The aim of this paper is to defend James Sterba’s version (2019) of the logical argument from evil against the existence of God from two objections that have been raised against it: that God cannot “logically” prevent all evils and...
The evil god challenge is for theists to explain why a good god’s existence should be considerably more reasonable than an evil god’s existence. Challengers note that there is a symmetry between a good god and an evil god. Moreover, the c...
Film, as a medium, serves not only as a significant source of entertainment but also as a powerful instrument in shaping attitudes, beliefs, behaviours, social norms, and identities. Since its inception, cinematic art has been closely intertwined wit...
I argue in this paper that moral realism is more likely to be true if God exists than if God does not exist. I will first argue that, without the existence of God, objective moral facts would be queer, but that the queerness problem is solved if God...
Toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, rationalism’s demise gradually entailed the transcendent God’s demise. In this article, I will draw on the resurfacing of God in the ensuing tradition of the unconscious. Whereas philosophers su...
Against the background of the current debates about God and evil, the article elaborates in three stages of argumentation the thesis that statements about God must not be understood as factual or representational statements, but as descriptive elemen...
This paper explores dimensions of culture and practice that shape the cognitive pathways leading to different beliefs about God(s)’ mind(s). Varying socio-ecological sources of insecurity are linked to types and modes of cognitive processing, w...
In 1973, British musician, social anthropologist, and ethnomusicologist John Blacking published his seminal work, How Musical is Man? In this book, Blacking describes his 1950s ethnographic study of the Venda people in South Africa, which explores ho...
The recent debate on the notorious Anselmian proof of God’s existence, usually called the “ontological argument”, is placed within an analytic approach, since Alvin Plantinga revisited this argument beginning in the sixties and espe...
Sterba argues that if God existed, God would allow lower-level evils and suffering but should and would prevent all significant and horrendous evils. Since such serious evils do exist, God does not exist. In reply, I argue that in creating a Sterba w...
St. Paul writes, “whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10: 31 NABRE).” This essay employs the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and the recent philosophical work of Daniel Johnson (2020) on this command to investigate a series...
Many people report occasional feelings of anger toward God. However, most evidence pertains to western, predominantly Christian populations. In this study, Indian university students (N = 139; 78% Hindu) completed a survey about anger toward God(s)....
God’s power is usually discussed in terms of omnipotence. However, the problems associated with omnipotence are complex, and even if some think that the problems are resolvable, many find the purported resolutions unsatisfactory. I turn away fr...
Prominent approaches to the problems of evil assume that even if the Anselmian God exists, some worlds are better than others, all else being equal. But the assumptions that the Anselmian God exists and that some worlds are better than others cannot...
Justice seeking is an indispensable component of multicultural worship. How can multicultural worship help the faith community worship God heartfully, indwelling with God, one another, and creation? In this article, the Tai Chi rhythm of “loosen-empt...
Interpretations of quantum physics are shown to presuppose the reality of consciousness. But if a minimal realism about the external world is true, then the consciousness presupposed by quantum reality cannot be only that of the scientific observer,...
There is renewed interest in philosophical and theological investigations about God, religions and the implications of religious beliefs among philosophers and theologians in Africa. This development is itself profitable because the question or the p...
Children actively construct their understanding of God in early childhood, an understanding that incorporates affect-laden mental representations often referred to as God images. To explore religious variations in children’s association of posi...
The usage of the term ‘Te Atua’ for God within Māori contexts has been largely accepted and unchallenged, yet its appropriateness is questioned due to its colonial origins and misalignment with Māori epistemologies. This paper e...
The main thesis presented in this article rejects the identification of the “death of God” idea with atheism. Atheism is a metaphysical claim stating that the signifier God has no signified. By contrast, the “death of God” not...
Previous studies on the Nanhaishen Temple 南海神廟 (Temple of the South Sea God) in Guangzhou in the Song dynasty focus mainly on its state sacrificial ritual and local temple fairs, without fully discussing the differences of...
The central argument of James Sterba’s “Is a Good God Logically Possible?” relies crucially on the notion that a good God would have to abide by various evil prevention requirements. Because it appears that God has not done so, Ster...
This article is a Christian theological evaluation of African neo-Pentecostal prophets’ (ANPPs) projection of God as a servant of prophetic rituals in their solutions to poor human agency (power to act) and transcendence (power to overcome) in...
Nature shows itself to us in ambivalent ways. Breathtaking beauty and cruelty lie close together. A Darwinian image of nature seems to imply that nature is a mere place of violence, cruelty and mercilessness. In this article, I first explore the ques...
Discussions of gratitude to God characteristically presuppose some philosophical or theological framework. This philosophical and theological exploration of gratitude to God examines the topic in light of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Unlike some tr...
This article addresses the question, “Is an ethics without God possible?” This question is explored in a special issue, edited by Prof. Dr. James P. Sterba, which directly poses this very inquiry. I argue that an objective ethics without...
Understanding spirituality as “the sense or experience of God and the way one lives in response to that experience”, Jesus’ spirituality according to Mark may be described as relational and communal, with less attention given to the...
Will CRISPR usher in a new era of Promethean overreach? CRISPR makes gene editing widely available and cheap. Anti-play-god bioethicists fear that geneticists will play god and precipitate a backlash from nature that could be devastating. In contrast...
Knowledge and love, as well as intellect and will, while remaining distinct, must be understood in man as being intrinsically related on account of his being ordained to a single ultimate end. This responds to the substantial inclination that every h...
Gratitude to God is a core component of Christian liturgy; along with the countless hymns which express attitudes of thanks to God, Christian liturgy often includes acts of spoken gratitude, as well as prayers of thanksgiving. We argue that two aspec...
Research has expanded the notion of attachment to caregivers to other figures such as God, and there is now literature supporting positive effects of attachment to God with various psychosocial outcomes. The dimensions of attachment to God—anxiety an...
Nietzsche’s declaration of “God is dead” signifies not only the collapse of classical metaphysical systems in philosophy but also shifts in the psychological structure of individuals and society after the secularization of Christian...
In contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, the evil God challenge has been developed by several authors as a parody argument. Proponents of this challenge contend that, given the goods in our world, the hypothesis of an omnipotent, omniscient,...
This article discusses the place of God in the poetic system of Aleksandr Vvedensky. Vvedensky’s famous pronouncement on his “poetic critique” is more throughgoing than Kant’s critical enterprise, and invites a comparison between the movement of Kant...
This paper argues that Westphal’s attempt to overcome onto-theology paradoxically collapses back into it—not through conceptual inconsistency but through a structural reinscription of the very hierarchy he seeks to escape. The argument be...
Avicenna scholars unanimously agree that Avicenna takes the position that God is not classifiable according to the Aristotelian scheme of the ten categories. However, Avicenna scholars are in little agreement about precisely why God evades categorial...
After Being and Time, “the last god” is born ex nihilo in Contributions to Philosophy. This has aroused extensive interest and discussion in the academic world. This paper focuses on the manifestation of “the last god” in Cont...
When good things happen, what thoughts elicit gratitude to God (GTG)? Building on work highlighting divine attributions and appraisals, we examined whether consciously priming people to think about God would increase subsequent reports of GTG. U.S. a...
This paper takes the interaction between late-Ming Jesuits and Chinese City God (chenghuang, 城隍) worship as a case study, employing the “Great Tradition/Little Tradition” framework to examine the confrontation between &ldquo...
Metaphysical modelling is a method in (epistemologically enlightened) metaphysics. It uses models for the philosophical analysis of metaphysico-epistemological situations. In this paper, the method is applied to a set of metaphysical questions that c...
The majority of people living in the U.S. report that spirituality is an important part of their life that is influential to their well-being. However, individuals vary widely in how they conceptualize spirituality, which often stems from and overlap...
In contemporary theology, one can find an array of models of God to choose from. There are various types of arguments that one can put forth in order to reject one model, or to defend another model. In this paper, I wish to examine one popular type o...
This article begins with a short reconstruction of the long-forgotten Death of God movement and its development of the concept of a Radical Theology during the 1960s in the United States of America and in Western Germany (The “Death of God&rdqu...
In this paper, I examine Aristotle’s cosmological proof of God’s existence, Avicenna’s metaphysical proof, and Thomas Aquinas’s five-way proof. By comparing these proofs, I argue that philosophers and theologians take differen...
This study presents a review about what great figures of history thought about the existence of God and a worldwide comparison between religious believers and non-believers using the World Social Survey (WSS) database, comprising a sample of 90,350 r...
Contemporary public opinion has come to assume that we live in the post-truth era, in which judgments on the most relevant realities of human life have been left in the hands of mere emotions. In such a context, it is very opportune to redirect our g...
This paper aims at a particular love for God in the human exploration of knowledge (including philosophy and science). Here, “a particular love for God” does not mean something related to religion but a way of thinking to pursue perfectio...
Research on the relationship between belief in God and mental health is scarce and often limited to comparing group differences in mental health across various self-reported religious identities (e.g., atheists, agnostics, believers). To advance this...
Discussions of Jewish responses to modernity often focus on what is new or what has adapted or evolved in Judaism in the face of modernity’s challenges. However, contrary to convention, this paper argues that, at least in principle, neither has...
In our paper, we put forward an argument for the existence of God that starts with a description of the goal of science. The fact that science approximates perfect knowledge opens the problem of its status. We proceed to three resolutions of the prob...
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