This article aims to demonstrate, by means of a comparison with Lacoste’s proposal, that we can find a particular phenomenology of liturgy in the early Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion, centered in the structure of “being-placed before God”. His...
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...
Bede Griffiths is considered one of the pioneers of interfaith theology. He sought to establish a profound connection between different religious traditions at a time when even Christian ecumenism was still in its infancy. His spirituality, nourished...
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...
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...
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...
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...
This paper inquires into the nature of God’s relationship to space. It explores two different views, one that God transcends space or exists aspatially and the other that God exists throughout space and so is spatially extended. It seeks to adj...
This unique and rich volume is the culmination of a Special Issue of Religions with a focus on “God and Ethics”, a topic both rich with historical significance and of special contemporary importance in light of the recent resurgence of in...
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...
This essay approaches the “God is dead” theme by offering a new philosophical history addressing what would make belief in divinity, in God, sustainable and unsustainable. I claim that the death of nature and the death of God in the moder...
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...
This study approaches the question of the unity between the existence of God and the knowledge of God. Henry’s phenomenology of life, as a phenomenological ontology, offers a phenomenological way to rethink the existence of God and our cognitio...
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...
This article examines the assumption that, in order to respond adequately to the question in the title, one must have the classical concept of God in mind. Classical theism is criticized and neoclassical/process theism is briefly defended. Specifical...
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...
In this essay, I argue that we should take fully seriously the doctrine of heaven when dealing with the problem of evil in our world. The hope of heaven is integral to Christian theism so it cannot be neglected in any substantive discussion of the pr...
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...
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...
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...
A limestone relief fragment with a figure in a winged disk from the fifth-century BCE Hall of 100 Columns at Persepolis in southwestern Iran that entered the Harvard Art Museums’ collections in 1943 preserves significant traces of its original...
Since 9/11, and even more so with the atrocities committed by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, violence in the name of God is predominantly perceived as a “different” kind of violence, which triggers more “absolute” and radical manifestations than its secular...
This Special Issue of Religions is about the encounter between thought experiments and theology [...]
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...
According to the free will theodicy of hell, the damned agent freely chooses to suffer in hell, or equivalently, to reject God. Against this view, Thomas Talbott argues that it is impossible for the agent to freely reject God because doing so is not...
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...
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...
This paper looks at South Indian rationalist and anti-caste leader Periyar EV Ramasamy’s approach to religion. Periyar saw Hinduism as a fundamental degradation of the non-Brahmin community in general, the Dalits in particular. Here, I draw par...
The Frazerian question of murder turned into ritual sacrifice is foundational to cultural anthropology. Frazer described the antinomian figure of a king, who was, at once, a priest and a murderer. Generations of anthropologists have studied sacrifice...
James Sterba has constructed a powerful argument for there being a conflict between the presence of evil in the world and the existence of God. I contend that Sterba’s argument depends on a crucial assumption, namely, that God has an obligation...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2014) tells the story of a nun who must learn to resituate her faith in light of new experiences and information. Through Ida’s encounters, Pawlikowski suggests that God may be encountered in unexpected places. This theologic...
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...
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...
The panda’s thumb argument, championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, stands as one of the most famous polemics for common ancestry. In this essay, I analyze Gould’s argument in several steps. First, I attempt to reconstruct the argument...
This essay defends the position that ethics must be grounded in God, where the notion of ‘God’ is understood as a transcendental source of normativity, though not necessarily a personal being who ‘commands’ moral behavior. The...
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,...
This essay is a response to James Sterba’s “An Ethics without God That Is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution.” As an atheist philosopher I show that atheist morality is essentially and thoroughly a secular morality, and that the mo...
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...
This article examines, through a theological lens, the narrative landscape of Stanisław Lem—the Polish thinker and visionary author who died in 2006, leaving behind an indelible legacy in science fiction, exemplified by masterworks such as...
This article addresses James Sterba’s recent argument for the conclusion that God’s existence is incompatible with the degree and amount of evil in the world. I raise a number of questions concerning the moral principles that Sterba suggests God woul...
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...
All Abrahamic religions have developed hypostatic and semi-divine perceptions of scripture. This article presents an integrated picture of a rich tradition developed in early kabbalah (twelfth–thirteenth century) that viewed the Torah as participatin...
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...
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 paper problematizes the now widely accepted concept of Dostoevsky’s dialogism, which alleges the ‘Author’s’ equal empowerment of all his characters. Using examples from Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Zholkovsky focuses on insta...
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...
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