at least ten places in this brief work in which he associates himself with “letters” or “literature”—as compared to at most four associations with philosophy. The moral to be inferred is not that Hume considered himself not to be a philosopher. Rather, he conceived of philosophy as a kind of literature. The Treatise was itself a “literary attempt.” Indeed, opposition between the “literary” and “philosophical” aspects of a text would have been foreign to Hume and his contemporaries—a notion for a later age, despite his occasional loose distinction between the relevant genres, as in his list of writings “historical, philosophical, or literary” in “My Own Life” (E-MOL: xxxvi).Yet despite Hume’s own understanding of the continuity between philosophy and literature, broadly conceived, it is still common for contemporary philosophers to ignore literary questions in their examination of Hume’s work, or to presume that one can easily distinguish the “philosophical” parts from the “literary” ones. Tim Milnes’s The Testimony of Sense is therefore a welcome addition to the Hume literature (pun intended). With a particular focus on the essay—a genre of great importance to Hume—Milnes contributes to the small set of engagements with Hume from the disciplinary perspective of English literature. With training in both philosophy and literature, as well as established expertise on Romanticism and its own essays, Milnes is well-qualified for the task. The Testimony of Sense includes sustained engagement with Hume’s contemporaries and successors, but for the purposes of this review, I engage the book primarily as a Hume scholar for Hume scholars.Milnes’s story plays out in three acts. The first establishes the need for public trust created by a skeptical crisis, itself a product of Hume’s criticism of the epistemic program of thinkers in the Cartesian and Lockean traditions. The second explains how the essays of the long eighteenth century constitute a response to that need in various ways. The third reveals in detail how the Romantic essayists, particularly William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, both respond to and deviate from the “neoclassical” essayists, typified by Hume and Samuel Johnson.The first chapter, “Self and Intersubjectivity,” lays the groundwork by articulating how Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart identify the need for what we now call intersubjectivity. Milnes describes the common thread as a kind of “natural transcendentalism.” In what sense are these thinkers properly understood as [End Page 175] transcendentalists? The central idea seems to be that all posit things other than reason as “conditions of meaningful thought” (72). For Hume, it is the social, linguistic experience of a community of virtuous judges. The intricate relations between self and other essential to such a community get “internalized within the specular drama of the impartial spectator” (72) in Smith’s writing, which itself takes part in the drama through his “halting, qualified syntax” that mimics “everyday speech” (44). Reid posits a “prescience” of trust, which grounds our reliance on both human testimony and the uniformity of nature, itself undergirded by the design of a benevolent God. Stewart, who posits axiomatic truths that help constitute the “stamina of intellect,” goes furthest, actually calling these truths transcendental (55). This chapter also puts these eighteenth-century thinkers in conversation with twentieth-century theorists, including Habermas, Davidson, and Rorty.Chapter 2, “The Subject of Trust,” deepens the analysis by situating these “natural transcendentalisms” in the broader enlightenment context. In contrast to Descartes, Bacon, and Locke, who were suspicious of our reliance on the opinions of others, the eighteenth-century thinkers understand trust as prior to reason in various ways—though not prior to solidarity. The particulars in each case depend on their responses to skepticism and their accounts of the relation between... (shrink)

This paper states that as there is the “death of God” (Nietzsche), there is also the "death of man" (Foucault). The first will be interpreted either as the truth of the God who dies (theologies of the death of God), or as the death of the principle (Heidegger), or as the death of the living God and of his resurrection power (Nietzsche's true interpretation). The second one can certainly consecrate the human as an “fabricated problem” (Foucault), but even more (...) this way can open up the new power relationship of the Übermensch. Therefore, after the fold of the "forces of finitude" comes the fold of the "new creative infinity" (Deleuze). It is in this way, and only by thinking about “the thread of the body”, that we will perhaps move away from the death of man (Foucault) and the death of God (Nietzsche). Going down to Freud’s “es”, but also reaching Nietzsche’s “Self” will be the condition to echo the power of the Übermensch and of the " Über God". Man does not only stand on the “back of the es” like the rider on his horse (Freud), but also on the “back of the Self” like the “back of the tiger” that cannot be tamed (Nietzsche). (shrink)

Tillich has been accused of being an atheist and pantheist. This study shows mainly that once one studies Tillich's work with care and with an open mind, one can see clearly that his existential ontology is quite consistent in form and theistic in content, and that the terms which he uses to express the idea of God are not unduly vague at all. ; There are six chapters in this thesis. In the first chapter, I argue that Tillich is (...) not an atheist; his God above the God of theism is a more adequate concept than most traditional concepts of God. I show that, for Tillich, God as our ultimate concern expresses the appropriateness of a worshipping attitude towards God, and that God as being-itself shows that God is the ground of being that gives us the moral courage to affirm our being in spite of the fact of nonbeing. God is thus the "power of being" which conquers anxieties. ;In the second chapter, I show more clearly what being-itself means for Tillich. God as being-itself is not a being among beings. Beings are bound to the structure of being and the categories of finitude, but God as being-itself is not bound by them. Being-itself transcends the world and everything within it. Being-itself is not the kind of immanent God that pantheism holds. Thus I once again argue against the accusation that Tillich is an atheist or pantheist. I also argue against the idea that the Platonic or Aristotelian universal is adequate as a model to interpret Tillich's idea of being-itself. Being-itself, for Tillich, cannot be identified with the Platonic or Aristotelian universal. ;The third chapter shows how Tillich gives a philosophical-theological interpretation of religious symbols. Except for the claim that "God is being-itself" is a direct non-symbolic statement about God, everything we say about God is interpreted by Tillich as symbolic. In chapter four, I show in some detail why, for Tillich, the word "existence" cannot be applied to God. But when Tillich claims that God does not exist, he does not mean that there is no God. He only rejects the misleading combination of the word "existence" and "God." "Existence" should be applied only to finite beings, not to being-itself. Therefore I also argue that arguments for God's existence cannot be constructed out of Tillich's system as some commentators have claimed. In fact, for Tillich, God is presupposed necessarily; any argument for God's reality is impossible and unnecessary. ;Chapter five is a discussion of Tillich's idea of freedom in relation to God's transcendence. Only things are determined. Human being has finite freedom which is rooted in his destiny. And God is absolute freedom. However, God's absolute freedom does not destroy man's finite freedom. For Tillich, the crucial theistic assertion of God's transcendence is rooted in this reality of both human and divine freedom. ;In the final chapter, I discuss Tillich's proposed solution to the problem of evil and omnipotence. For Tillich, to say that God is omnipotent does not mean that God can do everything; rather it is to express our trust in God. It is to assert that God as the power of being can conquer nonbeing in all its expressions. The existence of evil does not constitute a reason for a believer to abandon his belief in God; it simply constitutes one of the mysteries of existence reflected in religion. The existence of evil is inevitable because it is implied in the creaturely finitude. To believe in God's providence, according to Tillich, is the only answer to the question of theodicy. Thus Tillich shows us how to face suffering. (shrink)

Marion contends that whereas the traditional metaphysics (“onto-theology”) poses the first ‘idolatry’ in the sense that it reduces God, who is both transcendent and infinite, to a being, albeit the highest being, Heidegger’s ontology represents a second, yet subtler ‘idolatry’ in that Being is thought as a condition of God, and as such it constitutes a ‘screen’ over Him. I argue, however, that Marion’s criticism of Heidegger with regard to his position on the relationship between (...) class='Hi'>Being and God is not well founded, as it is based on a misinterpretation of Heidegger’s conception of Being. I attempt to show that Heidegger’s ontology accommodates the notion of God free from any ontological constraints. (shrink)

A god is a cosmic designer-creator. Atheism says the number of gods is 0. But it is hard to defeat the minimal thesis that some possible universe is actualized by some possible god. Monotheists say the number of gods is 1. Yet no degree of perfection can be coherently assigned to any unique god. Lewis says the number of gods is at least the second beth number. Yet polytheists cannot defend an arbitrary plural number of gods. An alternative is (...) that, for every ordinal, there is a god whose perfection is proportional to it. The n -th god actualizes the best universe(s) in the n -th level of an axiological hierarchy of possible universes. Despite its unorthodoxy, ordinal polytheism has many metaphysically attractive features and merits more serious study. (shrink)

In ‘The Power of God’ (Gleeson 2010) I elaborate and defend an argument by the late D.Z. Phillips against definitions of omnipotence in terms of logical possibility. In ‘Which God? What Power? A Response to Andrew Gleeson’ (Hasker 2010), William Hasker criticizes my defense of Phillips’ argument. Here I contend his criticisms do not succeed. I distinguish three definitions of omnipotence in terms of logical possibility. Hasker agrees that the first fails. The second fails because negative properties (like disembodiedment (...) and simplicity) do not amount to a nature that licenses the attribution of causal powers. The third fails because it does not identify actions that can be performed without a body. It cannot be saved by appeal to the idea of purely mental acts. (shrink)

What is the constituent nature of God? Most scholars project the idea that God is an absolute, pure spirit devoid of matter. In this paper, I engage this position from the African philosophical place. First, I contend that the postulation that God is pure spirit stems from an ontological system known as dualism. This system bifurcates reality into spirit and matter and sees spirit as good, and matter as evil. Therefore, scholars who subscribe to this theory of dualism, posit that (...) God, the Supreme Being is the ultimate good that is, and is pure spirit. Secondly, I disagree with this position. Using the African theory of duality, I argue that everything that is has both spirit and matter, and that spirit and matter are good. Thus, God as an existent reality consists of spirit and matter. I will support my argument using Asouzu’s Ibuanyidanda ontology and Ijiomah’s Harmonious Monism, two African culture-inspired philosophical systems. In this paper, I employ conversationalism as my philosophical method. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment by Frederick C. BeiserJohn W. YoltonFrederick C. Beiser. The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 332. Cloth, $39.50.Beiser characterizes the methodology of his study as historical and philosophical: historical in placing texts in their own context and in uncovering the intentions (...) of their authors; philosophical in reconstructing and appraising arguments (ix). Both methods are necessary for good historical work. The second is often practiced without the first, to the detriment of philosophy and its history. “A philosopher who reconstructs arguments without the aid of history indulges in mere guesswork and anachronism, measuring the standards of philosophical relevance and importance by the concerns of his own age” (x). Equally, understanding the arguments and ideas of, e.g., seventeenth-century writers, “also involves testing their truth: seeing how they cohere with one another, what their consequences are, whether they follow from the evidence adduced for them, and if they reply to the objections made against them” (x). This splendid study of the role of reason in seventeenth-century religion, science, and philosophy is a fine example of careful textual-historical scholarship with rigorous philosophical analysis.The goal of his study is to tell “the story of how rationalism, in the very specific sense of the sovereignty of reason, arose in seventeenth-century England” (5). Starting with an introduction which discusses such topics as “The Paradox of the English Enlightenment,” “Rationalism in the English Church,” “The Enlightenment and the New Sciences,” Beiser proceeds to detailed presentations and discussions of “The Protestant Challenge” (Chap. 1); Richard Hookers’s defense of reason (Chap. 2); the views of the Great Tew Circle, e.g., Falkland, Chillingworth, Hammond, Hales (Chap. 3); the Cambridge Platonists (Chap. 4); the nature of Enthusiasm (Chap. 5); John Toland and Deism (Chap. 6); and ethical rationalism (Chap. 7).Many of the topics covered have been the subjects of other books and articles. What marks Beiser’s account is the freshness of his approach, the many new insights and suggestions about the tensions between the holders of traditional doctrines and newer challenges. Beiser’s writing is clear, and the issues are carefully presented and analyzed. One of the central themes is the mistake of equating “rationalism with the critique or rejection of religion” (15), of identifying enlightenment with secularization (14). The appeals to reason often emerge from within orthodox religion, whose defenders were trying to cope with their own internal tensions. “Once we consider the Cambridge Platonists’ early reaction to predestination, it becomes clear that it was not Hobbes but Calvin who first posed the danger of atheism for them. For it was Calvin’s theology, and not Hobbes’s materialism, that inspired the fear of God that [End Page 138] they regarded as the source of atheism. In the eyes of the Cambridge Platonists, Hobbes’s materialism was only a false remedy for that fear...” (147). A similar point is made later: “the foundations of a rational theology” in Whichcote “did not arise from any need to combat a creeping Hobbesianism. Rather, it grew up from the inner struggles and torments of the Protestant soul” (165).Equally significant is Beiser’s analysis of enthusiasm, the appeals to divine inspiration rather than to reason or evidence: “We should be aware of accepting the contemporary caricature of the enthusiasts, which portrayed them as zealous and ignorant anti–intellectuals with no cogent or coherent philosophical position of their own” (187). His analysis of the enthusiasts stresses the epistemological nature of their position, rather than the usual theological, ethical, or political dimensions (193). He insists that “enthusiasm is essentially a philosophical concept. Historically, it arose as a response to the problem of the sources and criteria of religious knowledge” (187). The search for criteria is a pervasive feature of Beiser’s study: Luther’s and Calvin’s efforts to draw the boundary between faith and reason (24); Richard Hooker’s failure to “provide an epistemological foundation for his theory of natural law” (67); the need for a criterion to distinguish genuine from false revelation... (shrink)

At the outset of this paper, a couple of clarifications are in order: first of all, I will be concerned with the origin of the concept of God, not with the origin of various anthropomorphic depictions or purported incarnations of God, such as Osiris, Christ, Zeus, Krishna, or Azura-Mazda. Secondly, by the adjective “phenomenological” I mean to differentiate this analysis from other approaches which have a legitimacy of their own—the anthropological approach which is concerned with the sociocultural emergence of the (...) notion of a divinity; the psychological approach which traces the God concept to responses to the environment or to inner needs, drives, or archetypes; the semantical approach which focuses on the problems of reference and denotation in god language; and so forth. That being said, however, I should also explain that I intend my approach to be “phenomenological” not in a kind of Husserlian sense, i.e., as concerned specifically with discovering certain a priori grounds for the notion of God in human subjectivity itself, but in a Kantian-Hegelian sense, which is somewhat wider. In this latter sense, “phenomenological” means “connected with the basic experience of subject-object distinction in consciousness, and with the exigencies, characteristics and/or dynamics of that distinction.”. (shrink)

Once it is appreciated that it is not possible for an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God to exist, the important question arises: What does exist that is closest to, and captures the best of what is in, the traditional conception of God? In this paper I set out to answer that question. The first step that needs to be taken is to sever the God-of-cosmic-power from the God-of-cosmic-value. The first is Einstein’s God, the underlying dynamic unity in the physical universe which (...) physics seeks to depict by means of a true, unified, physical “theory of everything”. Science has already achieved some theoretical knowledge of this God-of-cosmic-power. The second is what is of most value in our human world, and in the world of sentient life more generally. Having cut God in half in this way, our fundamental problem, intellectual and practical, becomes: How can the God-of-cosmic-value (as it is represented on earth at least) exist and best flourish within the God-of-cosmic-power? Or, in other words: How can what is of value associated with human life – and sentient life more generally – exist and best flourish within the physical universe? Clearly acknowledging that this is our fundamental problem, in academic inquiry, and in all that we do, might help what is of value in life to flourish rather better than it does at present. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 619-637 [Access article in PDF] Maimonides and the Rise and Fall of the Sabians:Explaining Mosaic Laws and the Limits of Scholarship Jonathan Elukin The Koran mentions the Sabi'un three times (II 6-2, V 69, XXII 17). "Believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabi'un—whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and does what is right—shall be rewarded by their Lord; they have nothing (...) to fear or to regret." This language is repeated in the second citation. The third appearance is slightly different: "As for true believers, the Jews, the Sabi'un, the Christians, the Magians, and the pagans, Allah will judge them on the Day of Resurrection. He bears witness to all things." 1 Early Islamic commentators often disagreed on the identity of the Sabi'un, and the confusion continued throughout the medieval Islamic period. 2 The term Sabi'un was applied by some early Koranic commentators to the survivors of an ancient Jewish-Christian sect, the Elchasites in southern Iraq. 3 One minority group of ethnic Arab "pagans" with a hellenized elite in Harran, in Arabia, also took the Koranic name Sabian in the third/ninth century to claim the status of a "people of the book" and therefore avoid persecution. It is this group that some later Muslims identified as Sabi'. 4 The scholarly consensus now suggests that [End Page 619] the term Sabian refers to some kind of Gnostic identity that can encompass "the disciples of Judeo-Christian baptizing sects... and, on the other, Harranian astrolators, the last representatives of decadent Greco-Roman paganism." 5The mysterious Sabians would play a key role in attempts by early modern European scholars to understand the origins of the Mosaic legislation. It was through Maimonides, the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar, that the Sabians were transmitted to Christian scholars. By the seventeenth century, the Sabians of Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed had become a fixture in how scholars understood or at least debated the history of the origins of Mosaic law. Increasingly perceived as a diffuse paganism rather than a specific ethnic identity or subsumed by the more tangible reality of Egypt, Sabianism drifted to the margins of scholarship by the end of the Enlightenment. During the nineteenth century the Sabians became superfluous to scholarly efforts to understand the origins of Israelite monotheism. This study is an attempt to understand the growth of the enthusiasm for the Sabians by early modern scholars and then its precipitous decline. In a large degree it was the nature of the evidence itself regarding the Sabians that shaped and ultimately undermined the survival of the Sabians in European thinking. Still, both Christian and Jewish scholars well into the twentieth century lived with the ghosts of the Sabians as they sought to explain otherwise mysterious Mosaic commandments.In the Guide Maimonides argued that the sacrificial system legislated by Moses was an example of God's mercy. It would have been impossible for the Israelites to abandon suddenly the style of idolatrous worship learned in Egypt, and so Moses crafted the sacrificial system gradually to replace false gods with the true God. Maimonides still needed to explain the particular details and reasons for the sacrifices and the other ritual laws. 6 To that end he claimed to have read various texts, particularly the so-called Nabataen Agriculture, which purported to describe Abraham's education among and flight from the Sabians as well as a summary of the practices of the Sabians. 7 (The Sabians had made one brief appearance before Maimonides's discussion in the Guide; the tenth-century Karaite Jew, Qirqisani, declared in his Kitab al anwar, "the modern Christian philosophers assert that the laws of the Torah were given to the Children of Israel only because of God's wrath; and that they [Israel] have chosen these laws for themselves only on account of their resemblance to the laws of the Sabians, which was due to the fact that they became... (shrink)

The author examines Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to discover a variant of the usual teleological argument that abandons reliance on analogical reasoning. This second version, never refuted in the Dialogues, is termed "pragmaticist" in Peirce's sense. It relies on an abductive hypothesis that claims not logical proof but the power of instinctual conviction. The Dialogues' espousal of sound common sense may then be viewed as an imperfectly articulated precursor of Peirce's pragmaticist argument for the reality rather than the (...) existence of God. (shrink)

This article argues that, as far as the problem of Confucian religiosity is concerned, there is an interpretative turn from Mou Zongsan’s moral metaphysics to Tu Weiming’s religious hermeneutics. Some concluding remarks are made: First, Tu’s hermeneutics is rooted in the ontology of self as interrelatedness, which is completely different from Mou’s theory of true self as transcendental subjectivity. Second, Tu’s hermeneutics of self can be better illuminated with the help of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as Being-with (Mitsein). (...) For Tu and Heidegger, self cannot be seen as something separate from community. This article also points out that the paradigmatic shift is evidenced in another similarity between the four categories of self, community, nature, and the transcendent in Tu’s hermeneutics on the one hand, and the four symbols of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals employed by Heidegger to interpret the meaning of dwelling, on the other. In such a primordial situation of dwelling, gods are not supposed to be intellectually known; they are rather to be neighbors in community. (shrink)

Esta reflexão pretende mostrar o discurso racional cartesiano na segunda prova da existência de Deus. Para tanto, Descartes se depara com uma pergunta central: qual a causa da existência da res cogitans que é finita e possui a ideia de infinito? A resposta é encontrada na desproporcionalidade ontológica entre o finito e o infinito. Essa desproporcionalidade é elucidada mediante dois conceitos: o princípio de causalidade que determina que a causa deve ser igual ou superior a coisa causada e o princípio (...) de criação contínua em que a causa que criou o ser não é menor do que aquela que o conserva em sua existência. As objeções destacadas no texto contra os argumentos cartesianos foram escolhas deliberadas que servem para elucidar a importância da racionalidade como fundamento para a prova da existência de Deus. A relação entre o entendimento e a liberdade, apresentada no texto sucintamente, justifica a impossibilidade da res cogitans ser causa de si mesma. Palavras-chave: Infinito; finito; causalidade; criação contínuaThis essay aims to show the rational Cartesian discourse on the second proof of God’s existence. In order to do so, Descartes faces a core question: which is the cause for the existence of the res cogitans that is finite in front of the idea of the infinite? The answer is found in the ontological disproportionality between the finite and the infinite. This disproportionality is elucidated through a couple crucial concepts: the principle of causality, which determines that the cause must be equal or superior to the caused thing and the principle of continuous creation, in which the cause that created the being is not inferior than the one that preserves its existence. The objections highlighted in the text against the Cartesian arguments were deliberated choices, to elucidate the relevance of rationality as the foundation for the proof of God’s existence. The relation between the understanding and the liberty, showed on the text even if succinctly, justifies the impossibility of the res cogitans to be the cause of itself. Key words: Infinite; finite; causality; creation continuous. (shrink)

In three parts, this paper seeks 1) to provide a synopsis of Bernard Lonergan‟s proof for the existence of God as presented in chapter nineteen of Insight, 2) to explain how Lonergan later came to critique his approach in Insight 19 in light of subsequent philosophical developments, and 3) to assess the ongoing relevance of Lonergan‟s Insight 19 argument given that aforementioned critique.The issues discussed in this paper are important for a variety of reasons.First, Lonergan‟s argument for the existence of (...) God may in fact be a sound argument. Second, Lonergan prefaced his argument with the incredibly bold and enticing claim that while arguments for the existence of God are many, all such arguments are implicitly included in the general form of his own argument.And third, however one may assess the preceding claim, the second and third parts ofthis paper will raise fundamental questions regarding the function and existential significance of any philosophical proof for the existence of God, and by doing sowill contribute to contemporary discussions concerning the relevance of philosophical theology. (shrink)

This book offers an approach to Christian ethics. It does so first by organizing Christian ethics around the virtue of practical wisdom and suggesting what the guiding vision of a Christian practical wisdom should be. Second, it provides an account of practical wisdom that integrates literature drawn from the fields of philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and the neurosciences. Reconceptualizing Christian ethics in this way can help us address-but not resolve once and for all-in a faithful way the challenges of (...) our divided age. (shrink)

In this essay dedicated to the memory of D. Z. Phillips, I propose to do two things. In the first part I present his position on the grammar of God and the language game in some detail, discussing the confusion of "subliming" the logic of our language, the contextual genesis of sense and meaning, the idea of a world view, language game, logic, and grammar internal to each context, the constitution of the religious context, and the grammar of God proper (...) to that context. In the second part I present my appreciative critical reflection by arguing that the conception of context and language game must be made more dialectical, that the grammar of God needs more systematic metaphysical analysis, and that a greater sense of the radical transcendence of God over a language game is necessary in order to avoid reductionism always inherent in any contextual approach. (shrink)

This book contains some rare combinations: first, an author who is as concerned with conceptual clarification as he is with the absolute truthfulness of the biblical text; second, an argument that avoids the common "either-ors" and contends for the importance of both divine sovereignty and divine solicitude in equal measure; third, an approach that espouses divine determinism and divine temporality. No One Like Him takes on the most intractable intellectual challenges of contemporary evangelical theology. Kevin Vanhoozer , Research Professor (...) of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School John Feinberg judicially reconstructs aspects of the classical view of God in a way that proves more faithful than process and openness of God theisms. Arguably, this is the best study of theology proper in print. Bruce Demarest , Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation, Denver Seminary Feinberg reads theology with a philosopher's eye and writes it with a philosopher's sensitivity to illogic and incoherence. J. I. Packer , Professor of Theology, Regent College A magisterial work, one that truly deserves to be called a magnum opus....It reveals its author as...perhaps the only modern scholar whose work, like that of Carl. F. H. Henry, can compare in size, detail, comprehensiveness, and intellectual acuity with the accomplishments of the late Karl Barth.... It is not risky to predict that Feinberg's No One Like Him will come to be a milestone in evangelical theology. Harold O. J. Brown , Professor of Philosophy and Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary. (shrink)

The core idea of the ontological proof is to show that the concept of existence is somehow contained in the concept of God, and that therefore God’s existence can be logically derived—without any further assumptions about the external world—from the very idea, or definition, of God. Now, G.W. Leibniz has argued repeatedly that the traditional versions of the ontological proof are not fully conclusive, because they rest on the tacit assumption that the concept of God is possible, i.e. free from (...) contradiction. A complete proof will rather have to consist of two parts. First, a proof of premiseGod is possible. Second, a demonstration of the “remarkable proposition”If God is possible, then God exists. The present contribution investigates an interesting paper in which Leibniz tries to prove proposition. It will be argued that the underlying idea of God as a necessary being has to be interpreted with the help of a distinguished predicate letter ‘E’ as follows:\\). Proposition which Leibniz considered as “the best fruit of the entire logic” can then be formalized as follows:\) \rightarrow \, E)\). At first sight, Leibniz’s proof appears to be formally correct; but a closer examination reveals an ambiguity in his use of the modal notions. According to, the possibility of the necessary being has to be understood in the sense of something which possibly exists. However, in other places of his proof, Leibniz interprets the assumption that the necessary being is impossible in the diverging sense of something which involves a contradiction. Furthermore, Leibniz believes that an »impossible thing«, y, is such that contradictory propositions like \\) and \\) might both be true of y. It will be argued that the latter assumption is incompatible with Leibniz’s general views about logic and that the crucial proof is better reinterpreted as dealing with the necessity, possibility, and impossibility of concepts rather than of objects. In this case, the counterpart of turns out to be a theorem of Leibniz’s second order logic of concepts; but in order to obtain a full demonstration of the existence of God, the counterpart of, i.e. the self-consistency of the concept of a necessary being, remains to be proven. (shrink)