Past research suggests that death pushes some individuals to strongly promote religious worldviews. The current work explores the role of conceptual metaphor in this process. Past research shows that metaphors can provide meaning and certainty, suggesting that death may therefore cause people to be more attracted to epistemically beneficial metaphoric descriptions of God. In three studies, we test this possibility against competing alternatives suggesting that death concerns may cause more selective metaphor preferences. Using both correlational and experimental methods, we (...) find that death concern is generally associated with embracing metaphors about God. (shrink)

John C. Fletcher, a pioneer in the field of bioethics and friend and mentor to many generations of bioethicists, died tragically on May 27th at the age of 72. The son of an Episcopal priest from Bryan, TX, Fletcher graduated in 1953 with a degree in English Literature from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. After completing a Masters in Divinity degree from the Virginia Theological Seminary and a stint as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Heidelberg (...) in 1956, he was ordained in the Episcopal Church and received a doctorate in Christian ethics from the Union Theological Seminary in New York. After ordination, Fletcher worked in various Episcopal churches and founded the Interfaith Metropolitan Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. However, despite his religious faith, he was also a skeptic, and renounced his ordination in the mid-1990s due to his need for ?intellectual honesty.? Fletcher began his bioethics contributions in the early 1970's, when he became a founding Fellow of the Hastings Center and eventually the first Chief of the Bioethics Program at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he was the Founding Director of the Center for Bioethics and a professor of biomedical ethics at the medical school, and became the Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics until his retirement in 1999. Fletcher was a prominent authority and voice in the national and international bioethical dialogue through his talks, his testimonies before scientific and congressional panels, his many articles, and his bioethical and religiously-orientated books, including: An Introduction to Clinical Ethics (1997), Coping with Genetic Disorders: a Guide for Clergy and Parents (1982), Ethics and Human Genetics: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (1989), which he wrote with sociologist Dorothy C. Wertz. Dr. Fletcher received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities in 2000. With the passing of Dr. John C. Fletcher, bioethics has lost one of its great voices, a dedicated teacher and mentor, and a friend and colleague to scholars in bioethics and a host of other fields. Below is a touching tribute from one of his former students. (shrink)

Is religious faith consistent with being an intellectually virtuous thinker? In seeking to answer this question, one quickly finds others, each of which has been the focus of recent renewed attention by epistemologists: What is it to be an intellectually virtuous thinker? Must all reasonable belief be grounded in public evidence? Under what circumstances is a person rationally justified in believing something on trust, on the testimony of another, or because of the conclusions drawn by an intellectual authority? (...) Can it be reasonable to hold a belief on a topic over which there is significant, entrenched disagreement among informed inquirers, or should such disagreement lead all parties to modify or suspend their own judgments? Is there anything about faith that exempts it from measurement against such epistemic norms? And if we would so evaluate it, how exactly should we understand the intellectual commitments faith requires? The volume's introduction provides a roadmap of the central issues and controversies as currently discussed by philosophers. In fourteen new essays written to engage nonspecialists as well as philosophers working in religion and epistemology, a diverse and distinguished group of thinkers then consider the place of intellectual virtue in religious faith, exploring one or more of the specific issues noted above. (shrink)

Purpose. The aim of this article is to analyse the essential features of religious faith as an existential-personalistic model of the formation of a person, his worldview orientations and activities. This requires a consistent solution of the following tasks: a) to focus on different approaches to understanding the phenomenon of "religious faith" ; b) to reveal the spiritual potential of religious faith, its capabilities in boundary situations. Theoretical basis. The author thinks that the interpretation (...) of religious faith as confidence in the invisible is unsatisfactory, one-sided and superficial. Religious faith is the existential, due to which a person overcomes the contradictions between finiteness and infinity. It is the construct of the human spirit, which makes its way into the transcendental realm. In this context, religious faith is a kind of criterion for the "growth" of the "human" in human, the criterion of his spirituality and humanity. Religious faith, being an integral part of human existence, gives it irrational dimensions, makes the possibility of impossible. The existential potential of religious faith serves as the "fulcrum" of a person, thanks to which he self-actualizes, self-fulfills and forms a certain worldview model. Originality. The author has proved that religious faith, which is the projective model of a person, turns out to be one of the possible ways to solve its existential problems, as it concerns not only the nature of the essential characteristics, the properties of the Divine itself but also the ultimate foundations of person in all the uniqueness and specificity of his being. Conclusions. Religious faith, acting as a factor in human activity, builds his value-worldview model of the world. Faith deals with the "ultimate" problems of human existence since it is of exceptional importance in solving life-meaning issues of human existence. The existential experience of the believer acquires the status of an event that opens up a field of new possibilities, a new spiritual experience. The accumulative effect of such experience forms the spiritual and value priorities of human existence, sets certain coordinates of his vital activity, due to which he self-determines, being in dialogue with the Absolute. Religious faith, unfolding as a permanent process of "search and finding" opens the "code" of transcendence, a new level of relations of the Human and Divine. (shrink)

On several levels, there is now a debate whether the concept of God can be made compatible with modern science. In an attempt to elucidate this debate, I give an account of my own experiences from writing a book on the foundation of quantum mechanics. In my opinion, one can give two independent arguments for the existence of God by taking as departure an epistemic (knowledge-based) interpretation of quantum theory. However, I also argue that any religious belief should be (...) the result of an existential choice governed by each person’s own context (history and culture). In particular, I give my account of Christianity as a religion connected to our western culture, how one as a scientist can relate to the relevant dogmas. (shrink)

The particular sense or use of the word ‘faith’ that I am seeking to understand is that which occurs when the religious man, and more specifically the Christian believer, speaks of ‘knowing God’ and goes on to explain that this is a knowing of God by faith. Or again, when asked how he professes to know that God, as spoken about in Christianity, is real, his answer is ‘by faith’. Our question is: what does ‘faith’ (...) mean in these contexts? And what I should like to be able to do is to make a descriptive analysis that could be acceptable to both believers and non-believers. A Christian and an atheist or agnostic should equally be able to say, Yes, that is what, phenomenologically, faith is – though they would of course then go on to say radically different things about its value. (shrink)

The particular sense or use of the word ‘faith’ that I am seeking to understand is that which occurs when the religious man, and more specifically the Christian believer, speaks of ‘knowing God’ and goes on to explain that this is a knowing of God by faith. Or again, when asked how he professes to know that God, as spoken about in Christianity, is real, his answer is ‘by faith’. Our question is: what does ‘faith’ (...) mean in these contexts? And what I should like to be able to do is to make a descriptive analysis that could be acceptable to both believers and non-believers. A Christian and an atheist or agnostic should equally be able to say, Yes, that is what, phenomenologically, faith is – though they would of course then go on to say radically different things about its value. (shrink)

Religious communities that speak of faith typically affirm the ideal of a highly confident faith. If we understand confidence in terms of the quality of assent to faith-claims, however, it is difficult to reconcile a high degree of confidence with intellectual virtue. As an alternative, I propose to construe confident faith as a kind of trusting perception. The sort of confidence that I envision here makes sense as a religious ideal. In addition it leaves (...) room for the recognition of epistemic risk needed for intellectual humility as well as for the kind of openness to revising the content of faith in the light of relevant evidential considerations that intellectual integrity demands. Furthermore, someone with this type of confidence can find a particular faith compelling, while also acknowledging some faiths that make conflicting claims to be reasonable options. (shrink)

Recent philosophy of religion, particularly neo-Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, has reminded philosophers that there is more to religion than belief and, indeed, that there is more to religious belief than mere belief. D. Z. Phillips is among those who have made a contribution here. He has emphasized how religious belief is very different from the kind of belief that amounts to holding a hypothesis, even a God-hypothesis. However, perhaps because of his non-cognitivist tendencies, Phillips, unlike Kierkegaard to whom (...) he often appeals, has failed to bring into relief another quintessential fact about belief in God, namely that it is for the believer an entered relationship with God. We do well to appreciate that belief in God is not identical with making a truth claim. But if the essential core of religious belief is construed as an attitudinal or affective response, as non-cognitivists tend to construe it, an important conceptual dimension of religious faith will all but be overlooked, as, paradoxically it seems it has been by the philosophical approach that strives to describe the religious ‘form of life’ in its own terms. In what follows I shall endeavour to bring into relief what I take to be an essential dimension of religious belief, one which presupposes that religious belief is an entered relationship for the believer. This I shall do by pursuing a contrast which, I think, at once clarifies and makes undeniable religious belief's essential nature as a relationship to God. (shrink)

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] intellectual virtue an obstacle to religious faith? The papers in this fine collection answer this question either directly or indirectly.1 The editors, Laura Callahan and Timothy O’Connor, are to be congratulated on requesting, and receiving, from the authors accessible papers that cover many of the relevant issues. In addition they have provided a clear introduction and (...) useful summaries....In this review, I first consider the way the editors explicate the question. Then I examine the authors' answers. Finally I draw some conclusions from the various papers.In their Introduction the editors remind us of the complexity of faith, which typically involves: various intellectual propensities, notably tenacity of belief; a world-view; a moral orientation and an ‘affective stance’. This last may well be the... (shrink)

Rockefeller (religion and philosophy, Middlebury College) combines biography and intellectual history in an introduction to the philosophy of Dewey (1859-1952) which emphasizes the evolution of the religious faith and moral vision at the heart of his thought. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Po.

The aim of this paper is to argue against the received view among Unamuno scholars that Miguel de Unamuno was defending a sort of pragmatic argument for religious faith and that his notion of religious faith as “querer creer” (“wanting to believe”) is to be identified with William James’s “the will to believe”. As I will show in this paper, one of the aspects that makes Unamuno’s reasoning philosophically relevant is his ability to formulate a non-pragmatist (...) defense of religious faith without a prior commitment to the truth of any religious or theological statement and grounded in our longing for an endless existence through God’s Salvation. (shrink)

Background and Aims The prevalence of religious faith among doctors and its relationship with decision-making in end-of-life care is not well documented. The impact of ethnic differences on this is also poorly understood. This study compares ethnicity and religious faith in the medical and general UK populations, and reports on their associations with ethically controversial decisions taken when providing care to dying patients. Method A postal survey of 3733 UK medical practitioners, of whom 2923 reported on (...) the care of their last patient who died. Findings Specialists in care of the elderly were somewhat more likely to be Hindu or Muslim than other doctors; palliative care specialists were somewhat more likely to be Christian, religious and ‘white’ than others. Ethnicity was largely unrelated to rates of reporting ethically controversial decisions. Independently of speciality, doctors who described themselves as non-religious were more likely than others to report having given continuous deep sedation until death, having taken decisions they expected or partly intended to end life, and to have discussed these decisions with patients judged to have the capacity to participate in discussions. Speciality was independently related to wide variations in the reporting of decisions taken with some intent to end life, with doctors in ‘other hospital’ specialities being almost 10 times as likely to report this when compared with palliative medicine specialists, regardless of religious faith. Conclusions Greater acknowledgement of the relationship of doctors' values with clinical decision-making is advocated. (shrink)

"Terence Penelhum surveys traditional and contemporary views on the often troubled relationship between philosophical reason and religious faith. Covering all the major issues and figures in a clear, balanced, and fair-minded way, this is the most reliable and modern treatment of these issues now available."--BOOK JACKET.

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke maintains that ?Reason must be our last Judge and Guide in every Thing,? including matters of religious faith, and this commitment to the primacy of reason is not abandoned in his later religious writings. This essay argues that with regard to the relation between reason and religious faith, Locke is primarily concerned not with evidence, but with consistency, meaning, and how human beings ought to respond to their inclinations, (...) including their inclinations to believe. Leibniz, on the other hand, stakes out an alternative conception of the relationship between faith and reason that assigns to faith the role of a primary truth. For Leibniz, some religious propositions can be believed immediately and without an additional examination and evaluation by reason. The essay maintains that the differences between the two regarding faith and reason are tied to a broader disagreement about how much of the human understanding is due, in Locke's words, to ?Labour, Attention and Industry? (shrink)

The proper role of religious faith in the public life of a liberal democracy is one of the most important and controversial issues in the United States today. Since the publication in 1991 of his book Love and Power, Michael J. Perry's important writings on this issue have been among the most insightful. In this new book, Perry argues that political reliance on religious faith violates neither the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution nor, more (...) broadly, the morality of liberal democracy. Nonetheless, Perry argues, religious believers sometimes have good reasons to be wary about relying on religious beliefs in making political decisions. Along the way, Perry thoughtfully addresses three subjects at the center of fierce contemporary political debate: school vouchers, same-sex marriage, and abortion. (shrink)

Open-ended survey responses from 205 Christian exemplars drawn from 37 distinct congregations within 19 Christian denominations in the Northwest and New England regions of the United States were analyzed by chi-square and multiple regression analyses to determine relationships between religious experience and gender. Results indicated that men were more likely than women to describe positions of leadership/responsibility/service as influential to their faith, and to indicate their own personal sin as a faith challenge. Women were more likely than (...) men to describe negative/tragic events as a faith influence, the intellectual dimension of their faith as a challenge, and serving other people as a faith satisfaction. These results appear to lend strong empirical support to previous assertions in both the social science and feminist theological literature regarding relationships between gender and religious experience. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to articulate the possibility of semantic non-doxastic agnostic religious faith. Robin Le Poidevin, who introduced the idea of semantic religious agnosticism, defines it as being agnostic about which parts of religion to treat in realist terms and which parts to treat in fictionalist terms. I take Le Poidevin’s view and argue that it is consistent with a non-doxastic attitude toward the object of faith such as acceptance. I then explore the (...) similarities and differences between my account and a prominent version of non-doxastic faith found in the work of Daniel Howard-Snyder. One advantage of my theory of faith is that it allows a person to be even more sceptical about religion than other versions of agnosticism while simultaneously avoiding some of the problems frequently associated with religious fictionalism. (shrink)

Religious faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. While such seeing may well be truthful, it is also unavoidably constructive, involving the imagination in its philosophical sense of the capacity to organize underdetermined or ambiguous sense date into a whole or gestalt. One of the characteristic ways in which biblical narratives inspire and teach (...) is by renewing their characters’ and readers’ imagination. The texts do so not inexorably but in a similar way as (other) works of art. This paper therefore investigates the ways in which works of art engage and develop the imagination, and thereby enable renewed perceptual and cognitive engagement with the world. The paper introduces predictive processing as a helpful psychological theory for analyzing this dynamic, and outlines questions for further research. (shrink)

This study aimed to adapt the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire -Brief Version to the Portuguese elderly, and to investigate the effect of relevant and easy to assess predictors on the strength of religious faith. Participants were 778 non-institutionalized Catholic elderly, with a majority of women, young-olds, with four years or less of education, and practicing Catholics. The sample was randomly split in two to study the invariance and the structural validity of the SCSRFQ-Brief (...) Version across both groups. Following this step, a multiple indicators and multiple causes model for age, gender, educational level, and religious participation influence on strength of religious faith was tested across groups. All predictors were statistically significant, with religious participation being the most influential. The study of religion in the elderly is enriched by resource to valid multiple-item instruments as the SCSRFQ-Brief Version. (shrink)