Search

In this paper, I present what I call the symmetry conception of God within 1st order, extensional, non-well-founded set theory. The symmetry conception comes in two versions. According to the first, God is that unique being that is universally symmetrical with respect to set membership. According to the second, God is the universally symmetrical set of all sets that are universally symmetrical with respect to set membership. I present a number of theorems, most importantly that any universally symmetrical set is identical to its essence, that show that the two symmetry conceptions intersect with some dominant theological conceptions of God. The theorems also show that both of the symmetry conceptions of God entail that God has a fractal like structure.

Various key concepts in the Qur’an serve a critical role in correcting misconceptions in the minds of its addressees, transforming these erroneous understandings into correct ones and progressively constructing a new mentality in the person. The Arabic word rabb (lord) used in the Qur’an to mean “God’s subjugation and uninterrupted administration of the entire cosmos as owner of all creation” is one such concept. Given the obscure and contradictory conceptions of God and lordship (rububiyyah) that the Qur’an’s first addressees had, this term serves an important function in emphasizing God’s continuous administration of the cosmos and, more particularly, of man as the lord of all of creation. Accordingly, considering how frequently and in what ways the word rabb is used in the Qur’an during the first half of the Meccan period, we observe that it constitutes one of the cornerstones and fundamental concepts of the Qur’an. In our aim to depict the current situation, we will discuss certain key points that demonstrate how the first addressees of the Qur’an, i.e., the Meccan polytheists, perceived both God and the concept of lordship. After this, we attempt to determine the style in which the word rabb is used, the number of times it appears, and its ratio of use compared to other words over the course of the Qur’an’s revelation. Then, we will attempt to identify how this data resonated in the mentality of the Qur’an’s original addressees, the Meccan polytheists.

Beginning with its third word, the book of Genesis reveals that God (םיהל)א exists and that He created the heavens and the earth. The seventeenth word from the end of the book is also “God” (םיהל)א—in Joseph’s declaration that God will provide for the descendants of his father Israel. Few exegetes would argue today that the plural form of םיהל א even implies a plurality of divine persons—and rightly so. However, evidence exists within the text of the first book of Moses that might indicate a distinction of persons in the Godhead. For example, both Genesis 1:2 and 6:3 seem to refer to the Spirit of God. Other statements in the text of Genesis appear to mention more than one divine person named Yahweh (19:24). Some references involve a person identified as the “angel/messenger of Yahweh” (e.g., 22:11). Was this individual the same as one of the “three men” who appeared to Abraham (18:2) and before whom Abraham stood (18:22)? Is he a person of the Godhead? In addition to these more direct and perhaps less abstract references to a divine person, Genesis includes several first person plural statements (“us” and “our”) spoken by a divine person (1:26; 3:22; 11:7). Are these references best explained as multiple divine persons, some sort of plural of majesty, or some council of spirit beings other than divine? What is the exegetical evidence? What are the implications theologically regarding either a plurality of divine persons or even a limitation to three such divine persons? Furthermore, how do these implications affect the way we understand ancient human conceptions of God, His person, His attributes, and His work from Adam to Joseph?

In this chapter, we outline the various problems that ontological randomness is supposed to present to God’s providence, as understood by traditional monotheistic religions. We begin by defining various notions of randomness and identify putative examples. We then outline three conceptions of divine providence: Super Meticulous, Meticulous, and General Providence. We go on to articulate the problems that randomness is thought to pose for God’s providence, especially problems concerning God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. We explore how the different conceptions of God’s providence fare with respect to these problems and gesture toward some possible responses.

Many moral philosophers have assumed that ordinary folk embrace moral objectivism. But, if so, why do folk embrace objectivism? One possibility is the pervasive connection between religion and morality in ordinary life. Some theorists contend that God is viewed as a divine guarantor of right and wrong, rendering morality universal and absolute. But is belief in God per se sufficient for moral objectivism? In this paper, we present original research exploring the connections between metaethics and particular conceptions of God among religious participants. Study 1 shows that, when controlling for religiosity, age, and belief in God's loving characteristics, it is belief in God's punishing characteristics (specifically, the existence of Hell) that uniquely predicts rejection of moral relativism. Study 2 shows that followers of Abrahamic faiths are more likely to endorse moral objectivism when thinking of the Divine, regardless of loving or punishing characteristics. And Study 3 shows that priming for moral objectivism makes theists more likely to endorse God's punishing characteristics. A general picture is suggested by these data. For Abrahamic theists, God's particular characteristics are not germane to the question of whether his moral commandments are real and objective. And while theists strongly endorse God's loving characteristics, focusing on the objective nature of morality can highlight God's punishing nature, reminding theists that objective morality requires a divine guarantor of justice to enforce it.

One of the most burning problems the world is facing these days is religious fundamentalism and the consequent intolerance, terrorism and violence. In the present circumstances, thoughtful deliberation on this problem from the viewpoint of anekāntavāda may be of great help to redeem the situation and to develop firm belief that coexistence and mutual appreciation are the only way out. Therefore, the present chapter is extension from the previous chapter on this theme of topical importance. It aims at focusing on the prevalence of religiosity in humankind and giving it a desired direction for cosmic wellness. Every religion puts forth the noble ideals of peace, love, compassion and friendship in a spirit of coexistence and cooperation. Religiosity seems to be ingrained in human nature, and because of varied human psyche multiple religions have come to exist. Plurality of religions cannot be eliminated, and there cannot be one universal religion. So, the only way out is their coexistence with cordiality and harmony. It has to be recognized that there can be multiple conceptions of God and modes of worship. We have to reckon with this fact. Jain theory of anekāntavāda is helpful in cultivating such mindset. We need to understand basic tenets of our own religion and also those of other religions. Then, we shall come to appreciate that there is fundamental unity in their tenets in spite of differences in practice. Jain thinkers have upheld this point.

At the center of the three Abrahamic traditions is faith in God, yet the foundational revelations of these traditions and the filled-out concepts of God that they provide conflict with one another and are incompatible. The logic or nature of faith, it is argued in this chapter, allows that despite conflicting conceptions of God in these three theistic traditions, believers nevertheless have faith in and a faith relationship to the same God.

In Contra Celsum (‘Against Celsus’), probably written in 248, Origen defends his Christian belief against ‘accusations’ of the Platonic philosopher Celsus. This thesis comments on Contra Celsum 4.1-22, where Origen replies to Celsus’ criticism of the Jewish-Christian concept of a ‘divine descent’. According to Celsus it is shameful to assert that ‘some god or son of god’ will come down, or has come down, to the earth in order to correct the situation up here. Origen defends this concept as essential for his belief. Speaking about this descent he refers to Christ’s coming in the world, but more generally also to God’s governance of the world and to the way God and the Logos come down to the level of human souls in order to illuminate them.In 'Divine Descent' the Greek text of this passage is discussed from three perspectives: linguistics, rhetoric and philosophical theology. In the linguistic-rhetorical commentary the focus is on the communication between author and audience, the structure of the discourse and the persuasive strategies used by Celsus and Origen. The second part deals with the conceptions of God and his relation to the world, which form the backdrop to the discussions. The theological conceptions of Celsus and Origen are presented in relation to thoughts of other philosophers in the Greco-Roman age. The final chapter examines how the whole of these ideas can contribute to the interpretation of Contra Celsum 4.1-22.

In this study we explored young isiZulu children’s conceptions of spirituality. The children (n = 8; females = 5; male = 3) were nine to eleven years old and attended a primary school in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. They drew pictures depicting their sense of spirituality and answered questions on vignettes or scenarios that contained a moral dilemma. The children also engaged in conversations with a picture, and wrote a letter to God. Thematic analysis of the data yielded three themes that characterised the children’s emerging conceptions of their spirituality: conceptions of a transcendental being; spirituality as a search for personal meanings; and influences on emerging conceptions of spirituality. For the young children, being spiritual was about connecting with a transcendental being and with significant others in their lives through expressions of love, respect, hope, faith, compassion, closeness, fairness, and empathy. Children appear to acquire a sense of spirituality mainly by internalising expe...

Proposals that god-belief is an innate capacity of all humanity have not been confirmed by empirical studies. Scientific disciplines presently lean against god-belief’s innateness. Perhaps religion should be relieved that belief in gods is not innate. Intuitive cognitive functions supporting god-belief offer little convergence upon any god. Religious pluralism back to the Stone Age displays no consensus either. Any cognition for god-belief can only be deemed as mostly or entirely misleading. Theology has tried to forestall that skeptical judgment, by dictating what counts as authentic religiosity and who enjoys a valid idea of god. Justin Barrett exemplifies this theological interference with scientific inquiry. Contorting the anthropology and cognitive science of religion too far, his quest for a primal natural religion won’t match up with his search for intuitive conceptions of god. His quest for god-belief’s innateness devolves into theological dogmatism, deepening doubts that scientific theories of religion will validate god-belief.

The present research examines the influence of intuitive cognitive domain and religion on the God concepts of children growing up in religious traditions that present God in ways varying from abstract to concrete. In Study 1, we compared children from a Latter-Day Saints (LDS) background with those from mainstream Christian (MC) backgrounds in the United States. In contrast to MC theology that holds that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and disembodied, LDS theology depicts God as embodied. In Study 1, 3- to 7-year-olds from LDS and MC backgrounds were asked about supernatural mental and immaterial attributes of God, a ghost, a dad, and a bug. In Study 2, children ages 3-7 from Muslim and Catholic backgrounds in Indonesia were presented with a variant of Study 1. Taken together, the two studies examine the God concepts of children raised in three different religious traditions with God concepts that range from highly abstract to concrete. Overall, we find that the youngest children, regardless of religion, distinguish God from humans and hold similar ideas of God, attributing more supernatural psychological than physical properties. Older children's conceptions of God are more in line with the theological notions of their traditions. The results suggest that children are not simply anthropomorphic in their God concepts, but early on understand supernatural agents as having special mental properties and they continue to learn about differences between agents, influenced by their religious traditions. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject Research on children's God concepts has established that children begin to distinguish the mind of God from that of humans by around age 4-5. The main debate in the field is whether children start out thinking about God in anthropomorphic terms or whether they start out with an undifferentiated idea of agents' minds as all having access to knowledge. Research on children's understanding of immortality has demonstrated that around the same age that children begin differentiating God's mind from human minds, they also differentiate between the two in terms of life-cycle attributes, attributing immortality to God, but not to humans. What does this study add? The present research contributes to the field by examining the God concepts of children from different religious backgrounds. These religious backgrounds have theologies with God concepts that range from physically concrete (Latter-Day Saints or Mormonism) to highly abstract (Islam). We also include Christian samples for comparison. The present research examines children's attributions to different supernatural agents including God, but also a ghost and an angel. The present studies look at children's attribution of not only supernatural mental attributions, but also the supernatural physical attributions of immateriality and omnipresence that have been understudied.

In the preface of the 4th edition (p. xiii), Rowe relates the development of philosophy of religion in the 21st century with the ability of religious thinkers to demonstrate that religious belief supports rational arguments, growth in the understanding of non-Western religious traditions and continued interest in the problem of evil. He indicates his intention to address the reasons behind the development of this field of study. Rowe divides the topics of discussion into eleven chapters. In the introduction, the author indicates that philosophy of religion examines basic religious beliefs as well as the major conceptions of God that emerged in Western civilization, namely theistic ideas of God (p. 1-3).

In Western theism, different attributes have classically been ascribed to God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, wisdom, goodness, freedom and so on. But these ascriptions have also raised many conceptual difficulties: are these attributes internally coherent? Are they really compossible? Are they compatible with what we know about the world (e.g. the existence of evil, human freedom, the laws of nature etc.). These traditional questions are part of the inquiry on God’s nature as it is carried out in contemporary philosophy of religion. Another part of this inquiry is constituted by theological and philosophical questions raised by more precise or particular religious conceptions of God – e.g. the doctrine of Trinity in Christianity, or other specific credentials about the right way to understand God’s perfection and absolute transcendence in Judaism, Christianity or Islam. In this issue, we propose to follow these two directions of the inquiry about God’s nature and attributes through historical and systematic studies, in the perspective of contemporary philosophy of religion and analytical theology. While the three papers specifically dedicated to the problem of the Trinity pertain mainly to the second part of the examination (the conceptual analysis of specific credentials and theological doctrines), the three others offer new perspectives and arguments on traditional questions about God, like the problem of evil, perfect goodness, or the problem of divine perfection and God’s freedom.

The notion of divine love was essential to medieval Christian conceptions of God. Jewish thinkers, though, had a much more ambivalent attitude about this issue. While Maimonides was reluctant to ascribe love, or any other affect, to God, Gersonides and Crescas celebrated God’s love. Though Spinoza is clearly sympathetic to Maimonides’s rejection of divine love as anthropomorphism, he attributes love to God nevertheless, unfolding his notion of amor Dei intellectualis at the conclusion of his Ethics. But is this a legitimate notion within his system? In the first part of this chapter, I explain some of the problems surrounding this notion and then turn, in the second part, to consider two unsatisfactory solutions. In the third part, I attempt to rework Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis from his definitions of love and the other affects in part three of the Ethics. In the fourth part, I examine closely how Spinoza tweaks his definition of love in order to allow for the possibility of divine intellectual love and conclude by trying to explain what motivated this move.

In this paper I suggest that we should identify panentheism on a scale, with deism at one extreme and pantheism at the other. The surprising outcome of the analysis is that many of the things which in the philosophical and theological debate are simply taken for granted as distinguishing panentheism from traditional theism (and vice versa) turn out to be possible extension claims rather than core doctrines of these different conceptions of God. Nevertheless, I maintain that it remains possible to draw a line between them. It is also emphasized that the greatest challenge many panentheists face is to give a convincing argument why we should think that God’s power can never be coercive, but must always be persuasive. The good news is that there is nothing in panentheism that requires that we must accept this particular doctrine.

Cross-sectional studies have found significant positive relationships between scrupulosity symptoms, i.e. obsessive-compulsive symptoms with religious or ethical content, and both explicit and implicit negative conceptions of God as well as their interaction. This study aimed to test the role of these conceptions by examining whether they predict scrupulosity symptoms prospectively. Sixty-five participants drawn from a larger study on Judaism and Mental Health completed a measure of explicit beliefs about God, a related implicit measure and a measure of scrupulosity - the Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity-Revised (PIOS-R) - at two time points approximately one year apart. Implicit associations emerged as a positive prospective predictor of scrupulosity symptoms in regression analysis. Neither explicit negative beliefs nor the interaction between implicit and explicit beliefs emerged as prospective predictors. Results suggest that negative conceptions of God may not be causal in the development of scrupulosity. The emergence of implicit associations as a positive prospective predictor may reflect the fact that the PIOS-R partly measures religiosity. Alternatively, positive associations may predict the content of obsessive-compulsive symptoms in people vulnerable to developing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Limitations and suggestions for future studies are discussed.

The current study examined the cultural factors (i.e., religious background, religious participation, parents' views of prayer, and parents' concepts of God) that contribute to children's differentiation between the capabilities of human minds and God's mind. Protestant Christian, Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Religiously Non-Affiliated parents and their preschool-aged children were interviewed (N = 272). Children of Muslim parents differentiated the most between God's mind and human minds (i.e., human minds are fallible but God's is not), and children who had greater differentiation between God's and humans' minds had parents who had the least anthropomorphic conceptions of God. Additionally, there was a unique effect of being raised in a Religiously Non-Affiliated home on the degree of children's differentiation between God's and human minds after religious context factors had been accounted for; in other words, children of Religious Non-Affiliates differentiated between humans and God the least and their differentiation was unrelated to religious context factors. These findings delineate the ways in which religious context differences influence concepts of God from the earliest formation. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Children's concept of God develops during the preschool years. The degree of anthropomorphism in children's concept of God varies. What does this study add? Muslim children have a strong differentiation between what God's mind and human minds can do. Religiously Non-Affiliated children have almost no differentiation between God's and human minds. Parent anthropomorphism explains variance in children's God concepts, both within and across religious groups.

This article is an interpretation of John Hick’s philosophy of religious pluralism in the context of traditional Yoruba religion. The ultimate goal of the article is pragmatic, viz . to provide a theoretical basis for peaceful coexistence among different religions in Nigeria. The methods adopted to achieve this objective are hermeneutical/analytical and comparative. Hick’s theory is interpreted and analysed before it is applied to traditional Yoruba theology. His concept of the Transcendent or Ultimate Reality is equated with the Yoruba concept of the Supreme Being or Olodumare. Both Hickean Ultimate Reality and Olodumare are conceived as transcategorial. However, Yoruba divinities are equated with Hick’s personae and impersonae of the Real: like the personae and impersonae of Hickean Ultimate Reality, the divinities are manifestations of Olodumare. This interpretative method can be used to account for differences in the conceptions of the Supreme Being among competing religions in Nigeria, especially Islam and Christianity in their conceptions of God. Keywords John Hick, pluralism, Yoruba, Nigeria, Olodumare, divinities

In his 2006 paper `Pantheists in Spite of Themselves: God and Infinity in Contemporary Theology,’ William Lane Craig examines the work of Wolfhart Pannenberg, Philip Clayton, and F. LeRon Shults, whose conceptions of God are influenced by Hegel. Craig shows that these thinkers’ Hegelian formulations lead to monism, despite their attempts to avoid it. He then attempts to refute Hegelian thinking by appealing to Cantor. I argue that that this refutation fails because Cantor and Hegel are far more amicable than Craig realizes, as Small’s and Drozdek’s work shows.

The question whether God should be thought of as personal or a-personal is closely linked to the issue of an appropriate model of God-world relation on the one hand and the question how to conceive divine action on the other hand. Starting with a discussion of the scientific character of theology, this article critically examines the univocal-personal concept of God. Traditional Christian conceptions of God have, however, always acknowledged a radical asymmetry between the personal existence of created beings and the ground of being itself. In a second step, the ontological truth claim associated with this way of speaking about God is being related to its methodological consequences. In final step, attention is given to the relation of immanence and transcendence as it is defended in different versions of panentheism: As an alternative to divine interventionism, panentheism can be shown to explicate divine providence as formal and final causation.

Significant challenges arise for clinical care teams when a patient or surrogate decision-maker hopes a miracle will occur. This article answers the question, “How should clinical bioethicists respond when a medical decision-maker uses the hope for a miracle to orient her medical decisions?” We argue the ethicist must first understand the complexity of the miracle-invocation. To this end, we provide a taxonomy of miracle-invocations that assist the ethicist in analyzing the invocator's conceptions of God, community, and self. After the ethicist appreciates how these concepts influence the invocator's worldview, she can begin responding to this hope with specific practices. We discuss these practices in detail and offer concrete recommendations for a justified response to the hope for a miracle.

A common type of argument against the existence of God is to argue that certain essential features associated with the existence of God are inconsistent with certain other features to be found in the actual world. (Cf. Gocke (2013) for an analysis of the different ways to deploy the term “God” in philosophical and theological discourse and for an analysis of the logical form of arguments for and against the existence of God.) A recent example of this type of argument against the existence of God is based on the assumption that there are random processes or chancy states of affairs in the actual world that contradict God being absolute sovereign over his creation: Chancy states of affairs are said to entail a denial of divine providence or omniscience. (For instance, Smith (1993, p. 195) argues that “classical Big Bang cosmology is inconsistent with theism due to the unpredictable nature of the Big Bang singularity.”) More often than not, however, this apparent conflict is formulated only intuitively and lacks sufficient conceptual clarification of the crucial terms involved. As a consequence, it is seldom clear where the conflict really lies. In what follows, I first provide a brief analysis of chance and randomness before I turn to cosmological and evolutionary arguments against the existence of God that in some way or other are based on chance and randomness. I end by way of comparing three popular conceptions of God as regards their ability to deal with God’s relation to a world of chance and randomness. Neither classical theism, nor open theism, nor indeed process panentheism has difficulties in accounting for God’s relation to a world of chance and randomness.

Discussions of divine immutability normally take place against the backdrop of a presupposition of monotheism. This background makes some problems seem especially salient—for instance, does the notion that God is immutable have any implications for God’s relation to time? In what follows, I’ll consider the problem of divine immutability in the context of henotheistic conceptions of god. I take henotheism to be the view that, although there are a plurality of gods, all of them are in some sense dependent upon and subordinate to one god that is the supreme first principle or arche. Henoetheism was the dominant approach to gods among the pagan philosophers of antiquity—with a few exceptions. I consider the development of henotheistic defences of divine immutability through a dialectical development from Xenophanes to Plato to Proclus (d. 485 CE).

I address three key questions in Jewish theology that have come up in readers’ criticism of my book The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture: (i) How should we think about God’s revelation to man if, as I have proposed, the sharp distinction between divine revelation and human reason is alien to the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic sources? (ii) Is the biblical Law of Moses intended to be a description of natural law, suggesting the path to life and the good for all nations? And (iii) what should be the role of the Jewish theologian, given the overwhelming prevalence of Christian conceptions of God and Scripture in contemporary theological discourse.

Atheism is skeptical towards gods, and atheology advances philosophical positions defending the reasonableness of that rejection. The history of philosophy encompasses many unorthodox and irreligious movements of thought, and these varieties of unbelief deserve more exegesis and analysis than presently available. Going back to philosophy’s origins, two primary types of atheology have dominated the advancement of atheism, yet they have not cooperated very well. Materialist philosophies assemble cosmologies that leave nothing for gods to do, while skeptical philosophies find conceptions of god to be too unintelligible or unsupported by evidence to warrant credibility. The origins and genealogies of these two atheologies are sketched and compared over many centuries down to present-day atheism, which still displays signs of this internecine divide between confident naturalists and agnostic skeptics.

This chapter examines the role of sinister aesthetics in depictions of divine punishment in two kinds of Renaissance cheap print texts: broadside ballads and sermons. Although ballads are often seen as sensationalist entertainments opposed to the moral and religious didacticism of sermons, the two genres share important subjects, techniques, and goals. Ballads about so-called monstrous births not only present them as pleasurably fearful spectacles but they also treat them as texts written by God. Depicting God as a monster-maker has important implications for early modern English conceptions of God and his relationship to evil. The second part of the chapter analyzes seventeenth-century sermons that further explore this relationship and try to cultivate an appreciation for the monstrous and infernal forms of divine punishment.

A survey of 317 randomly sampled Wisconsin public school teachers revealed that 87.9% profess to believe in God. Generally, a teacher's sense of calling and devotion correlated positively with relationships with students and negatively with depersonalization. Based on their conceptions of God, teachers fell into 3 groups (inclusive, traditional, and skeptical). Conceptions of God were associated with beliefs about truth. Teachers' beliefs about God were associated with differential use of classroom resources. The more important teachers' beliefs about God, the stronger the connection these beliefs had to the teachers' professional lives. Other qualitative studies exemplify and corroborate the findings.

My goal in this paper is to elucidate a problematic feature of Newton's metaphysics of absolute space. Specifically, I argue that Newton's theory has the untenable consequence that God depends on space for His existence and is therefore not an independent entity. I argue for this conclusion in stages. First, I show that Newton believed that space was an entity and that God and space were ontologically distinct entities. Part of this involves arguing that Newton denies that space is a divine attribute. I then show that Newton endorsed a principle according to which the existence of space is a necessary condition for the existence of any other entity. Following this, I discuss the ways in which this makes God depend on space for His existence and the reasons why this is unacceptable for traditional conceptions of God. Specifically, I show that it is incompatible with the orthodox position that God be entirely independent and self-determining. Finally, I offer two considerations which, I hope, make the problem seem less serious than it first appears. The first consideration has to do with Newton's polemical context and the second has to do with the nature of his theological thought.

The Indian Muslim poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal is widely known for his influential contribution to Islamic modernist thought. Iqbal's metaphysical account of the nature of reality has attracted a massive body of commentary and provoked substantial scholarly controversy. One of the primary areas of scholarly debate is Iqbal's conception of divine immanence and how it is related to the Quran and to the Islamic theological tradition, particularly doctrines associated with Sufism. This debate concerns question of how faithful Iqbal is to the God of the Quran, whether or not Iqbal rejects traditional Islamic conceptions of God, and to what extent Iqbal adopts Western philosophical notions of God. The present paper surveys this debate in arguing that the tensions between Iqbal's thought on God and traditional Islamic notions shed significant light on the aims of Islamic modernism. The aspects of Iqbal's conception of God that have given rise to controversy are precisely those that make possible an evolutionary, progressive, and human-centered depiction of the universe and of history. For this reason, the scholarly debate over Iqbal's conception of God provides a point of departure for understanding the altered metaphysical assumptions behind the Islamic modernist project.

This article investigates results from one part of a dissertation on children’s literature and children’s spirituality, an aspect that focused on children’s oral discourse about the Divine. This discourse was articulated through four 10 and 11 year old children’s reading and responding to two toy fantasy novels, including Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (2006) and Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child (1962). The interview transcripts of discussions with each child were analysed for themes of the children’s lived experience of the texts in spiritual terms, and one theme related to the children’s discourse about God or the Divine. Through an exploration of this discourse, I discovered that the children’s perceptions of the Divine either reinforced or challenged existing conceptions of God within their religious traditions.

The aim of the present chapter is to challenge conceptions of a divine ideal against which human subjects measure their ethical points of view. I locate my own position at the interface of debates concerning the positioning of a first-person human subject in relation to a third-person divine ideal in Anglo-American philosophy of religion and Continental feminist philosophy. My critical point of departure is Luce Irigaray’s feminist challenge to what she sees to be a masculine conception of God; her alternative is for women to become divine (Irigaray L, Divine women. In: Gill GC (trans.) Sexes and genealogies. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 57–72, 1993; Irigaray L, La Mysterique’. Divine women. When the Gods are born. In: Joy M, O’Grady K, Poxon JL (eds) French feminists on religion: a reader. Routledge, London, 2002), or for ‘a divine in the feminine’ (Irigaray L Towards a divine in the feminine. In: Howie G (ed) Women and the divine: transcendence in contemporary feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. pp forthcoming, 2007). Irigaray’s provocative accounts of divinity are having a profound impact on feminist philosophers and certain theologians. The poetic or, some would say, slippery style of Irigaray’s French psycholinguistics finds expression in sexually differentiated conceptions of the divine, including accounts of ‘divine women,’ and of becoming divine as women and as men (Jantzen GM, Becoming divine: towards a feminist philosophy of religion. Manchester University Press, Manchester,1998; Martin A, Luce Irigaray and the question of the divine. Maney Publishing, Leeds, 2000).

This article analyzes the insights and shortcomings of selected New Atheist writings. The first section places the New Atheists into critical dialogue with Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. Here I argue that the most rhetorically compelling claim of New Atheism—that religion is at odds with the basic values of humanity—is also the point of their greatest philosophical deficiency. The second section addresses some of the scientific arguments that the New Atheists advance against supernatural theism. I argue that although such arguments never succeed in disproving the existence of God, they do succeed in rendering some conceptions of God implausible.

Objectives: Scrupulosity is a relatively common but understudied subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) characterized by religious or moral fears. It is difficult to treat and frequently disabling. We examined scrupulosity as it relates to (a) treatment-seeking behavior and perceived treatment gains, (b) the perceived effect of symptoms on religious experience, and (c) conceptions of God. Method: Seventy-two individuals with scrupulous OCD (mean age = 36; 70% women) and 75 individuals with nonscrupulous OCD (mean age = 38; 81% women) completed an internet-based survey. Results: The groups did not differ on demographic variables or overall OCD severity. Compared with the nonscrupulous group, the scrupulous group was (a) more religious, (b) more likely to seek pastoral counseling, (c) less likely to seek medication treatment, and (d) more likely to report that symptoms interfered with their religious experience. Indeed, most scrupulous individuals endorsed that their symptoms interfered with their religious experience. Scrupulous individuals with a more negative concept of God experienced more severe symptoms, whereas a positive description of God was unrelated to severity of scrupulosity in this group. Nearly one in five scrupulous participants reported no religious affiliation. Conclusions: Scrupulous individuals have unique treatment-seeking preferences. Moreover, most scrupulous individuals perceive their symptoms as interfering with their religious experience. Focusing on the religious costs and benefits of scrupulous rituals might have clinical utility. Finally, scrupulous individuals with a more negative concept of God experienced more severe symptoms. Future research is necessary to evaluate whether addressing such concepts can improve treatment outcome. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 67:1–9, 2011.

This paper outlines two approaches to account for the finding that concepts that are minimally counterintuitive are better remembered than intuitive or maximally counterintuitive concepts. The first approach considers such memory advantages to be a property of the concepts themselves while the second approach emphasizes the role played by the context in which such concepts appear in allowing a reader to make sense of them. The context-based view also suggests that counterintuitive concepts lose their advantages as they become widely accepted and embedded in a cultural milieu. In the new context, ideas with enhanced counterintuitiveness obtain transmission advantages. This ratcheting up of counterintuitiveness helps explain cultural innovation and dynamism. It also allows us to account for the development and spread of complex cultural ideas such as the overly counterintuitive religious concepts including the Judeo-Christian-Islamic conceptions of God.

Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African American and Jewish Theology, by Kurt Buhring. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 262 pp. $79.95 (c); $40.00 (p). Conceptions of God, Freedom, and Ethics in African American and Jewish Theology is a scholarly text, geared toward, but not written exclusively for, teachers and students of theology, religion, and ethics. Anyone who has ever struggled with reconciling belief in a benevolent and omnipotent God with the enormity of evil or random suffering, or asked the "Why do bad things happen to good people?" question, is wrestling, as Buhring does in this work, with the issue of theodicy, the branch of theology and philosophy that deals with the problem of the existence of evil. The existential insecurity that can result is derived from cognitive dissonance between our understanding of who or what God is, who we are in relationship to God, and our responsibility as human beings for what happens to us. Readers from other disciplines, with an interest in the foundation, form, and content of ideas that have contributed to social policy, can derive some benefit from Buhring's in-depth analyses of the work of the theologians that he has chosen to interrogate for this study. His primary thinkers, James Cone and Emil Fackenheim and the supporting cast of eight theologians included in the text, in discussing theodicy have raised issues and concerns of broad applicability, well beyond the sphere of religion. Within this deceptively compact text, Buhring uses an efficient "compare and contrast" strategy to explain some rather complex liberative theologies, alongside his distinctive perspective on the nature of God, suffering, and evil that he describes as humanocentric theism. He borrows the term from theologian William R. Jones, without necessarily rejecting out of hand, as Jones does, an underlying methodological and theological assumption of an all good and all powerful God. Chapters Two and Four provide the essence of the theologies that he has selected from his primary pillars, James Cone and Emil Fackenheim respectively, while Chapters Three and Five speak to critiques and affirmations of Cone and Fackenheim from the eight theologians (described here as secondary thinkers) that are as broad and balanced as Buhring promises in Chapter One. From the very beginning Buhring makes it clear that in proposing humanocentric theism as his response to the"theodicy question" he is"affirm[ing] the reality of evil, the goodness of God, and reinterpret [ing] the nature of God's power" (p. 7). Like Fackenheim, who has written extensively on postHolocaust Jewish theology, and James Cone, the foremost apologist for Black Theology in the United States, Buhring maintains that social, cultural, and historical forces are inseparable from the form and content of one's theology. To that end, with no shortage of events with which to illustrate the challenge that theodicy presents to belief in a benevolent and all powerful God, Buhring chooses two of the more extreme examples that, as he says, "so profoundly rupture[s] our conceptions of God" (p. 5). It is certainly likely that the notion of God for people of faith affected directly and indirectly by the horrific events of the Shoah or genocide of approximately six million Jews, and the enslavement and oppression of African Americans caused in part by continuing individual and systemic racism, would, at the very least, have undergone a metamorphosis. Chapter Two is a careful analysis of James Cone's theology, which Buhring describes as a "response to the problem of suffering and moral evil more than . …

Theistic religious believers should be concerned that the God they worship is not an idol. Conceptions of God thus need to be judged according to criteria of religious adequacy that are implicit in the ‘God-role’—that is, the way the concept of God properly functions in the conceptual economy and form of life of theistic believers. I argue that the conception of God as ‘omniGod’—an immaterial personal creator with the omni-properties—may reasonably be judged inadequate, at any rate from the perspective of a relationship ethics based on the Christian revelation that God is Love. I go on to suggest that a conception of God as the power of love within the natural universe might prove more adequate, with God’s role as creator understood in terms of final rather than efficient causation.

The employment by seventeenth-century natural philosophers of stock theological notions like creation, immensity, and eternity in the articulation and justification of emerging physical programs disrupted a delicate but longstanding balance between transcendent and immanent conceptions of God. By playing a prominent (if not always leading) role in many of the major scientific developments of the period, God became more intimately involved with natural processes than at any time since antiquity. In this discussion, I am particularly concerned with the causal and spatio-temporal relations between God and nature in the seventeenth century as recent scholarship has revealed how dramatically traditional conceptions of these relations were transformed by philosophers and scientists like Descartes, Malebranche, More, and Newton.

Utilizing a cultural-developmental approach, this interview study examined how children, adolescents, and adults from religiously liberal and conservative groups conceptualize God and the Devil. Participants (N = 120) conceptualized God and the Devil along similar dimensions, including number (e.g., one, many), gender, central attributes (e.g., physical, supernatural), and evaluation (e.g., positive, neutral). Within-subject differentiations of God and the Devil occurred on all dimensions. Religiously liberal and conservative groups differed on attributes, evaluations, and degree of control ascribed to God and the Devil. With respect to age, results suggest a rethinking of the Piagetian interpretation that children’s conceptions of supernatural entities are more concrete, more anthropomorphic, and less abstract than those of adolescents and adults. The results instead point to the usefulness of a cultural-developmental approach. God is just God. He’s not male or female. God is amazing. He helps you through your troubles. He’s powerful. I think more powerful than we know. He’s beyond what we know. —13-year-old religiously liberal interviewee There is a fallen spiritual being who rebelled against God and [who] is influential. He’s nothing like what Hollywood portrays him to be or the painters of the Renaissance. Yet he’s there. He exists. He is a deceiver, a liar, an accuser. And he has influence in people’s thinking. —48-year-old religiously conservative interviewee

The striking similarity of the Cyrus cylinder with the contemporaneous Cyrus oracle in Is 45:1-7 has often been noticed, but up to now, we lack a detailed comparison that concentrates on the conceptions of God. Due to their crucial importance for the understanding of both texts, such a focus, however, promises to be rewarding: It allows to elaborate aspects substantial for both documents and to illuminate their similarities and differences more sharply. For Old Testament research, a particularly relevant result is that the monotheism of Deutero-Isaiah can be located more precisely in the religious- and theological-historical developments of the late Babylonian and early Persian time.

The starting-point is the distinction between concept and conception. Our conceptions of gold, for instance, are the different understandings we get when we hear the word ‘gold’ whereas the concept of gold consists in the scientific determination of what gold is. It depends on the context whether it is more reasonable to claim a concept or to look for fitting conceptions. By arguing against metaphysical realism and for non-metaphysical realism, I will elaborate on some philosophical reasons for dealing with conceptions instead of concepts of God, and secondly, I will discuss how such conceptions should be critically assessed.

This article attempts to give a detailed analysis of the poem, which has been only partially examined in the existing criticism. Throughout the poem four incompatible conceptions of God and man collide without merging with each other: the poet tells about the loving Father and humble, grateful man; about the incomprehensible Origin of All and of stoical acceptance of the world which man cannot change; about hostile despotic Force and man's rebellion against It; and finally, about the illusive nature of the very notion of God and of the resulting meaninglessness of human existence. The article proceeds by tracing these four concepts, which are not presented consecutively but interweave sometimes in one and the same stanza, if not in the same line. Some attention is given to comparing and contrasting the poem with Derzhavin's ‘Bog’ and ‘Reka vremen v svoem stremlen'i’, Pushkin's ‘Prorok’ and ‘Dar naprasnyi, dar sluchainyi’, and Lermontov's ‘Prorok’ and ‘Blagodarnost", as well as with Ivan Karamazov's “rebellion”.