They include humanists, whose philosophy rejects theism, and Jewish veterans.
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Much of "The Hard Problem" spins around Hilary's quietly confident theism.
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We're interested in preserving Western civilization, that's why we see the rise of theism dangerous.
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But the tensions between secularism and theism are real, and profound, and won't abate in the imaginable future.
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Me leaving theism and the black church wasn't about me being personally disappointed—life was good for me.
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John Gray thinks that such problems with theism shouldn't make most atheists any more confident about their own outlook.
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Its strategy, however, is not to show that theism is unscientific, as the "new atheists" have tended to do.
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As far as I could tell, based upon my ministry, what theism in the black church did was tell folks to be OK with their suffering.
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Some theologians seemed to reject traditional notions of theism, even arguing that Jesus should be seen more as a human role model than an actual deity.
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In fact, he shows, it was not just frustrated third parties but the protagonists, Catholic and Protestant propagandists, who subverted faith by using arguments that undermined theism.
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The Quaker movement's retreat from conventional theism goes back at least to the 1930s, when members started placing less emphasis on the Bible as a guide to spiritual experience.
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But it was a matter of not being able to see how theism, in general, and the black church in particular made a difference in the lives of folks.
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You pointed instead to the fact that the secular moralities of duty and utility, which rose to supremacy during the Industrial Revolution, defend the same virtues preached by every variety of theism, especially the sacrifice of the individual to some "higher" authority.
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While I do think LaVey's work is an excellent explication of the human animal, and my own social and political proclivities are aligned with that of the Satanic Temple, after years of atheism, I was slowly but surely headed towards theism, or the belief that there is a transcendental reality and that gods do exist.
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And if you're going to preference supernaturalism over non-theism, or one deeply held religious belief over another, by mandating that people have to listen to and acknowledge a belief like "life begins at conception" and wait to get an abortion — then I feel that runs against the grain of the very spirit of American pluralism.
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Post-theism is a variant of nontheism that proposes that the division of theism vs. atheism is obsolete, that God belongs to a stage of human development now past. Within nontheism, post-theism can be contrasted with antitheism. The term appears in Christian liberal theology and Postchristianity.
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In short, open theism says that since God and humans are free, God's knowledge is dynamic and God's providence flexible. While several versions of traditional theism picture God's knowledge of the future as a singular, fixed trajectory, open theism sees it as a plurality of branching possibilities, with some possibilities becoming settled as time moves forward. Thus, the future as well as God's knowledge of it is open (hence "open" theism). Other versions of classical theism hold that God fully determines the future, entailing that there is no free choice (the future is closed).
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Tillich argues that the God of theological theism is at the root of much revolt against theism and religious faith in the modern period. Tillich states, sympathetically, that the God of theological theism Another reason Tillich criticized theological theism was because it placed God into the subject-object dichotomy. The subject-object dichotomy is the basic distinction made in epistemology. Epistemologically, God cannot be made into an object, that is, an object of the knowing subject.
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Liberal theism should not be confused with Liberation Theology. Liberalism can also exist in established religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. A key aspect of Liberal Theism is the idea that classical theism can be modified. This means a Liberal Christian may not, for example, conform entirely to the description of God in the Bible.
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Antitheism, sometimes spelled anti-theism, is the opposition to theism. The term has had a range of applications. In secular contexts, it typically refers to direct opposition to the belief in any deity.
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Instead of claiming that the existence of evil logically contradicts theism, he argues that the "hypothesis of indifference", which holds that should supernatural beings exist, they are indifferent to our suffering, better explains the existence of suffering. Since the hypothesis of indifference is logically incompatible with theism, he considers this an evidentiary problem for theism. The paper relies significantly on the use of epistemic probabilities, equivalent to those used in Bayesian reasoning. He is also responsible for first coining the term skeptical theism.
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Romanes, George John, (1878). A Candid Examination of Theism. London: Trübner and Co.
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Theism is an example of a dualist spiritualist philosophy, while pantheism is an example of monist spiritualism.
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Jon Nelson also has criticized Morey for incorrect quotes.Jon Nelson. The Dishonesty of Theism. Atheist Alliance, 2006.
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This collection focuses primarily on Peirce's realism, pragmatism, and theism, with attention to his tychism and synechism.
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This collection focuses primarily on Peirce's realism, pragmatism, and theism, with attention to his tychism and synechism.
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Tillich also further elaborated the thesis of the God above the God of theism in his Systematic Theology.
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In classical theism, God is characterized as the metaphysically ultimate being (the first, timeless, absolutely simple and sovereign being, who is devoid of any anthropomorphic qualities), in distinction to other conceptions such as theistic personalism, open theism, and process theism. Classical theists do not believe that God can be completely defined. They believe it would contradict the transcendent nature of God for mere humans to define him. Robert Barron explains by analogy that it seems impossible for a two-dimensional object to conceive of three- dimensional humans.
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Agnostic theism is the philosophical view that encompasses both theism and agnosticism. An agnostic theist believes in the existence of a god or God, but regards the basis of this proposition as unknown or inherently unknowable. Agnostic theists may also insist on ignorance regarding the properties of the gods they believe in.
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Sanders situates open theism as a form of freewill theism which goes back to the early church fathers and in Protestantism, it is prominent in the Arminian-Wesleyan traditions.God Who Risks, rev. ed. 197-199 and “Divine Providence and the Openness of God,” in Bruce Ware ed., Perspectives on the Doctrine of God: Four Views (Broadman & Holman, 2008), 196-202. In freewill theism God does not micromanage the creation, as is the case in theological determinism, but instead exercises “general sovereignty” by which God enacts the overarching structures in which creatures operate.
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In distinction to "theological theism", Tillich refers to another kind of theism as that of the "divine-human encounter". Such is the theism of the encounter with the "Wholly Other" ("Das ganz Andere"), as in the work of Karl Barth and Rudolf Otto. It implies a personalism with regard to God's self-revelation. Tillich is quite clear that this is both appropriate and necessary, as it is the basis of the personalism of biblical religion altogether and of the concept of the "Word of God",Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1955, 21-62.
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Agnostic theism, agnostotheism or agnostitheism is the philosophical view that encompasses both theism and agnosticism. An agnostic theist believes in the existence of a God or gods, but regards the basis of this proposition as unknown or inherently unknowable. The agnostic theist may also or alternatively be agnostic regarding the properties of the God or gods that they believe in.
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Oxford University Press.Schellenberg, J. L., 2014, Skeptical Theism and Skeptical Atheism. In Justin McBrayer Trent Dougherty (ed.), _Skeptical Theism: New Essays_. Oxford University Press. Finally, Schellenberg's position is that all known and unknown goods are ultimately in God; hence, God can bring about unknown greater goods without hiddenness.Schellenberg, J.L., 2016, “Divine Hiddenness and Human Philosophy”, in Green and Stump 2016: 13–32.
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The term theism derives from the Greek theos or theoi meaning "god" or "gods". The term theism was first used by Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688). In Cudworth's definition, they are "strictly and properly called Theists, who affirm, that a perfectly conscious understanding being, or mind, existing of itself from eternity, was the cause of all other things".Cudworth, Ralph (1678).
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Open theism, also known as openness theology and free will theism, is a theological movement that has developed within Christianity as a rejection to the synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian theology. Open theism is typically advanced as a biblically motivated and philosophically consistent theology of human and divine freedom (in the libertarian sense), with an emphasis on what this means for the content of God's foreknowledge and exercise of God's power. Noted Open Theist theologian Thomas J. Oord identifies four paths to open and relational theology: # following the biblical witness, # following themes in some Christian theological traditions, # following the philosophy of free will, and # following the path of reconciling faith and science. Roger E. Olson said that open theism triggered the "most significant controversy about the doctrine of God in evangelical thought" in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
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The Saiva Siddhanta temple belongs to a monistic branch of the school of Saiva Siddhanta. Its theology is grounded in the Vedas, Saiva Agamas and the ancient Tirumantiram, a Tamil scripture composed by Tirumular. The temple's theology is based on a synthesis of devotional theism and uncompromising nondualism. It is referred to as "monistic theism", which recognizes that monism and dualism/pluralism are equally valid perspectives.
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Yet other versions of classical theism hold that even though there is freedom of choice, God's omniscience necessitates God foreknowing what free choices are made (God's foreknowledge is closed). Open theists hold that these versions of classical theism do not agree with: # the biblical concept of God # the biblical understanding of divine and creaturely freedom and/or result in incoherence. Open Theists tend to emphasize that God's most fundamental character trait is love, and that this trait is unchangeable. They also (in contrast to traditional theism) tend to hold that the biblical portrait is of a God deeply moved by creation, experiencing a variety of feelings in response to it.
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The word antitheism (or hyphenated anti-theism) has been recorded in English since 1788. The etymological roots of the word are the Greek anti and theos.
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31 (2), June, pp.177–181. New's usage has reappeared in the work of Wallace A. Murphree.Murphree, Wallace A. (1997). "Natural Theology: theism or antitheism", Sophia, Vol.
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Process theology and open theism are other positions that limit God's omnipotence or omniscience (as defined in traditional theology). Dystheism is the belief that God is not wholly good.
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They include Protagoras, a 5th-century BCE Greek philosopher. "God exists, but this cannot be proven or disproven" (de facto theism); and that "God exists and this can be proven" (strong theism). Countless arguments have been proposed to prove the existence of God. Some of the most notable arguments are the Five Ways of Aquinas, the Argument from desire proposed by C.S. Lewis, and the Ontological Argument formulated both by St. Anselm and René Descartes.
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Showbread openly advocate Christian pacifism, criticize patriotism as idolatry, boycott all companies that use sweatshops, all members are freewill theists, some subscribe to open theism and all members are teetotalers.
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He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
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Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of religion, and Theism is an 1874 book by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, published posthumously by his stepdaughter Helen Taylor, who also wrote the introduction. It is made up of three essays: "Nature" and the "Utility of Religion", were both written between 1850 and 1858, while "Theism" was composed between 1868 and 1870. The book is critical of traditional religious views, instead advocating for a "religion of humanity".
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Schlesinger wrote books on the topic of philosophy of religion. These include New Perspectives on Old-Time Religion, which contains Schlesinger's ideas and analysis of the logic and philosophy of religious beliefs. In this book, Schlesinger presents a strong defense of theism, which includes answering arguments against theism, such as why there is evil and suffering in the world. Schlesinger also discusses divine attributes in this book, and his belief they are all vs the belief they are separate.
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Byrne, Peter (2007), Kant on God, London: Ashgate, p. 159. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. WoodWood, Allen W. (1970), Kant's moral religion, London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 16. and Merold Westphal.Westphal, Merold (2010),The Emerge of Modern Philosophy of Religion, in Taliaferro, Charles, Draper, Paul and Quinn, Philip (editors), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 135.
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In particular, he notes that it has been used as a subdivision of atheism, descriptive of the view that theism has been disproven, rather than as the more general term that Flint prefers. He rejects non-theistic as an alternative, "not merely because of its hybrid origin and character, but also because it is far too comprehensive. The theories of physical and mental science are non-theistic, even when in no degree, directly or indirectly, antagonistic to theism."Flint, p.
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Most theists hold that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, although this belief raises questions about God's responsibility for evil and suffering in the world. Some theists ascribe to God a self-conscious or purposeful limiting of omnipotence, omniscience, or benevolence. Open Theism, by contrast, contends that, due to the nature of time, God's omniscience does not mean the deity can predict the future. Theism is sometimes used to refer in general to any belief in a god or gods, i.e.
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Zaehner allows the possibility of what he calls the convergence of faiths, or solidarity.Zaehner, Concordant Discord (1970). Preface. Zaehner writes of the "missing link" between Zen and theism ( p. 304), and "the Hindu bridge" (p.
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In late Vedic era, with the start of Upanishadic age (~800-600 BCE), from the henotheistic, panentheistic concepts emerge the concepts which scholars variously call nondualism or monism, as well as forms of non-theism.
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Time is unreal, he argued. What we experience as temporal transition is an illusion. Though a skeptic of traditional theism, Sprigge considered himself a believer in an impersonal God. He would eventually become a Unitarian.
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The modern man could no longer tolerate the idea of being an "object" completely subjected to the absolute knowledge of God. Tillich argued, as mentioned, that theological theism is "bad theology". Alternatively, Tillich presents the above-mentioned ontological view of God as Being-Itself, Ground of Being, Power of Being, and occasionally as Abyss or God's "Abysmal Being". What makes Tillich's ontological view of God different from theological theism is that it transcends it by being the foundation or ultimate reality that "precedes" all beings.
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Agnostic theism is belief but without knowledge, as shown in purple and blue (see Epistemology). There are numerous beliefs that can be included in agnostic theism, such as fideism, the doctrine that knowledge depends on faith or revelation; not all agnostic theists are fideists. Since agnosticism is in the philosophical rather than religious sense a position on knowledge and does not forbid belief in a deity, it is compatible with most theistic positions. The classical philosophical understanding of knowledge is that knowledge is justified true belief.
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Dystheism, which is related to theodicy, is a form of theism which holds that God is either not wholly good or is fully malevolent as a consequence of the problem of evil. One such example comes from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, in which Ivan Karamazov rejects God on the grounds that he allows children to suffer.The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky pp. 259–61 In modern times, some more abstract concepts have been developed, such as process theology and open theism.
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Schlesinger wrote many books and articles in the area of philosophy of religion. He argued very strongly in favor of theism - that there is one and only one infinitely powerful creator of the universe who plays an active role in the world and in our lives. His work focused on examining and analyzing all the arguments in favor and against theism. In his work, many questions are discussed and answered, such as why the world was created in such a way that we have evil and suffering.
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While Hartshorne believed that his reformulated ontological argument is sound, he never claimed that it was sufficient unto itself to establish the existence of God. Throughout his career, from the time of his dissertation, he relied upon a multiple argument strategy, commonly called a cumulative case, to establish the rationality of his di-polar theism. Hartshorne accepts that, by definition, God is perfect. However, he maintains that classical theism, be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, has held to a self-contradictory notion of perfection.
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Terence E. Fretheim is an Old Testament scholar and the Elva B. Lovell professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary. His writings have played a major part in the development of process theology and open theism.
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Warrant and Proper Function, New York: Oxford UP, 1993, viii Because there is an epistemically possible model according to which theistic belief is properly basic and designed to form true belief in God, belief in God is probably warranted if theism is true. Plantinga does not argue that this model is true, but only that if it is true, theistic belief is also likely true, because then theistic belief would result from our belief-forming faculties functioning as they were designed. This connection between the truth value of theism and its positive epistemic status suggests to some that the goal of showing theistic belief to be externally warranted requires reasons for supposing that theism is true (Sudduth, 2000). This point is answered by many theistic arguments which purport to provide sufficient propositional and physical evidence to warrant that belief, apart from reformed epistemology.
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Advocates of spiritual naturalism can vary in their position across the religious spectrum including deism, theism (or process theism), non-theism, and atheism, though it is by no means limited to these orientations. The majority of adherents are believed to be agnostic or atheistic while many prefer not to be categorized. There is a vast difference in opinions on how to address the question of a deity of some kind, if at all. There are those who see God as the creative process within/of the universe, those who define God as the totality of the universe (The All), some who use God in metaphoric ways, those who have no need to use the concept or terminology of God even as a metaphor, and some who are atheistic proclaiming there is no such entity whatsoever and rebel against usage of the term.
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He does not, however, argue that there is a direct and necessary connection between these worldviews and either atheism or theism — he acknowledges that it is possible in theory for an atheist to adopt the Baroque Monarchy and for some types of theist to adopt the Spartan Meritocracy. Strictly speaking, then, the main thrust of his argument is that the Spartan Meritocracy is superior and anyone who cares about the truth should adopt this worldview. Nevertheless, he also argues that it is highly unlikely for theism ever to occur within the Spartan Meritocracy due to the evidence the world presents, and that, consequently, anyone who adopts the Spartan Meritocracy will almost inevitably be an atheist. Harbour constructs an argument throughout the book to demonstrate that the Spartan Meritocracy leads logically and naturally to atheism rather than theism.
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What is worse, as he sees it, these bad ideas have mostly had socially unfortunate consequences." (pp. 158–159) In contrast, Gould thought theism is irrelevant to religion. "He interprets religion as a system of moral belief.
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David Basinger () is professor of philosophy at Roberts Wesleyan College, Rochester, New York. He graduated from Grace College, Bellevue College, and University of Nebraska-Lincoln, with an MA and PhD. He is a proponent of open theism.
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Most scholars criticize the skeptical theism defense as "devaluing the suffering" and not addressing the premise that God is all-benevolent and should be able to stop all suffering and evil, rather than play a balancing act.
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The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism deals with objections to Christian belief in Part 1, "The Leap of Doubt". Skeptical authors cited include J.L. Mackie,J.L. Mackie, 1982. The Miracle of Theism, Oxford.
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It applies to all > systems which are opposed to theism. It includes, therefore, atheism, but > short of atheism, there are anti-theistic theories. Polytheism is not > atheism, for it does not deny that there is a deity; but it is anti-theistic > since it denies that there is only one. Pantheism is not atheism, for it > asserts that there is a god; but it is anti-theism, for it denies that God > is a being distinct from creation and possessed of such attributes as > wisdom, and holiness, and love.
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The term "God Above God," then, means to indicate the God who appears, who is the ground of being, when the "God" of theological theism has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.The Courage to Be, Yale: New Haven, 2000, 190. While on the one hand this God goes beyond the God of theism as usually defined, it finds expression in many religious symbols of the Christian faith, particularly that of the crucified Christ. The possibility thus exists, says Tillich, that religious symbols may be recovered which would otherwise have been rendered ineffective by contemporary society.
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Open theists are not saying that there is a reality about which God is ignorant (which would be limited omniscience). The denial that God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge of future contingent events has been the single most controversial aspect of open theism. The term “open” in open theism involves two important ideas: (1) God is open to what creatures do (God is affected by creatures) and (2) the future is open in that there are multiple possible futures (the branching tree model of the future or like a create your own story book).
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363–4 In 1885, the words "Scientific method" appear together with a description of the method in Francis Ellingwood Abbot's 'Scientific Theism', > Now all the established truths which are formulated in the multifarious > propositions of science have been won by the use of Scientific Method. This > method consists in essentially three distinct steps (1) observation and > experiment, (2) hypothesis, (3) verification by fresh observation and > experiment.Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Scientific Theism p. 60 The Eleventh Edition of Encyclopædia Britannica did not include an article on scientific method; the Thirteenth Edition listed scientific management, but not method.
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Meister, Chad. Introducing Philosophy of Religion. Routledge 2009, chapter 3. In Western religions, various forms of theism are the most common conceptions, while in Eastern religions, there are theistic and also various non-theistic conceptions of the Ultimate.
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Despite these hierarchies of deities, traditional conceptions of Tao should not be confused with the Western theism. Being one with the Tao does not necessarily indicate a union with an eternal spirit in, for example, the Hindu sense.
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Their message embraces both science and religion, combining her scientific humanism with his evolutionary theism, her soft-spoken manner with his zealous preaching style. They draw in Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Christians; theists and atheists; scientists and philosophers.
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Very high probability but short of 100%. "I don't know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there." # Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50% but not very high.
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Very high probability but short of 100%. "I don't know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there." #Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50% but not very high.
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The clearest articulation of his ideas (which were often expressed using jargon and obscure phrases) can be found in Humanism versus Theism; or Solipsism (Egoism) = Atheism. In a series of letters by Robert Lewins M.D. (London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1887).
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Theistic finitism, also known as finitistic theism or finite godism, is the belief in a deity that is limited.Geisler, Norman; Watkins, William D. (1989). Finite Godism: A World with a Finite God. In Worlds Apart: A Handbook on World Views.
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Strenger was interested in modern Jewish identity, particularly in modern Jewish Universalism, and has written about it in a variety of publications.C. Strenger (2010)Freud, Jewish Universalism and the Critique of Religion. In Beit-Hallahmi, B. (ed.). Psychoanalysis and Theism.
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Radical opponents and repudiators of modern life appeal to a "universal freedom from domination." Against all this blindness and "partisan narrowness" Taylor sees hope "implicit in Judaeo-Christian theism ... and ... its central promise of a divine affirmation of the human".
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Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering is a 2008 book by Michael J. Murray, which explores animal suffering throughout evolutionary history as a natural evil, within the context of the problem of evil.
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T&T; Clark Int'l, New York. P. 246. . Panentheism is also expressed in the Bhagavad Gita. In verse IX.4, Krishna states: Many schools of Hindu thought espouse monistic theism, which is thought to be similar to a panentheistic viewpoint.
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John E. Sanders is an American Christian theologian. He currently serves as professor of religious studies at Hendrix College. Sanders is best known for his promotion of open theism but he has also written on cognitive linguistics and religious pluralism (inclusivism).
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Plantinga holds that an individual may rationally believe in God even though the individual does not possess sufficient evidence to convince an agnostic. One difference between reformed epistemology and fideism is that the former requires defence against known objections, whereas the latter might dismiss such objections as irrelevant. Plantinga has developed reformed epistemology in Warranted Christian Belief as a form of externalism that holds that the justification conferring factors for a belief may include external factors. Some theistic philosophers have defended theism by granting evidentialism but supporting theism through deductive arguments whose premises are considered justifiable.
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According to these arguments, an evil God, whatever this might be, would simply not be God. Perry Hendricks has used skeptical theism to undermine the evil god challenge.2018, "Sceptical theism and the evil god challenge", Religious Studies 54 (4): 549-561 The evil god challenge relies on what Law calls "the symmetry thesis," which states that if belief in an evil god is unreasonable, then belief in a good God is unreasonable. Law claims that the existence of good in the world renders belief in an evil god unreasonable, and hence, by the symmetry thesis, belief in a good God is unreasonable.
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Rationales for not believing in deities include arguments that there is a lack of empirical evidence, the problem of evil, the argument from inconsistent revelations, the rejection of concepts that cannot be falsified, and the argument from nonbelief. Nonbelievers contend that atheism is a more parsimonious position than theism and that everyone is born without beliefs in deities; therefore, they argue that the burden of proof lies not on the atheist to disprove the existence of gods but on the theist to provide a rationale for theism., citing Although some atheists have adopted secular philosophies (e.g. secular humanism), in .
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In the philosophy of religion, Forrest's books God Without the Supernatural and Developmental Theism defend a speculative view of God which resembles traditional theism in regarding God as an entity beyond the world, having creative powers, but also takes God not to violate natural laws and to develop from a state of pure power to a state of pure love. In the philosophy of time, Forrest defends the growing block theory, according to which the present and the past are real, but not the future. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is married, with four children.
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Zuist Church's literature presents Zuism as a scientific religion, based upon the order of Heaven, An, which is not a transcendent human-like God but "the universal cosmos and the nature of things". This makes Zuism different from the religions of transcendental theism, and makes it able capable of welcoming theological positions such as pantheism, panentheism and even atheism. Zuism therefore "proposes itself as a reconciliation of the dichotomy between scientific atheism and religious theism, consequently emerging as well as a new type of social organisation capable of reconciling religious and secularist positions in the field of politics".
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In his book, Religion and the Scientific Method, Schlesinger argues that there may be more than one way to acquire knowledge, not only the methods in use by working scientists. In this book, he discusses how those engaged in religious studies can defend the methods that they use even when they are not the same as those in use by scientists. He discusses evidence in favor of theism, and why the existence of evil and suffering in the world is not evidence against theism. In this book, Schlesinger illustrates that reflections on religion lead us to consider almost every other topic in philosophy.
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Open theists have named open theism precursors to document their assertion that "the open view of the future is not a recent concept," but has a long history.Gregory A. Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil (InterVarsity, 2001), 91, n.11. The first known post-biblical Christian writings advocating concepts similar to open theism with regard to the issue of foreknowledge are found in the writings of Calcidius, a 4th-century interpreter of Plato. It was affirmed in the 16th century by Socinus, and in the early 18th century by Samuel Fancourt and by Andrew Ramsay (an important figure in Methodism).
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In God and Morality: A Philosophical History (2007), Hare evaluates the ethical theories of Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant, and the author's father, R. M. Hare, with close attention to the similarities among the philosophers and the relationship of their work to theism.
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However, the exact definitions assigned to what is morally definite and ordered toward creation depend on the religion. For example, differences between religions based in pantheism and theism will differ what is moral according to the nature of the "God" acknowledged or worshipped.
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A Candid Examination of Theism. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London. In fact, he became an agnostic due to the influence of Darwin.Darwin's Disciple: George John Romanes, A Life in Letters, was published July 2010 by Lightning Rod Press at the American Philosophical Society.
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Kirby was an advocate of theistic evolution. In his book Evolution and Natural Theology he argued that evolution and theism are compatible. He noted that creationism was scientifically untenable and refuted its arguments. He viewed nature as a "vast self-adjusting machine".
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In modern times, significant secularization since the 20th century, notably in secularist France, Estonia and the Czech Republic. Currently, distribution of theism in Europe is very heterogeneous, with more than 95% in Poland, and less than 20% in the Czech Republic and Estonia.
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Anna Cheney Edwards Anna Cheney Edwards (31 July 1835 - 1930) was a 19th- century American educator from the U.S. state of Massachusetts. She served as Associate Principal of Mount Holyoke Seminary, 1872-1888; and as Professor of Theism and Christian Evidences, 1888-1890.
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Some philosophical theists are persuaded of God's existence by philosophical arguments, while others consider themselves to have a religious faith that need not be, or could not be, supported by rational argument. Philosophical theism has parallels with the 18th century philosophical view called Deism.
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Dylan Evans, "No God, but value in art of worship", Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 2005] He contributed an article to The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity arguing that psychology has shown atheism to be a better explanation of the human mind than theism.
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Swinburne wrote about many taboo topics, such as lesbianism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism. The poems have many common elements, such as the Ocean, Time, and Death. Several historical persons are mentioned in the poems, such as Sappho, Anactoria, Jesus (Galilaee, La. "Galilean") and Catullus.
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Thoughts on religion (5th ed.). Chicago, Ill.: Open court Pub. Co He published another book on the subject in general called A Candid Examination of Theism, where he concluded that God's existence is not supported by the evidence, but stated his unhappiness with the fact.
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Tapper, 10. In his metaphysical texts, Priestley attempted to combine theism, materialism, and determinism, a project that has been called "audacious and original". He believed that a proper understanding of the natural world would promote human progress and eventually bring about the Christian millennium.Tapper, 314.
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Friedrich Schelling coined the term henotheism, from the Greek heis or heno which literally means "single, one". The term refers to a form of theism focused on a single god. Related terms are monolatrism and kathenotheism. The latter term is an extension of "henotheism", .
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Elinor Shaffer argues that Hennell was familiar, as was common enough in rational dissenter circles going back to Priestley, with some German theologians, but largely limited (as Strauss wrote) to works in Latin; and that his writing was not in those terms so innovative as to justify the weight sometimes given it as an influence on George Eliot.Elinor Shaffer, Kubla Khan and the Fall of Jerusalem, pp. 230–2. Hennell published in 1839 Christian Theism, an essay on religious sentiment after the end of a belief in miraculous revelation. A second edition of the Inquiry appeared in 1841; it was republished with Christian Theism in one volume, 1870.
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His principal objection to the latter practice was that "Mourning tends to perpetuate unhappy and false views of death...Death ought to be looked upon as at least as much of a heavenly boon to the beloved one, as a source of bitter pain to ourselves.". His teaching was based upon a pure theism, without a miraculous element. While retaining belief in God, in prayer, and hope for life beyond death, Voysey denied the perfection of Jesus and the authority of the Bible. He would spend much of his remaining career publishing books, sermons, articles, and pamphlets criticising traditional Christian doctrines, and defending his version of theism against critics.
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Theism generally holds that God exists realistically, objectively, and independently of human thought; that God created and sustains everything; that God is omnipotent and eternal; and that God is personal and interacting with the universe through, for example, religious experience and the prayers of humans. Theism holds that God is both transcendent and immanent; thus, God is simultaneously infinite and, in some way, present in the affairs of the world. Not all theists subscribe to all of these propositions, but each usually subscribes to some of them (see, by way of comparison, family resemblance). Catholic theology holds that God is infinitely simple and is not involuntarily subject to time.
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9 and admitting that the broad definition of agnostic was the common usage definition of that word,George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God, pg. 12 promoted broadening the definition of atheist and narrowing the definition of agnostic. Smith rejects agnosticism as a third alternative to theism and atheism and promotes terms such as agnostic atheism (the view of those who do not believe in the existence of any deity, but do not claim to know if a deity does or does not exist) and agnostic theism (the view of those who do not claim to know of the existence of any deity, but still believe in such an existence).
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In essence, the argument's structure is as follows: # There are compelling reasons for believing that claims of religious experience point to and validate spiritual realities that exist in a way that transcends material manifestation; # According to materialism, nothing exists in a way that transcends material manifestation; # According to classical theism, God endows human beings with the ability to perceive – although imperfectly – religious, spiritual and/or transcendent realities through religious, spiritual and/or transcendent experience. # To the extent that premise 1 is accepted, therefore, theism is more plausible than materialism. As statements 2 to 4 are generally treated as uncontroversial, discussion has tended to focus on the status of the first.
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Liberal theism is the philosophical and religious belief in the existence of a deity without adhering to an established religion. The exact definition is debatable. Liberal theists often believe that, "all religions lead to the truth." Liberal theists are often influenced by the beliefs in their culture.
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Zaehner, Mysticism. Sacred and profane (1957): two chapters discuss Theism and Monism, another two Mescalin (drug-induced states). The Triune Divinity of Christianity is briefly addressed at pp. 195–197.William Lloyd Newell, Struggle and Submission: R. C. Zaehner on Mysticisms (University Press of America 1981), pp. 5-6.
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The Āditya are male and Ṛta is personified as masculine in later scriptures (see also Dharma). In some Hindu philosophical traditions, God is depersonalized as the quality-less Nirguna Brahman, the fundamental life force of the universe. However, theism itself is central to Hinduism. Slater, Robert Lawson. 1964.
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Lucille Cedercrans (1921–1984) was an esoteric mystic apparently influenced by ecumenical gnostic theism, particularly (neo-)Theosophy. However, she stated that the source of her writings was the result of a meditative state that put her in rapport with her teacher, whom she referred to as the Master R.
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Alvin Plantinga in 2004 Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense is a logical argument developed by the American analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga and published in its final version in his 1977 book God, Freedom, and Evil. Plantinga's argument is a defense against the logical problem of evil as formulated by the philosopher J. L. Mackie beginning in 1955. Mackie's formulation of the logical problem of evil argued that three attributes of God, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, in orthodox Christian theism are logically incompatible with the existence of evil. In 1982, Mackie conceded that Plantinga's defense successfully refuted his argument in The Miracle of Theism, though he did not claim that the problem of evil had been put to rest.
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Hendricks challenges Law's assumption that the existence of good renders improbable an evil God: he argues that for the same reason that skeptical theism undermines arguments from evil against a good God, it also undermines arguments from good against an evil god. Hence, belief in an evil god is not unreasonable - at least on account of the existence of good - and the symmetry thesis is irrelevant. So, even if the symmetry thesis is granted, Hendricks claims that the evil god challenge is innocuous. Hendricks also suggests that the advocate of good God theism can make use of reformed epistemology, phenomenal conservatism, and historical arguments for Christianity to justify accepting the existence of a good God over an evil god.
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Vaishnavism is centered on the devotion of Vishnu and his avatars. According to Schweig, it is a "polymorphic monotheism, i.e. a theology that recognizes many forms (ananta rupa) of the one, single unitary divinity," since there are many forms of one original deity, with Vishnu taking many forms. Okita, in contrast, states that the different denominations within Vaishnavism are best described as theism, pantheism and panentheism.Kiyokazu Okita (2010), Theism, Pantheism, and Panentheism: Three Medieval Vaishnava Views of Nature and their Possible Ecological Implications, Journal of Vaishnava Studies, Volume 18, Number 2, pages 5-26 The Vaishnava sampradaya started by Madhvacharya is a monotheistic tradition wherein Vishnu (Krishna) is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent.
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I am not > sure I like the label, as it seems to constrain, whereas I want to explore. > I also have some sympathy for the naturalistic theism described above. But > certainly, precisely in the attitude of exploring, I fit the naturalism > referenced above. Or I at least, I hope do.
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Mill died in 1873. Taylor, who had edited in 1872, with a biographical notice, the miscellaneous and posthumous works of H. T. Buckle, a devoted adherent of Mill's school of thought, edited in 1873 Mill's Autobiography; and in 1874 she issued, with an introduction, his essays, Nature, The Utility of Religion, Theism.
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He has criticized the presumption of atheism, (i.e. the notion that atheism should be one's default position when evaluating arguments over the existence of God). He argues that such a position rigs the rules, since atheism is just as much a claim to knowledge as theism. The only natural default position is agnosticism.
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Oxford Professor of Mathematics John Lennox holds that atheism is an inferior world view to that of theism and attributes to C.S. Lewis the best formulation of Merton's thesis that science sits more comfortably with theistic notions on the basis that Men became scientific in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th century "[b]ecause they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.' In other words, it was belief in God that was the motor that drove modern science". American geneticist Francis Collins also cites Lewis as persuasive in convincing him that theism is the more rational world view than atheism. Other criticisms focus on perceived effects on morality and social cohesion.
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Lu, Xing, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: the impact on Chinese thought, culture, and communication, University of South Carolina Press (2004). For example, the People's Daily asserted on 27 July 1999, that the fight against Falun Gong "was a struggle between theism and atheism, superstition and science, idealism and materialism." Other editorials declared that Falun Gong's "idealism and theism" are "absolutely contradictory to the fundamental theories and principles of Marxism," and that the "'truth, kindness and forbearance' principle preached by [Falun Gong] has nothing in common with the socialist ethical and cultural progress we are striving to achieve." Suppressing Falun Gong was presented as a necessary step to maintaining the "vanguard role" of the Communist Party in Chinese society.
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More recently, interest in non-theism resurfaced, particularly under the British Friend David Boulton, who founded the 40-member Nontheist Friends Network in 2011. Non-theism is controversial, leading some Christian Quakers from within Britain Yearly Meeting to call for non-theists to be denied membership. In one study of Friends in the Britain Yearly Meeting, some 30 per cent of Quakers had views described as non-theistic, agnostic, or atheist. Another study found that 75.1 per cent of the 727 members of the Religious Society of Friends who completed the survey said that they consider themselves to be Christian and 17.6 per cent that they did not, while 7.3 per cent either did not answer or circled both answers.
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Miss Cullens was a newspaper poet > with connections to Mencken's wife and the cultural set in Montgomery. She > gave John books, and he sat at the kitchen table while she and Uncle Waldo > debated the merits of Eisenhower vs. Stevenson, atheism vs. theism, or > argued over the latest novels reviewed in the Sunday Times.
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Theistic vs non-theistic is a common way of sorting the different types of religions.see the whole structure of 'Yandell, 2002.' There are also several philosophical positions with regard to the existence of God that one might take including various forms of theism (such as monotheism and polytheism), agnosticism and different forms of atheism.
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The Miracle of Theism, Oxford, pg. 203 Another version of this objection argues that for every religion that promulgates rules, there exists another religion that has rules of the opposite kind. If a certain action leads one closer to salvation in the former religion, it leads one further away from it in the latter.
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Maximal God: A new defence of perfect being theism. Oxford University Press, 2017, 15-25. He suggests that even "the fool" can understand this concept, and this understanding itself means that the being must exist in the mind. The concept must exist either only in our mind, or in both our mind and in reality.
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Guy became a speaker at the Institute of Theism, but soon felt it was time to set up his own organisation. In 1904 he founded the Theistic Mission, which met every Sunday. With a considerable, though sometimes boisterous, crowd, Guy was gaining a reputation as a forceful young orator. He was also shifting towards atheism.
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The text has a prayer prologue followed by 7 chapters with cumulative total of 21 verses. Its structure is similar to Nrsimha-tapaniya (IAST: Nṛsiṃhatāpanī) Upanishad. Both are Vaishnava texts presenting the discourse about and through Vishnu in his man-lion avatar. The Avyakta Upanishad combines theism, Samkhya, Yoga and abstract ideas in the Upanishads in its verses.
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All Vaishnava schools are panentheistic and view the universe as part of Krishna or Narayana, but see a plurality of souls and substances within Brahman. Monistic theism, which includes the concept of a personal god as a universal, omnipotent Supreme Being who is both immanent and transcendent, is prevalent within many other schools of Hinduism as well.
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The conversation turned to religion, and Coleridge believed that Porson was a strong speaker while Godwin lacked intelligence in his speech.Marshall 1984 p. 125 Godwin, unlike Coleridge, was an atheist, which caused Coleridge concern. On Coleridge's admission, he was able to win the debate with Holcroft but was unable to convince Godwin about theism until 5 years later.
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Reviewed Works: Christian Rationalism and Philosophical Analysis by F. H. Cleobury; Critique of Religion and Philosophy by Walter Kaufman. The Philosophical Quarterly 11 (44): 283–284. He used arguments from idealism to defend theism against "20th century philosophical analysis." He wrote articles for The Philosopher, the journal of The Philosophical Society of England and served as President (1962-1977).
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Frederic H. Balfour was a prolific religious scholar, and published several volumes discussing the implications of theism on emerging societies. He also wrote several lengthy discourses on agnosticism. His letters about famine conditions in China were highly regarded, as little credible news regularly made it out of China during this period. Many of these letters appeared in Harper's Magazine.
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Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philosophy of Mysticism. State University of New York Press. p. 251. "James's theology answer to the problem of evil is strikingly simple, but theologically daring: God is not all-powerful, all-knowing, or all-pervasive, but rather, is finite."Weidenbaum, Jonathan. (2013) William James’s Argument for a Finite Theism.
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It assumes a number of presuppositions, including the inerrancy of Scripture, a normal/plain interpretation of scripture, and the legitimacy of proof texts.Ryrie 1999, pp.16-17. Ryrie's theology stems from an approach to Scripture, claiming that "when objective authority is supplemented, compromised, or abandoned, theism will be weakened or even relinquished."Ryrie 1999, p.23.
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Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method. SIXTH: We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the several varieties of "new thought". SEVENTH: Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious.
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This gave it (they argued) a status similar to God, constituting a form of bi-theism or shirk. Remi Brague argues that while a created Quran may be interpreted "in the juridical sense of the word", an uncreated Quran can only be applied – the application being susceptible only "to grammatical explication (tasfir) and mystical elucidation (ta'wil)" — not interpreted.
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The God Who Risks has a section where Sanders delineates his sources and four criteria for a successful theological proposal.God Who Risks, revised edition 30-33. The following chapters in the book seek to show that open theism satisfies the four criteria. First, he says a theological model must agree with the major themes of Scripture.
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In being just, God determines that the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. In being merciful, God forgives those who sin. It follows, therefore, that a God that was only just or only merciful would be less than perfect. Dipolar theism holds that a perfect God must embody the good in both of those characteristics.
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The Hindus engage in beliefs spanning all forms of theism as well as atheism. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and other Gods and Goddesses of the Hindu pantheon are worshipped. Many places have temples with local deities, more often a Goddess (Devi). Festivities like Theyyam, Thira and art forms like Ottamthullal, Kathakali are performed in stages attested to temple estates.
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Paulsen received an associate degree from Snow College in English in 1957, a bachelor's degree from BYU in Political Science in 1961 (in which he was BYU's valedictorian), a JD from the University of Chicago Law School in 1964, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1975, with emphasis in the philosophy of religion. His doctoral dissertation, entitled The Comparative Coherency of Mormon (Finitistic) and Classical Theism, was said by two philosophers critical of LDS theology to be "by far the most detailed and comprehensive defense of Mormon theism."Beckwith, Francis J. and Stephen E. Parish, "The Mormon Concept of God: A Philosophical Analysis" Edwin Mellen Press 1991 p. 37 Paulsen is married to Audrey Lucille Leer and has six children and eleven grandchildren.
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In process theology, dipolar theism is the position that to conceive a perfect God, one must conceive Him as embodying the "good" in sometimes-opposing characteristics, and therefore such a deity cannot be understood to embody only one set of characteristics. For instance, here are some characteristics commonly associated with God: :One — Many :Transcendent — Immanent :Eternal — Temporal :Mutable — Immutable :Merciful — Just :Simple — Complex Dipolar theism holds that in each pair, both of the characteristics contain some element of good. To embody all perfections, therefore, God must embody the good in both characteristics, and cannot be limited to one, because a God limited to one would suffer the limits of the one, and lack the good in the other. For instance, there is a "good" in being just, and also a good in being merciful.
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Rather than a history of atheism, as the title may suggest, the book is a guide to why (according to the author) atheism is superior to theism and why the (a)theist discussion is important. According to Harbour, atheism is "the plausible and probably correct belief that God does not exist", while theism is "the implausible and probably incorrect belief that God does exist", and anyone who cares about the truth should be an atheist. Harbour makes his case on the basis of two fundamental worldviews which he labels the Spartan Meritocracy and the Baroque Monarchy. Worldviews are the ways in which we look at and try to explain the world around us; as a result, the validity of our worldviews is extremely important because it determines the validity and reasonableness of our beliefs.
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Many speakers delivered speeches at the March. A few noted speakers were Frank Zindler, editor of the American Atheist magazine, Margaret Downey of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia and Ed Buckner, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism. The speeches delivered were basically on theism, atheism and related themes. Buckner reportedly attacked the way theists perceive atheists as lacking morality.
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Belmont, North > Carolina: Wiseblood Books, 2020. Page 353-54 Finlay only held this job for several months before he reapplied to LSU's English doctorate program. He was readmitted and subsequently moved back to Baton Rouge. While continuing his coursework and teaching obligations Finlay began working on his dissertation topic, the intellectual theism of Yvor Winter, under the guidance of professor Stanford.
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For example, a liberal theist in the United States is likely to have beliefs strongly influenced by Christianity. It can also be said that all religions began as a form of liberal theism. Liberal theists are more likely to be proponents of moral relativism than moral absolutism. They often claim that there are no black and white concepts, but instead only subjective beliefs.
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New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc. pp. 286-301 Finitistic theism denies that God is omnipotent. Ray Harbaugh Dotterer in his book The Argument for a Finitist Theology summarized the argument for theistic finitism: Brightman developed the concept of a finite God to solve the problem of evil. He held the view that God is an infinite personal spirit but his power is limited.
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Frederick Douglass to Rev. M.J. Savage (June 15, 1880), published in Farewell Dinner to Francis Ellingwood Abbot, on Retiring from the Editorship of "The Index" 48 (George H. Ellis, 1880). Following the controversy in New Hampshire, Abbot left the ministry in 1868 to write, edit, and teach. Abbot's theological position was stated in Scientific Theism (1885) and The Way Out of Agnosticism (1890).
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He then attended Princeton Theological Seminary, earning a PhD in 1987, graduating magna cum laude. While at Princeton he was a classmate of Bart Ehrman and a student of Bruce Metzger. Boyd was then Professor of Theology at Bethel University for sixteen years. He resigned after there was a dispute between himself and some of the professors there over his open theism advocacy.
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Schellenberg has said that there is a danger here of "crying over unspilt milk" since we have hardly begun to think about skeptical religion.Schellenberg, 2013b, 273. He has also suggested reasons for distinguishing between theism (which he says may be disbelieved) and ultimism (which he says should only be doubted) on the basis of the former’s detailed content.Schellenberg, 2013b, 280-281.
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Thus, basho-being is roughly synonymous with "buddha." The basho is the limit of and that which sustains our universe, beyond which, Dr. Motoyama states, is God. In brief, Dr. Motoyama's system is a synthesis of Samkhya (atheistic), Buddhism (non-theistic) and Shinto (theism) that incorporates yogic cultivation, the energy systems of the body-mind as well as faith in God.
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Atheism is in the broadest sense an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.
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An ignostic maintains that he cannot even say whether he is a theist or an atheist until a sufficient definition of theism is put forth. The term "ignosticism" was coined in the 1960s by Sherwin Wine, a rabbi and a founding figure of Humanistic Judaism. The term "igtheism" was coined by the secular humanist Paul Kurtz in his 1992 book The New Skepticism.
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Millard Erickson calls this attribute God's constancy, arguing that "some interpretations of the doctrine of divine constancy, expressed as immutability, have actually drawn heavily upon the Greek idea of immobility and sterility."Millard Erickson, Christian Theology, 279. The immutability of God is being increasingly criticized by advocates of open theism,D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, 63.
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The content of absolute > faith is the "god above God." Absolute faith and its consequence, the > courage that takes the radical doubt, the doubt about God, into itself, > transcends the theistic idea of God.Paul Tillich. Theism Transcended (Yale: > CT 1952) 185-190, in the Courage to Be, in the Essential Tillich: an > anthology of the writings of Paul Tillich, ed.
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Frederick Gaiser and Mark Throntveit, (Word & World supplement series 5, April, 2006): 154-162. This is why he says we need to practice dialogical virtues.He and Chris Hall (a critic of open theism) sought to model dialogical virtues in a series of conversations which first appeared as “Does God know your Next Move?” the cover story for Christianity Today, May 21, 2001, pp.
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Speculative theism was an 1830s movement closely related to but distinguished from Right Hegelianism.Frederick C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 339 n. 58. Its proponents (Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Christian Hermann Weisse, Hermann Ulrici)Kelly Parker, Krzysztof Skowronski (eds.), Josiah Royce for the Twenty-first Century: Historical, Ethical, and Religious Interpretations, Lexington Books, 2012, p. 202.
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Some monotheists reject the view that a deity is or could be omnipotent, or take the view that, by choosing to create creatures with freewill, a deity has chosen to limit divine omnipotence. In Conservative and Reform Judaism, and some movements within Protestant Christianity, including open theism, deities are said to act in the world through persuasion, and not by coercion (this is a matter of choice—a deity could act miraculously, and perhaps on occasion does so—while for process theism it is a matter of necessity—creatures have inherent powers that a deity cannot, even in principle, override). Deities are manifested in the world through inspiration and the creation of possibility, not necessarily by miracles or violations of the laws of nature. The rejection of omnipotence often follows from either philosophical or scriptural considerations, discussed below.
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Skeptical theism defends the problem of evil by asserting that God allows an evil to happen in order to prevent a greater evil or to encourage a response that will lead to a greater good. Thus a rape or a murder of an innocent child is defended as having a God's purpose that a human being may not comprehend, but which may lead to lesser evil or greater good. This is called skeptical theism because the argument aims to encourage self-skepticism, either by trying to rationalize God's possible hidden motives, or by trying to explain it as a limitation of human ability to know. The greater good defense is more often argued in religious studies in response to the evidential version of the problem of evil, while the free will defense is usually discussed in the context of the logical version.
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Hechler memorial Hechler was 59 years old when Theodor Herzl died. He remained Chaplain of the British Embassy until 1910, when a new ambassador,arrived who was less tolerant of Hechler's theism. Hechler retired to Great Britain. Hechler was remembered in Vienna not only for his eccentricities and his support of Zionism but for being a founding member of the First Vienna Football (Soccer) Club.
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The theism in the tantra texts parallel those found in Vaishnavism and Shaktism. Shaiva Siddhanta is a major subtradition that emphasized dualism during much of its history. Shaivism has had strong nondualistic (advaita) sub-traditions. Its central premise has been that the Atman (soul, self) of every being is identical to Shiva, its various practices and pursuits directed at understanding and being one with the Shiva within.
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According to scholar Terence Irwin, the issue and its connection with Plato was revived by Ralph Cudworth and Samuel Clarke in the 17th and 18th centuries. More recently, it has received a great deal of attention from contemporary philosophers working in metaethics and the philosophy of religion. Philosophers and theologians aiming to defend theism against the threat of the dilemma have developed a variety of responses.
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In Western Christian classical theism, God is simple, not composite, not made up of thing upon thing. Thomas Morris notes that divine simplicity can mean any or all of three different claims: #God has no spatial parts (spatial simplicity). #God has no temporal parts (temporal simplicity). #God is without the sort of metaphysical complexity where God would have different parts which are distinct from himself (property simplicity).
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English philosopher McGinn speaks about the various reasons for not believing in God, and some of the reasons for. He gives a thorough treatment of the ontological argument. In addition, McGinn draws an important distinction between atheism (lack of belief in a deity) and antitheism (active opposition to theism); he identifies himself as both an atheist and an antitheist. Finally, he speculates about a post-theistic society.
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Priestley's major argument in the Institutes is that the only revealed religious truths that can be accepted are those that also conform to the truth of the natural world. Because his views of religion were deeply tied to his understanding of nature, the text's theism rests on the argument from design. Many of Priestley's arguments descended from 18th- century deism and comparative religion.Schofield, Vol.
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The term theism came to be contrasted with deism. Karen Armstrong writes that "During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word 'atheist' was still reserved exclusively for polemic ... The term 'atheist' was an insult. Nobody would have dreamed of calling himself an atheist." Atheism was first used to describe a self-avowed belief in late 18th-century Europe, specifically denoting disbelief in the monotheistic Abrahamic god.
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The collection covers a wide range of topics but focuses primarily on Lewis' view of Christianity. The book is split into three sections, the first of which contains essays such as "Myth Became Fact", "The Grand Miracle", and "Is Theism Important?". These articles lay the groundwork for Lewis' apologetics, essentially establishing a starting point at which the true discrepancies between Christians and non-Christians become clear.
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People who identified as gottgläubig could hold a wide range of religious beliefs, including non-clerical Christianity, Germanic neopaganism, a generic non- Christian theism,Hans-Adolph Jacobsen, Arthur L. Smith Jr. , The Nazi Party and the German Foreign Office, Routledge, 2012, page 157. deism, and pantheism. Strictly speaking, Gottgläubigen were not even required to terminate their church membership, but strongly encouraged to.Steigmann-Gall, p. 221–222.
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Reason and Religious Belief Plantinga, Mackie and Flew debated the logical validity of the free will defense as a way to solve the problem of evil.Mackie, John L. (1982). The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God Alston, grappling with the consequences of analytic philosophy of language, worked on the nature of religious language. Adams worked on the relationship of faith and morality.
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Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence, second edition (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 12-13. He spent a good portion of the next twenty years seeking to resolve such issues. Eventually, he became a proponent of open theism and contributed to the scholarship on the topic along with other open theists such as Clark Pinnock, Greg Boyd, and William Hasker.
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Spong's "Twelve Points for Reform" were originally published in The Voice, the newsletter of the Diocese of Newark, in 1998.A Call for a New Reformation Spong elaborates on them in his book A New Christianity for a New World: # Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God- talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
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"It cannot be aware only of itself—there is no 'itself' until it is aware of something." Thus, Objectivism posits that the mind does not create reality, but rather, it is a means of discovering reality. Expressed differently, existence has "primacy" over consciousness, which must conform to it. Any other type of argument Rand termed "the primacy of consciousness", including any variant of metaphysical subjectivism or theism.
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Other critics question the adequacy of panentheism. The point of tension in Hartshorne's theology is whether God is really worthy of worship since God needs the world in order to be a complete being. Traditional theism posits that God is a complete being before the creation of the world. Others find that his argument about God's perfection is flawed by confusing existential necessity with logical necessity.
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Reason and Religious Belief Plantinga, Mackie and Flew debated the logical validity of the free will defense as a way to solve the problem of evil.Mackie, John L. (1982). The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God Alston, grappling with the consequences of analytic philosophy of language, worked on the nature of religious language. Adams worked on the relationship of faith and morality.
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For some, this meant turning back to the Bible as the source of authority instead of the Catholic Church, for others it was a split from theism altogether. This was the main divisive line between the Reformation and the Renaissance, which dealt with the same basic problems, supported the same science based on reason and empirical research, but had a different set of presuppositions (theistic versus naturalistic).
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This is called acintya- bheda-abheda-tattva, inconceivable, simultaneous oneness and difference. Caitanya's philosophy of acintya-bhedābheda-tattva completed the progression to devotional theism. Rāmānuja had agreed with that the Absolute is one only, but he had disagreed by affirming individual variety within that oneness. Madhva had underscored the eternal duality of the Supreme and the Jīva: he had maintained that this duality endures even after liberation.
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Nonreligious population by country, 2010. Irreligion, which may include deism, agnosticism, ignosticism, anti-religion, atheism, skepticism, ietsism, spiritual but not religious, freethought, anti-theism, apatheism, non-belief, pandeism, secular humanism, non-religious theism, pantheism and panentheism, varies in the countries around the world. According to reports from the Worldwide Independent Network/Gallup International Association's (WIN/GIA) four global polls: in 2005, 77% were a religious person and 4% were "convinced atheists" while in 2012, 23% were not a religious person and an additional 13% were "convinced atheists"; in 2015, 22% were not a religious person and an additional 11% were "convinced atheists"; and in 2017, 25% were not a religious person and an additional 9% were "convinced atheists". According to sociologist Phil Zuckerman, broad estimates of those who have an absence of belief in a god range from 500 to 750 million people worldwide.
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The Oxford English Dictionary (2007) does not have an entry for nontheism or non- theism, but it does have an entry for non-theist, defined as "A person who is not a theist", and an entry for the adjectival non-theistic. An early usage of the hyphenated non-theism is by George Holyoake in 1852,"The Reasoner", New Series, No. VIII. 115 who introduces it because: This passage is cited by James Buchanan in his 1857 Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws, who however goes on to state: Spelling without hyphen sees scattered use in the later 20th century, following Harvey Cox's 1966 Secular City: "Thus the hidden God or deus absconditus of biblical theology may be mistaken for the no-god-at-all of nontheism." Usage increased in the 1990s in contexts where association with the terms atheism or antitheism was unwanted.
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Lu, Xing, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: the impact on Chinese thought, culture, and communication, University of South Carolina Press (2004). For example, the People's Daily newspaper asserted on 27 July 1999 that the fight against Falun Gong "was a struggle between theism and atheism, superstition and science, idealism and materialism." Other editorials declared that Falun Gong's "idealism and theism" are "absolutely contradictory to the fundamental theories and principles of Marxism," and that the "'truth, kindness and forbearance' principle preached by [Falun Gong] has nothing in common with the socialist ethical and cultural progress we are striving to achieve."Gayle M.B. Hanson, China Shaken by Mass Meditation – meditation movement Falun Gong, Insight on the News, 23 August 1999. Retrieved 31 December 2007 Suppressing Falun Gong was presented as a necessary step to maintaining the "vanguard role" of the Communist Party in Chinese society.
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Philosophers argue that there are two types of doxastic voluntarism: direct doxastic voluntarism and indirect doxastic voluntarism. Direct doxastic voluntarism being that the person has control over some of their beliefs (e.g. an individual changes his belief from theism to atheism) and indirect doxastic voluntarism is that the person has unintended control, through voluntary intermediate actions, over some of their beliefs (e.g. researching and unintentionally evaluating the evidence).
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He/she would say that we can redefine God. They generally argue that people 2,000 years ago did not necessarily have the correct idea. Liberal Theism can be seen as a response to the problem of evil argument against the existence of God. The problem of evil suggests that an "all good" and "all powerful" God could not possibly endorse or allow evil actions to occur, for example, the Holocaust.
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"God of the gaps" is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence. The term "gaps" was initially used by Christian theologians not to discredit theism but rather to point out the fallacy of relying on teleological arguments for God's existence. p. 333.See, for example, "Teleological Arguments for God's Existence" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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The five prime deities of Smartas in a Ganesha-centric Panchayatana: Ganesha (centre) with Shiva (top left), Shakti (top right), Vishnu (bottom left) and Surya (bottom right). Smarta Brahmins in western India (c. 1855–1862). Smarta tradition (स्मार्त) is a movement in Hinduism that developed during its classical period around the beginning of the Common Era. It reflects a Hindu synthesis of four philosophical strands: Mimamsa, Advaita, Yoga, and theism.
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George Romanes had become Darwin's leading protégé, but a conflict between his reasoned scepticism and earlier longing for faith came to a head when his sister died. His attempt to get solace from a leading spiritualist came to nothing. Darwin invited Romanes to Downe to help him recover. Romanes had earlier written a refutation of theism, and had taken Darwin's advice to pause, but now wanted to publish.
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His philosophical method in argument is known as rational empiricism. In addition to building on Bowne's position, Brightman is credited with developing a metaphysical view in the philosophy of religion called finitistic theism. For Brightman God is a self- limited being whose good will though perfect is constrained by God's own nature. There is a dynamic relationship between God and the world that grows and develops, or is in process.
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Open theism advocates the non-traditional Arminian view of election that predestination is corporate. In corporate election, God does not choose which individuals he will save prior to creation, but rather God chooses the church as a whole. Or put differently, God chooses what type of individuals he will save. Another way the New Testament puts this is to say that God chose the church in Christ (Eph. 1:4).
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Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that pantheism shares more characteristics of theism than of atheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time.
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Many brands of theism, the belief in a deity or deities, believe that everything has a purpose and that nothing is arbitrary. In these philosophies, God created the universe for a reason, and every event flows from that. Even seemingly random events cannot escape God's hand and purpose. This is somewhat related to the argument from design—the argument for God's existence because a purpose can be found in the universe.
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There are many different perspectives with philosophical theology on such questions. In modern times process theology, open theism and Christian panentheism have tried to look at God as the Being who is not only the Source and Ground of all being but also influenced by the people and processes of the world which he created and to which he belongs—rejecting or at least amending the classical medieval doctrine of impassibility.
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Sonsino, Rifat. The Many Faces of God: A > Reader of Modern Jewish Theologies. 2004, page 22–23 Most "classical" Reconstructionist Jews (those agreeing with Kaplan) reject traditional forms of theism, though this is by no means universal. Many Reconstructionist Jews are deists, but the movement also includes Jews who hold Kabbalistic, pantheistic (or panentheistic) views of God, and some Jews who believe in the concept of a personal God.
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Lewis developed his ideas from reading, among others, Robert G. Ingersoll, whose published works made him aware of Thomas Paine. He was first impressed by the idea to become an atheist after having read a large volume of lectures of Ingersoll devoted to his idol Paine, which was brought to their house by his older brother. He later credited Paine's The Age of Reason with helping him leave theism.
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Oxford University Press. p. 534. In this thesis he argued that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's position was not opposed to realism and is compatible with "the most realistic of modern realisms, so far as these bear upon the independent existence of the perceived physical universe." Turner defended a form of idealistic monism, which was influenced by Hegel. He has also been described as an exponent of "personalistic theism".
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The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was also accused of atheism, but he denied it. His theism was unusual, in that he held god to be material. Even earlier, the British playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe (1563–1593) was accused of atheism when a tract denying the divinity of Christ was found in his home. Before he could finish defending himself against the charge, Marlowe was murdered.
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Possibilianism is a philosophy which rejects both the diverse claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in strong atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground.Beyond God and atheism: Why I am a possibilian, David Eagleman, New Scientist, Sep 27, 2010.Envisioning the Afterlife, interview with David Eagleman on NPR's On Point, Feb 27, 2009.Stray questions for David Eagleman, New York Times Paper Cuts, July 10, 2009.
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Hegel's historicism holds that both ideas and institutions can only be understood by understanding their history. Throughout his life, Hegel said he was an orthodox Lutheran. He devoted considerable attention to the Absolute, his term for the infinite Spirit responsible for the totality of reality—something like God, though not the God of classical theism. This Spirit comes to fullest expression in the historical reality of the modern state.
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Relativism is opposite to Universalism because there is not a single moral code for every agent to follow. Relativism differs from Nihilism because it validates every moral code that exists whereas nihilism does not. When it comes to relativism, Russian philosopher and writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, coined the phrase "If God doesn't exist, everything is permissible". That phrase was his view of the consequences for rejecting theism as a basis of ethics.
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R. William Hasker (; born 1935) is an American philosopher and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Huntington University. For many years he was editor of the prestigious journal Faith and Philosophy. He has published many journal articles and books dealing with issues such as the mind–body problem, theodicy, and divine omniscience. He has argued for "open theism" and a view known as "emergentism" regarding the nature of the human person.
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Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of poetry such as Poems and Ballads, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Swinburne wrote about many taboo topics, such as lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism. His poems have many common motifs, such as the ocean, time, and death.
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That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism." Burridge disagreed that such is the case, decrying that "The Creator is distinct from his creation. The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism." Burridge concludes by challenging his reader to determine why "calling God the author of sin demand[s] a pandeistic understanding of the universe effectively removing the reality of sin and moral law.
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He also criticized them for their focus on the dangers of theism as opposed to the falsifying of theism, which results in mischaracterizing religions, taking local theisms as the essence of religion itself and for focusing on the negative aspects of religion in the form of an "argument from benefit" in the reverse. Professors of philosophy and religion Jeffrey Robbins and Christopher Rodkey take issue with "the evangelical nature of the new atheism, which assumes that it has a Good News to share, at all cost, for the ultimate future of humanity by the conversion of as many people as possible". They find similarities between the new atheism and evangelical Christianity and conclude that the all-consuming nature of both "encourages endless conflict without progress" between both extremities. Sociologist William Stahl notes: "What is striking about the current debate is the frequency with which the New Atheists are portrayed as mirror images of religious fundamentalists".
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Lewis criticizes modern attempts to debunk natural values, such as those that would deny objective value to the waterfall, on rational grounds. He says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture, which he refers to as "the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew...". Lewis calls that the Tao, from the Taoist word for the ultimate "way" or "path" of reality and human conduct. (Although Lewis saw natural law as supernatural in origin, as evidenced by his use of it as a proof of theism in Mere Christianity, his argument in the book does not rest on theism.) Without the Tao, no value judgments can be made at all, and modern attempts to do away with some parts of traditional morality for some "rational" reason always proceed by arbitrarily selecting one part of the Tao and using it as grounds to debunk the others.
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Moltmann proposes instead a crucified God who is both a suffering and protesting God. That is, God is not detached from suffering but willingly enters into human suffering in compassion. :God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God – that is the basis for real hope that both embraces and overcomes the world. This is in contrast both with the move of theism to justify God's actions and the move of atheism to accuse God.
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Finally, one can also question premise eight: why does a personal explanation have to lead to monotheistic (as opposed to deistic or polytheistic) accounts of intention?Steven J. Conifer (2001). "The Argument from Consciousness Refuted". However, Moreland maintains that questioning these minor premises is of little consolation to the naturalist as they essentially constitute intramural theist debates, and that for most westerners theism is the only viable candidate to accommodate personal explanations.
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This is the third and highest stage of development, the relation of the finite and the infinite. As philosophy is but the highest expression of humanity, these three moments will be represented in its history. The East typifies the infinite, Greece the finite or reflective epoch, the modern era the stage of relation or correlation of infinite and finite. In theology, the dominant philosophical idea of each of these epochs results in pantheism, polytheism, theism.
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Many of the themes addressed by Voltaire in this book are addressed or touched upon in his work L'Infame. In this and other works, Voltaire is very concerned about the injustices of the Catholic Church, which he sees as intolerant and fanatical. At the same time, his work espouses deism (although, in the entry Theism, he argues in favour of that which we actually mean as deism), tolerance and freedom of the press.
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The comic consists mainly of religious satire, often criticising arguments for religion,Jesus and Mo 10 August 2007: sense religious textsJesus and Mo 16 May 2006: wait and decreesJesus and Mo 17 July 2007: grief and the actions of believers.Jesus and Mo 21 August 2007: press As the comic centres on Christian and Muslim figures, the satire is generally directed at the two religions, though some critiques apply to many forms of theism.
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Tillich's ontological view of God has precedent in Christian theology. In addition to affinities with the concept of God as being-itself in classical theism, it shares similarities with Hellenistic and Patristic conceptions of God as the "unoriginate source" (agennetos) of all being.J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, HarperCollins: New York, 1978, 128. This view was espoused in particular by Origen, one of a number of early theologians whose thought influenced Tillich's.
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Thanks to dialectic the anti-dogmatic attitude has > disappeared, and Marxism has established itself as a dogmatism which is > elastic enough, by using its dialectic method, to evade any further attack. > It has thus become what I have called reinforced dogmatism. Bertrand Russell has criticized as unscientific Marx's belief in progress as a universal law. Russell stated: "Marx professed himself an atheist, but retained a cosmic optimism which only theism could justify".
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Gross states that ancient and medieval Hindu literature is richly endowed with gods, goddesses and androgynous representations of God.RM Gross (1978), Hindu Female Deities as a Resource for the Contemporary Rediscovery of the Goddess, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pages 269-291 This, states Gross, is in contrast with several monotheistic religions, where God is often synonymous with "He" and theism is replete with male anthropomorphisms.
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Some of the ambiguity and controversy involved in defining atheism arises from difficulty in reaching a consensus for the definitions of words like deity and god. The variety of wildly different conceptions of God and deities leads to differing ideas regarding atheism's applicability. The ancient Romans accused Christians of being atheists for not worshiping the pagan deities. Gradually, this view fell into disfavor as theism came to be understood as encompassing belief in any divinity.
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Negative atheism includes all other forms of non-theism. According to this categorization, anyone who is not a theist is either a negative or a positive atheist. The terms weak and strong are relatively recent, while the terms negative and positive atheism are of older origin, having been used (in slightly different ways) in the philosophical literature and in Catholic apologetics. Under this demarcation of atheism, most agnostics qualify as negative atheists.
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In the book, Vahanian observes that many people in his era regarded the Christian God to be irrelevant to their situation. He describes that Christianity, and particularly theism, was not resonating with people. One explanation given for this is that the Christian God is too transcendent, whereas people in his day were largely focused on the practical worldly goals. The book describes the process of secularization, namely, how society has steadily removed God its institutions.
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The great aim of his speculations was to find a philosophic basis for the personality of God, and for his theory on this subject he proposed the term "concrete theism."Immanuel Hermann Fichte entry at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His philosophy attempts to reconcile monism (Hegel) and individualism (Herbart) by means of monadism (Leibniz). He attacks Hegelianism for its pantheism, lowering of human personality, and imperfect recognition of demands of the moral consciousness.
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Ostler argues that God cannot know what acts a person will freely do in the future. The first volume also expounds a Mormon Christology or theory of Christ as both fully human and fully divine at once. Ostler also assesses the attributes of divine power, divine mutability, divine pathos, divine temporality and human and divine nature. The second volume, The Love of God and the Problems of Theism, addresses Mormon soteriology or theory of salvation.
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However, the modern writer Joshua Golding states that even though it contains inconsistencies, this "does not imply that God did not reveal the Torah".Golding, JL., Rationality and Religious Theism, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2003, p.106 On the other hand, Christian evangelists John Ankerberg and Dillon Burroughs state that "the Bible's teachings, if perfect, must be consistent with one another" and that "the Bible is consistent with itself from beginning to end".
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Walter Arnold Kaufmann (July 1, 1921 – September 4, 1980) was a German- American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University. He is renowned as a scholar and translator of Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Swaminarayan, the founder of the Swaminarayan Sampraday, established temples, known as mandirs (Devnagari: मन्दिर), as part of his philosophy of theism and deity worship. These mandirs are known as Swaminarayan Hindu temples. He constructed nine temples in the following cities; Ahmedabad, Bhuj, Muli, Vadtal, Junagadh, Dholera, Dholka, Gadhpur & Jetalpur. In these temples he installed images of various Hindu gods, such as NarNarayan Dev, LaxmiNarayan Dev, RadhaKrishna Dev, RadhaRaman Dev, Revti-Baldevji, Madan Mohan Dev etc.
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Thus, if a deity does not have absolute power, it must therefore embody some of the characteristics of power, and some of the characteristics of persuasion. This view is known as dipolar theism. The most popular works espousing this point are from Harold Kushner (in Judaism). The need for a modified view of omnipotence was also articulated by Alfred North Whitehead in the early 20th century and expanded upon by the aforementioned philosopher Charles Hartshorne.
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Taken together with the Epics, the vast body of religious and cultural compilations known as the Puranas (most of which were composed during the Gupta period, c. 300 - 600 CE) "afford us greater insight into all aspects and phases of Hinduism – its mythology, its worship, its theism and pantheism, its love of God, its philosophy and superstitions, its festivals and ceremonies and ethics – than any other works."Winternitz, M., Vol. I, p. 529.
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K. Kannan, who was the dialogue writer of Vedham Pudhithu (1987), made his debut as director of this venture. The film will deal with the ever-existing divide between rationalism and theism. Navya Nair, heroine of Azhagiya Theeye (2004), signed to play an Iyengar girl opposite Ganesh, a new face. Girish Karnad (voice dubbed by Mohan Raman) played the role of a temple priest and carnatic musician Anuradha Krishnamurthy would make her big screen debut.
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He wrote articles on free will, the philosophy of theism, on science, prayer and miracles for the Dublin Review. In 1863 he became editor of the Dublin Review (1863–1878). He took over as editor in July 1863, deferring editorial decisions on politics, history, or literature to capable sub-editors. He was an opponent of Liberal Catholicism and defender of papal authority, and did not hesitate to attack the views of Montalembert or Döllinger.
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81–82 Negulescu's publishing debut came in 1892, with a metaphysical essay, Critica apriorismului și a empirismului ("A Critique of Apriorism and Empiricism"), earning him the Romanian Academy award in philosophy. The title indicates the two main philosophical currents rejected by Negulescu, who sought a middle road between transcendental idealism and resurgent anti- realism, finalism, and theism. He found it in "realistic empiricism", a brand of monism, evolutionism and scientism that quoted heavily from Herbert Spencer.Bagdasar et al.
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The most extensive working out of such a theological position remains of After Christianity, ch. 6 'A Future Theism', but see also 'That Which is God' in eds. G. Howie and J. Jobling, Women and the Divine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). (Whether 'God' has agency, or would exist if humans did not, remain for her open questions.) It is this theological realism which those of more traditional beliefs have often recognised as being held in common.
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Apatheism (; a portmanteau of apathy and theism) is the attitude of apathy towards the existence or non-existence of God(s). It is more of an attitude rather than a belief, claim, or belief system. The term was coined by Robert Nash in 2001.Robert J. Nash, Religious Pluralism in the Academy: Opening the Dialogue (2001) An apatheist is someone who is not interested in accepting or rejecting any claims that gods exist or do not exist.
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Gregory A. Boyd (born June 2, 1957) is an American theologian, pastor, and author. Boyd is Senior Pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota and President of Reknew.org.Woodland Hills Church website He is one of the leading spokesmen in the growing Neo-Anabaptism movement, which is based in the tradition of Anabaptism and advocates Christian pacifism and a non-violent understanding of God. Boyd has also long been known as a leading advocate of open theism.
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7 November 2015 function vellore Thirumuruga Kirupanandha Variyar (1906–1993) was a Shaivite spiritual teacher from India. He was a Murugan devotee who helped rebuild and complete the works on many of the temples across the state. He is known for his discourses on various Shaivite legends. Coming into prominence at the time when atheist movement was running hot in the state of Tamil Nadu, he helped to sustain and re-establish Hinduism and Theism in the state.
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At this stage in our development, Schellenberg argues, religion of a different sort from what we have seen before is called for. Critics have argued that if Schellenberg is skeptical or doubting about ultimism on the basis of future possibilities, then he should also be skeptical about theism instead of being an atheist, and that the idea of skeptical religion might be hard to put into practice.McCreary 2010, Morriston 2013, 217-218; Dole 2013, 240-245.
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Though Annadurai initially belonged to the openly atheist Dravidar Kazhagam he later announced his stance towards theism as "Only one race, Only one God" (Onre Kulam Oruvanae Devan).Daughter of the South By Pi. Ci Kaṇēcan̲, p. 66Ethnic movement in India By Ganapathy Palanithurai, R. Thandavan, p. 41 Though secular to the core, he later described himself as a Hindu sans the sacred ash, a Christian minus the holy cross, and a Muslim without the prayer cap.
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"Religious theism which is central to Hinduism" (book review). Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 4(1):117–18. . . Reviewed book: Ashby, Philip H. History and Future of Religious Thought: Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam. While many Hindus focus upon God in the neutral form, Brahman being of neuter gender grammatically, there are prominent Hindu traditions that conceive God as female, even as the source of the male form of God, such as the Shakta denomination.
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The clashes between the Ehl-i Sunna and Shia in the 7th and 8th centuries had a genuine political character. Political thought was not purely rooted in theism, however. Aristotleanism flourished as the Islamic Golden Age saw rise to a continuation of the peripatetic philosophers who implemented the ideas of Aristotle in the context of the Islamic world. Abunaser, Avicenna and Ibn Rushd where part of this philosophical school who claimed that human reason surpassed mere coincidence and revelation.
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Panentheism is also a feature of some Christian philosophical theologies and resonates strongly within the theological tradition of the Orthodox Church. It also appears in process theology. Process theological thinkers are generally regarded in the Christian West as unorthodox. Furthermore, process philosophical thought is widely believed to have paved the way for open theism, a movement that tends to associate itself primarily with the Evangelical branch of Protestantism, but is also generally considered unorthodox by most Evangelicals.
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George N Schlesinger (Nov 7, 1925 – June 27, 2013) was a philosopher, rabbi, and author. He made major contributions in the areas of philosophy of religion, and philosophy of science. He taught and conducted research as a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from 1967 to 1999, and as a visiting professor at several other universities. His teaching and research interests included philosophy of time, philosophy of logic, and theism.
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For esoteric Buddhism "a" has a special function because it is associated with Shunyata or the idea that no thing exists in its own right, but is contingent upon causes and conditions. (See Dependent origination) In Sanskrit "a" is a prefix which changes the meaning of a word into its opposite, so "vidya" is understanding, and "avidya" is ignorance (the same arrangement is also found in many Greek words, like e.g. "atheism" vs. "theism" and "apathy" vs. "pathos").
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Socrates In Western classical Antiquity, theism was the fundamental belief that supported the legitimacy of the state (the polis, later the Roman Empire). Historically, any person who did not believe in any deity supported by the state was fair game to accusations of atheism, a capital crime. For political reasons, Socrates in Athens (399 BCE) was accused of being atheos ("refusing to acknowledge the gods recognized by the state").Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World.
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The term "open theism" was introduced in 1980 with theologian Richard Rice's book The Openness of God: The Relationship of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will. The broader articulation of open theism was given in 1994, when five essays were published by evangelical scholars (including Rice) under the title The Openness of God. Recent theologians of note expressing this view include: Clark Pinnock (deceased as of 2010), Greg Boyd, Thomas Jay Oord, John E. Sanders, Dallas Willard, Jürgen Moltmann, Richard Rice, C. Peter Wagner, John Polkinghorne, Hendrikus Berkhof, Adrio Konig, Harry Boer, Bethany Sollereder, Matt Parkins, Thomas Finger (Mennonite), W. Norris Clarke (Roman Catholic), Brian Hebblethwaite, Robert Ellis, Kenneth Archer (Pentecostal) Barry Callen (Church of God), Henry Knight III, Gordon Olson, and Winkie Pratney. A significant, growing number of philosophers of religion affirm it: Peter Van Inwagen, Richard Swinburne (Orthodox), William Hasker, David Basinger, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Dean Zimmerman, Timothy O'Connor, James D. Rissler, Keith DeRose, Richard E. Creel, Robin Collins (philosopher/theologian/physicist), J. R. Lucas, Vincent Brümmer, (Roman Catholic), Richard Purtill, Alan Rhoda, Jeffrey Koperski, Dale Tuggy, and Keith Ward.
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Michael Gorman presented ‘’Our Enduring Values’’ to the Association of Christian Libraries (ACL) and further reviews of his book have suggested that the eight proposed values which librarians should follow are more closely related to biblical theism than the humanistic beliefs Gorman believes.Smith, G. (2002) 'The Core Virtue of Christian Librarianship' in Faculty Publications and Presentations. Paper 1 Last accessed 20 March 2011 Further work by the ACL has developed ideas relating to the formulation of a Christian approach to library values.
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However, a counter argument by Stephen Maitzen suggests that the ethical inconsistency in the bible that is not followed by most Christians or Jews today, such as the execution of homosexuals, blasphemers, disobedient children, or the punishment for mixing linen and cloth, ultimately undermines the skeptical theism argument. Christian ethics have also been criticized for breeding intolerance (such as antisemitic views), and for having a repressive nature. Criticism has also been aimed at the core of Christian ethics, the threat of Hell.
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James Martineau - Replica (National Portrait Gallery) by George Frederic Watts, 1873 Martineau came to know German philosophy and criticism, especially the criticism of Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Tübingen school, which affected his construction of Christian history. French influences were Ernest Renan and the Strassburg theologians. The rise of evolution compelled him to reformulate his theism. He addressed the public, as editor and contributor, in the Monthly Repository, the Christian Reformer, the Prospective Review, the Westminster Review and the National Review.
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Conservative Southern Baptists of this time also bemoaned what they claimed was the growing presence of liberal ideology within the SBC's own seminaries. Clark H. Pinnock, who later became an advocate of open theism, taught at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pinnock is said to have been much more conservative in those days, at which time he argued that liberal professors should be dismissed. He did not embrace more liberal views until later.
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Teeuw describes the work as taking up the classic theme of modernity versus tradition in a new, more worldly manner. Balfas writes that this approach to the theme was soon followed by other writers. Despite Mihardja's insistence that Atheis is meant to be realistic, several symbolic interpretations have been put forward. According to Mihardja, one of the most common interpretations readers conveyed to him was that Hasan's death symbolised atheism defeating religion, with Hasan's death as the death of theism.
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According to self-published material, PDP-LABAN seeks a peaceful and democratic way of life characterized by "freedom, solidarity, justice, equity, social responsibility, self- reliance, efficiency and enlightened nationalism". It has touted as its five guiding principles the following: theism, authentic humanism, enlightened nationalism, democratic socialism, and consultative and participatory democracy. The party advocates a transition to a federal, semi-presidential parliamentary form of government from the current unitary presidential system through a revision of the present 1987 Constitution of the Philippines.
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Darwinism and Atheism: A Marriage Made in Heaven? by Michael Ruse 23. Creation and Evolutionary Convergence, by Simon Conway Morris 24. Signature in the Cell: Intelligent Design and the DNA Enigma, by Stephen C. Meyer 25. Darwin and Intelligent Design, by Francisco J. Ayala 26. Christianity and Human Evolution, by John F. Haught 27. Christian Theism and Life on Earth, by Paul Draper Part VI - The Human Sciences 28. Toward a Cognitive Science of Christianity, by Justin L. Barrett 29.
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"Positive Atheism and The Meaninglessness of Theism", Infidels.org George H. Smith uses an attribute-based approach in an attempt to prove that there is no concept for God: he argues that there are no meaningful attributes, only negatively defined or relational attributes, making the term meaningless. An example: Consider the proposition of the existence of a "pink unicorn". When asserting the proposition, one can use attributes to at least describe the concept such a cohesive idea is transferred in language.
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84 Incorporeality and corporeality of God are related to conceptions of transcendence (being outside nature) and immanence (being in nature) of God, with positions of synthesis such as the "immanent transcendence". Some religions describe God without reference to gender, while others use terminology that is gender-specific and . God has been conceived as either personal or impersonal. In theism, God is the creator and sustainer of the universe, while in deism, God is the creator, but not the sustainer, of the universe.
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Europeans polled who "believe in a god", according to Eurobarometer in 2005 North Americans polled about religious identity 2010-2012 Positions on the existence of God can be divided along numerous axes, producing a variety of orthogonal classifications. Theism and atheism are positions of belief (or lack of it), while gnosticism and agnosticism are positions of knowledge (or the lack of it). Ignosticism concerns belief about God's conceptual coherence. Apatheism concerns belief about the practical importance of whether God exists.
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He still believes in the existence of god as a theism but still faces difficulties in embracing Islam. In the month of Ramadan (August) in 2012, he stopped at the Iron Mosque and was attracted to his surroundings before converting to Islam four months later on Friday, 28 December 2012. Ayman received his early education at Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Seri Selayang in 2001 and graduated in 2005. He continued his education at Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Darul Ehsan in 2006 and graduated in 2007.
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Like Zimmer, Tillich is trying to express a religious notion that is neither theistic nor atheistic. However, the theism that is being transcended in Stoicism according to Tillich is not polytheism as in Jainism, but monotheism, pursuing an ideal of human courage which has emancipated itself from God. > The courage to take meaninglessness into itself presupposes a relation to > the ground of being which we have called "absolute faith." It is without a > special content, yet it is not without content.
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He reviewed and discarded pantheism, deism, and pandeism in favor of panentheism, finding that such a "doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations". Hartshorne formulated God as a being who could become "more perfect": He has absolute perfection in categories for which absolute perfection is possible, and relative perfection (i. e., is superior to all others) in categories for which perfection cannot be precisely determined.Charles Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1964) p.
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Sweis specializes in Apologetics , Christian Thought, Philosophy of religion, and Philosophy of mind and is well known for his book Debating Christian Theism, published by Oxford University Press and co-edited with philosophers J.P. Moreland and Chad V. Meister. Sweis earned his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at Eastern Illinois University and a Masters in Philosophy from Trinity National University. He received his Ph.D from the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. His dissertation was Philosophy of the mind and cognitive science.
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According to Olson, post-conservatives believe that doctrinal truth is secondary to spiritual experience shaped by Scripture. Post-conservative evangelicals seek greater dialogue with other Christian traditions and support the development of a multicultural evangelical theology that incorporates the voices of women, racial minorities, and Christians in the developing world. Some post-conservative evangelicals also support open theism and the possibility of near universal salvation.Roger E. Olson, "Postconservative Evangelicals Greet the Postmodern Age" , The Christian Century (May 3, 1995), pp. 480–483.
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Nontheist Friends are attempting sympathetically to generate conversation with others who are more comfortable with the traditional and often reiterated language of Quakerism. Some nontheistic Friends see significance in this lower-case / upper-case distinction in terms of inclusiveness and friendliness, welcoming both to the ongoing NTF email list conversations. Questioning theism, they wish to examine whether the experience of direct and ongoing inspiration from God ("waiting in the Light") – "So wait upon God in that which is pure. ..."Royce, Josiah. 1913.
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Miller also theorized about Franz Kafka, who was abused by his father but fulfilled the politically correct function of mirroring abuse in metaphorical novels, instead of exposing it. In the chapter entitled "The Pain of Separation and Autonomy," Miller examined the authoritarian (e.g.: Old Testament, Papist, Calvinist) interpretation of Judeo-Christian theism and its parallels to modern parenting practice, asserting that it was Jesus's father Joseph who should be credited with Jesus's departure from the dogmatic Judaism of his time.
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Essential kenosis is a form of process theology, (also known as "open theism") that allows one to affirm that God is almighty, while simultaneously affirming that God cannot prevent genuine evil. Because out of love God necessarily gives freedom, agency, self-organization, natural processes, and law-like regularities to creation, God cannot override, withdraw, or fail to provide such capacities. Consequently, God is not culpable for failing to prevent genuine evil. Thomas Jay Oord's work explains this view most fully.
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Philo argues: Philo also proposes that the order in nature may be due to nature alone. If nature contains a principle of order within it, the need for a designer is removed. Philo argues that even if the universe is indeed designed, it is unreasonable to justify the conclusion that the designer must be an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God – the God of classical theism. It is impossible, he argues, to infer the perfect nature of a creator from the nature of its creation.
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An evolutionary debunking, sometimes referred to as an evolutionary debunking argument or evolutionary debunking thesis, is a philosophical argument which holds that, because humans (like all organisms) have an evolutionary origin, the principles of ethics and morality that humans have devised are invalid and cannot be considered objective knowledge. Proponents of such arguments argue that they refute, or at least cast doubt on, ethical realism, moral realism, and/or theism. However, critics have argued that these arguments are themselves invalid.
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The process philosopher John B. Cobb (pictured, 2013) challenges Palmer's interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. In Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking, Palmer examines whether process philosophy, in particular the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, can provide an appropriate background for engaging in environmental ethics. Process thought, Clark notes, has frequently appealed more to theologically-inclined environmental ethicists than classical theism; in particular, the views of Hartshorne and Cobb have been influential. Palmer first sets forth a process ethic.
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Deism is a form of theism in which God created the universe and established rationally comprehensible moral and natural laws but no longer intervenes in human affairs. Deism is a natural religion where belief in God is based on application of reason and evidence observed in the designs and laws found in nature.[12] The World Order of Deists maintains a web site presenting deist apologetics that demonstrate the existence of God based on evidence and reason, absent divine revelation.
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The monads are "substantial forms of being, "elemental, individual, subject to their own laws, non-interacting, each reflecting the entire universe. Monads are centers of force, which is substance while space, matter and motion are phenomenal and their form and existence is dependent on the simple and immaterial monads. There is a pre-established harmony by God, the central monad, between the world in the minds of the monads and the external world of objects. Leibniz's cosmology embraced traditional Christian theism.
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The God is Dead movement in the 1960s, and especially its reflections on theological implications of the atrocities of the Nazi regime and the carnage of World War II, had an important influence on his abandonment of traditional theism. Finally, teaching courses on the philosophy of religion and on various philosophical systems in a secular university challenged him constantly to reflect on the relevance of religious and philosophical thought for his time and to continue to work out his own religious and philosophical outlook.
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Shaivism centers around Shiva, but it has many sub-traditions whose theological beliefs and practices vary significantly. They range from dualistic devotional theism to monistic meditative discovery of Shiva within oneself. Within each of these theologies, there are two sub-groups. One sub- group is called Vedic-Puranic, who use the terms such as "Shiva, Mahadeva, Maheshvara and others" synonymously, and they use iconography such as the Linga, Nandi, Trishula (trident), as well as anthropomorphic statues of Shiva in temples to help focus their practices.
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Isolation refers to Samkhya mysticism, whereby the purusa (the soul) and prakrti (nature) are separated (p. 106-128). About the Hindu mystics, Zaehner contrasts Samkhya, a dualist doctrine associated with the Yoga method, and non-dualist Vedanta, a monism inspired by the Upanishads. The relative merits of Monism verses Theism, and vice versa, are discussed (pp. 153–197). Near the end of his conclusion, Zaehner repeats his view that the monist and the theistic are "distinct and mutually opposed types of mysticism" (p. 204).
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In Glorantha, magic operates from the everyday level of prayers and charms to the creation and maintenance of the world. Heroes make their way in the world, and may also venture into metaphysical realms to gain knowledge and power, at the risk of body and soul. In the more recent material, competing magical outlooks (such as theism, shamanism and mysticism), exist to explain the world. Within each metaphysical system, adherents may also compete, such as when theistic worshipers of rival gods battle each other.
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Warren's earliest published work in philosophy was modified from the final chapter of his Vanderbilt University dissertation and was published in 1972. In Have Atheists Proved There is No God?, Warren develops a version of a soul-making theodicy to answer J. L. Mackie's argument from evil against theism. Warren's chief claim to fame outside the Churches of Christ are his debates with Antony Flew and Wallace Matson on the existence of God, and his debate with Joe E. Barnhart on the adequacy of utilitarian ethics.
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Fundamentally, Calvin at this point in his career is acting as a humanist and not a Protestant reformer. Calvin and Seneca agree that all men are sinners and sin needs to be punished, and both are committed to a deterministic theism. However, it becomes clear that Calvin had not intended to pass Stoic elements into Protestant theology, and in fact Calvin attacks the Stoic creed more often than he approves it.Edward F. Meylan, A Stoic Doctrine in Calvin, in The Romanic Review, 1937, pp.
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Darwin counselled anonymity, and suggested study of the evolution of religious reasoning, giving him unused notes on instinct from his work on Natural Selection. Romanes launched on the study of comparative psychology, and in August was given a standing ovation for his talk at the British Association. In November the Darwins were staying with the Litchfields, and Romanes drove there to introduce his fiancé and present his new book, A Candid Examination of Theism by "Physicus". Darwin read it with "very great interest", but was unconvinced.
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Process theology is a school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), while open theism is a similar theological movement that began in the 1990s. In both views, God is not omnipotent in the classical sense of a coercive being. Reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events, which are experiential in nature. The universe is characterized by process and change carried out by the agents of free will.
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Even though Christian Science differs from orthodox Christianity in some ways, it is still a theistic religion. Eschatology strongly rejects the belief of a personal God. In the chapter "Experiments and experiences" of The Sickle Walter confess the extreme tribulation, or "mental warfare" as he called it, that he endured in the process of abandoning theism and the ideas inculcated in him as a child. Walter and the Eschatologists' view of God are much closer to New Thought and the New Age movement than to Christian Scientists.
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There is broad agreement in modern culture about moral standards: "the demand for universal justice and beneficence ... the claims of equality ... freedom and self-rule ... and ... the avoidance of death and suffering." But there is disagreement about moral sources that support the agreement. Taylor explains how these sources are threefold: theism, "a naturalism of disengaged reason", extending to scientism, and Romanticism or its modernist successors. Beyond the disagreement on moral sources is the conflict between disengaged reason and Romanticism/modernism, that instrumental reason empties life of meaning.
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He was appointed Professor of Christian Doctrine at King's College in 1971, a post he held until 1983. He was regarded as a distinguished theologian, who wrote and spoke with clarity. He died in Cardiff on 26 October 1996. Though Owen's books published in his lifetime all treated of broad issues in theism such as the concept of God, knowledge of God, and arguments for his existence, a more specific study on the subject of prayer was published posthumously (see list of books below).
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God, he says, is to be regarded not as an absolute but as an Infinite Person, whose desire it is that he should realize himself in finite persons. These persons are objects of God's love, and he arranges the world for their good. The direct connecting link between God man is the genius, a higher spiritual individuality existing fan by the side of his lower, earthly individuality. Fichte advocates an ethical theism, and his arguments might be turned to account by the apologist of Christianity.
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Evidence suggests that they co- existed with the Bhagavata tradition in ancient times. The Advaita Vedanta scholars, such as Adi Shankara, criticized elements of the Pancharatra doctrine along with other theistic approaches stating it was against monastic spiritual pursuits and non-Vedic. According to Suthren Hirst, Shankara supported the use of icons and temple worship if it focussed as a means to comprehend Brahman as the sole metaphysical reality. However, he opposed devotional theism as an end in itself and the goal of spiritual pursuits.
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Baruch Spinoza later claimed that "Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived."Ethics, part I, prop. 15. "Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner."Ethics, part I, prop. 25S. Though Spinoza has been called the "prophet"Picton, J. Allanson, "Pantheism: Its Story and Significance", 1905. and "prince"Fraser, Alexander Campbell, "Philosophy of Theism", William Blackwood and Sons, 1895, p. 163.
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Brent D. Slife and Jeffrey S. Reber assert that an implicit bias against theism limits possible insights in the field of psychology. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative group, argues that course curriculums betray a progressive bias. However, John Lee argues that this research is not based on a probability sample and uses a research design that cannot rule out explanations other than political bias. Furthermore, research suggests little or no leftward movement among college students while they are in college.
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Carrier put forward a new translation of twelve quotations, based on the German editions of Henry Picker and Werner Jochmann, as well as a fragment of the Bormann-Vermerke preserved at the Library of Congress, challenging some of the quotations frequently used to demonstrate Hitler's hostility to Christianity. Carrier concludes that Hitler's views in Table Talk "resemble Kant's with regard to the primacy of science over theology in deciding the facts of the universe, while remaining personally committed to a more abstract theism."Carrier (2003), p. 574.
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Priestley's major argument in the Institutes was that the only revealed religious truths that could be accepted were those that matched one's experience of the natural world. Because his views of religion were deeply tied to his understanding of nature, the text's theism rested on the argument from design.Schofield (1997), 174; Uglow, 169; Tapper, 315; Holt, 44. The Institutes shocked and appalled many readers, primarily because it challenged basic Christian orthodoxies, such as the divinity of Christ and the miracle of the Virgin Birth.
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At issue here is the truth value of statements about the future actions of free creatures. At the 2003 annual ETS meeting the membership voted overwhelmingly to affirm Pinnock's inclusion but fell 25 votes short of the 2/3 majority necessary to expel Sanders.David Neff, "Open to Healing: Anxieties and Attack Turn to Grace and Truth at ETS Meeting," Christianity Today, Jan/Feb 2004, 21-22 Also in 2003 several Calvinist pastors in the tiny denomination which owned Huntington University put pressure on the Administration to remove Sanders from the faculty (he was professor of religion and philosophy). Even though William Hasker (one of the authors of The Openness of God with Sanders) had taught at Huntington for thirty years and some other faculty members affirmed open theism, only Sanders was examined by a “denominational commission.” In November 2004 the President of the university announced that the Board of Trustees had decided to dismiss Sanders. The President informed the faculty that the problem was not Sanders’ affirmation of open theism (since other open theists remain in the school's employ) but rather his notoriety in promoting them.
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Shang Dynasty bronze script character for tian (天), which translates to Heaven and sky. The orthodox faith system held by most dynasties of China since at least the Shang Dynasty (1766 BCE) until the modern period centered on the worship of Shangdi (literally "Above Sovereign", generally translated as "God") or Heaven as an omnipotent force.Homer H. Dubs, "Theism and Naturalism in Ancient Chinese Philosophy," Philosophy of East and West, Vol. 9, No. 3/4, 1959 This faith system pre-dated the development of Confucianism and Taoism and the introduction of Buddhism and Christianity.
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He also instituted a sacramental meal of rice and water similar to the Sikh system of Amrit (nectar) initiation for new converts. He also attempted a wider appeal to Indians with a more mystical approach. The Ethnographer General writes:- > From about this period, or a little before, Keshub Chandar Sen appears to > have attempted to make a wider appeal to Indians by developing the emotional > side of his religion. And he gradually relapsed from a pure unitarian theism > into what was practically Hindu pantheism and the mysticism of the Yogis.
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"To be sure, Lucretius and Epicurus are not professed atheists [but] the resulting theism is one that denies providence and rejects transcendentalism." he simply argues that they did not create the universe, that they do not care about human affairs, and that they do not intervene in the world. Regardless, due to the ideas espoused in the poem, much of Lucretius's work was seen by many as direct a challenge to theistic, Christian belief.Sheppard (2015), p. 29. The historian Ada Palmer has labelled six ideas in Lucretius's thought (viz.
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"God or the Divine is" without being able to attribute qualities about "what He is" would be the prerequisite of positive theology in negative theology that distinguishes theism from atheism. "Negative theology is a complement to, not the enemy of, positive theology". Since religious experience—or consciousness of the holy or sacred, is not reducible to other kinds of human experience, an abstract understanding of religious experience cannot be used as evidence or proof that religious discourse or praxis can have no meaning or value.Lonergan, Bernard (1972), "Method in Theology", New York, N.Y.: Seabury Press, .
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The founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Mordecai Kaplan, espoused a naturalistic definition of God, while some post-Holocaust theology has also eschewed a personal god. The Jewish philosopher Howard Wettstein has advanced a non-metaphysical approach to religious commitment, according to which metaphysical theism-atheism is not the issue. Harold Schulweis, a Conservative rabbi trained in the Reconstructionist tradition, has argued that Jewish theology should move from a focus on God to an emphasis on "godliness." This "predicate theology", while continuing to use theistic language, again makes few metaphysical claims that non-believers would find objectionable.
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In Nyāya Sūtra's Book 4, Chapter 1, verses 19-21, postulates God exists, states a consequence, then presents contrary evidence, and from contradiction concludes that the postulate must be invalid. A literal interpretation of the three verses suggests that Nyaya school rejected the need for a God for the efficacy of human activity. Since human action and results do not require assumption or need of the existence of God, sutra IV.1.21 is seen as a criticism of the "existence of God and theism postulate". The context of the above verses includes various efficient causes.
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The Kipsigis observe a monotheistic version of Asisian religion where once some Kalenjin can have various deities and a major deity as Asis and/or Tororot, the Kipsigis instead have Asis as the supreme God and the other gods as attributes of Asis. This religion however may have had minor interjections to a former Tororutian religion of the northern sections of Kalenjin. Theism was accompanied with no need for proof. The Asisian religion is based on the sun - 'Asista', and thus 'Asis' is an animated and personified instance of the sun.
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Every now and then, however, other trends appear along the way, especially during the last quarter of the 20th century, such as humanism, empiricism, pragmatism, existentialism, linguistic analysis and some others. But for unique, rather than rare, exceptions, theism has been a constant trait throughout the whole Maltese philosophical tradition. During the last thirty years or so philosophy in Malta took an unprecedented twist. Peter Serracino Inglott gave it an extraordinary new breath of life by widening its horizon, diversifying its interests and firmly propelling it into social and political action.
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Wells' views on God and religion changed over his lifetime. Early in his life he distanced himself from Christianity, and later from theism, and finally, late in life, he was essentially atheistic. Martin Gardner succinctly summarises this progression: > [The younger Wells] ...did not object to using the word "God" provided it > did not imply anything resembling human personality. In his middle years > Wells went through a phase of defending the concept of a "finite God," > similar to the god of such process theologians as Samuel Alexander, Edgar > Brightman, and Charles Hartshorne.
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Kluwer Academic Publishers. Netherlands. 52: 129–142. It has also been argued that the God-of-the-gaps view is predicated on the assumption that any event which can be explained by science automatically excludes God; that if God did not do something via direct action, that he had no role in it at all.God of the gaps – Science & Theology The "God of the gaps" argument, as traditionally advanced by scholarly Christians, was intended as a criticism against weak or tenuous faith, not as a statement against theism or belief in God.
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The tradition, states Milner, has roots that emerged sometime between 3rd century BCE and 3rd century CE, likely in response to the growth of Jainism and Buddhism. It reflected a Hindu synthesis of four philosophical strands: Mimamsa, Advaita, Yoga and theism. Smarta tradition emerged initially as a synthesis movement to unify Hinduism into a nonsectarian form based on the Vedic heritage. It accepted varnasrama-dharma, states Bruce Sullivan, which reflected an acceptance of Varna (caste/class) and ashrama (four stages of human life) as a form of social and religious duty.
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24 January 1944, C.E.M. Joad and C.S. Lewis, "On Being Reviewed by Christians" This debate involved a presentation by Joad that was based on his recent book, published in November 1942, God and Evil, which contained his arguments for theism, but also against Christianity. Joad was at this time taking a closer look at Christianity because of the evil he saw in Nazi Germany. He cited Lewis many times in his book, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons he was invited to address the Socratic Club. Joad later became a Christian.
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So much is made to depend on this and on the supposition that the earliest layer of Q as reconstructed by Kloppenborg, was exclusively normative, that is, its failure, allegedly, to include apocalyptic sayings reflected rejection of them, their eschatology and, as with John, their theism. Loader points out a number of issues with Crossan’s overall methodology and issues with the glossing over of important issues. Loader is not the only scholar to call attention to this deficiency. Christopher Mount of Chicago University had described Crossan’s methodology as “overly simplified.”Mount, Christopher.
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One of his earliest publications remains a classic text in contemporary philosophical theology, The Logic of God Incarnate.Thomas V. Morris (1986). The Logic of God Incarnate Description & contents. Wipf & Stock He has also written other important works in general philosophy, as well as in philosophical theology, such as Anselmian Explorations: Essays in Philosophical Theology (1987), Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism (1988), Philosophy and the Christian Faith (1988), Our Idea of God (1991), and God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason.
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Following his extensive readings, and intellectual exchanges with his peers, he developed the view that the failure of Brahmoism to draw converts lay in its being less philosophic, and being more grounded on dogma, based on divine inspiration and unverifiable assertions. To counter this, he put forward the need for developing a faith based on philosophy. In his written works, he developed a theological system of Brahmoism. This was based not on natural intuition or spontaneity, but on the metaphysics of theism and self-knowledge, based on the Upanishads and the Vedanta.
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Greg Boyd Boyd's Princeton dissertation (published as Trinity and Process) was a critique of the process theology of Charles Hartshorne. Here, he attempts to construct a philosophical theology that retains the positive features of a process worldview, while avoiding its unorthodox implications. Boyd is also a former Oneness Pentecostal, and wrote the book Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity (1992), critiquing the movement's anti-trinitarian view of God and other doctrines. Boyd is also known as one of the leading supporters of open theism, which he explores in the book God of the Possible (2000).
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In essence, open theism is the view that the future is partly open, and therefore known to God partly as a realm of possibilities. Proponents of the conservative or traditional view of God within the Baptist General Conference, such as John Piper, tried unsuccessfully to have the rules of the denomination changed to exclude Boyd and other open theists. He is widely known for his award-winning book Letters from a Skeptic (1994). This book is a collection of letters written by Boyd and his father Edward, who was an atheist at the time.
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Christian philosophy, God: being a contribution to a philosophy of theism by John Thomas Driscoll, Benzinger 1904, p. 190 :“In the criticism of his system we meet with the same difficulties that we find in Spinoza, i.e., the nature of the mind and of matter, the character of their interaction and the doctrine of determinism. Both Spinoza and Spencer teach a pure Naturalism … The two theories set forth are phases of Realistic or Naturalistic Pantheism.” Spinoza inspired a number of other pantheists, with varying degrees of idealism towards nature.
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O you who look on this our machine, do not be sad that with others you are fated to die, but rejoice that our Creator has endowed us with such an excellent instrument as the intellect. Kurt Gödel, the eminent mathematical logician, composed a formal argument for God's existence. Philosophical theism is the belief that the Supreme Being exists (or must exist) independent of the teaching or revelation of any particular religion. It represents belief in God entirely without doctrine, except for that which can be discerned by reason and the contemplation of natural laws.
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Apophatic theology is often assessed as being a version of atheism or agnosticism, since it cannot say truly that God exists. "The comparison is crude, however, for conventional atheism treats the existence of God as a predicate that can be denied ("God is nonexistent"), whereas negative theology denies that God has predicates". "God or the Divine is" without being able to attribute qualities about "what He is" would be the prerequisite of positive theology in negative theology that distinguishes theism from atheism. "Negative theology is a complement to, not the enemy of, positive theology".
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Agnostic theism could be interpreted as an admission that it is not possible to justify one's belief in a god sufficiently for it to be considered known. This may be because they consider faith a requirement of their religion, or because of the influence of plausible-seeming scientific or philosophical criticism. Christian Agnostics practice a distinct form of agnosticism that applies only to the properties of God. They hold that it is difficult or impossible to be sure of anything beyond the basic tenets of the Christian faith.
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The Institutes, published as part of a series of works on religious education, was "a summary of a half-century of the writing of liberal theologians on a number of issues and was to become a standard exposition of beliefs for generations of Unitarians."Schofield, 172. Priestley's major argument is that only revealed religious truths which conform to the truth of the natural world should be accepted. Because his views of religion were deeply tied to his understanding of nature, the text's theism rests on the argument from design.
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Influenced by the Pirahã's concept of truth, Everett's belief in Christianity slowly diminished and he became an atheist. He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982 and had abandoned all faith by 1985. He would not tell anyone about his atheism until the late '90s; when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact. However, by 2008 full contact and relations have been restored with his children, who now seem to accept his viewpoint on theism.
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The Bhagavata Purana is also stated to parallel the non-duality of Adi Shankara by Sheridan. As an example: Scholars describe this philosophy as built on the foundation of non-dualism in the Upanishads, and term it as "Advaitic Theism". This term combines the seemingly contradictory beliefs of a personal God that can be worshiped with a God that is immanent in creation and in one's own self. God in this philosophy is within and is not different from the individual self, states Sheridan, and transcends the limitations of specificity and temporality.
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Some have claimed this argument, however, fails to account for Stephen Maitzen's point on the demographics of theism. If all atheists are liars, why are people in some societies so much more likely to lie than in others?philosophy.acadiau.ca Finally, some have also claimed this argument fails to account for Jason Marsh's point on natural nonbelief in early humans. Since there was quite plausibly such a thing as natural nonbelief in early humans, then it does not make much sense to say that said nonbelief is self- deceptive.
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37 – a secular version of theism. Max Stirner expressed a similar position in his book The Ego and Its Own, published several decades before Nietzsche's work. Nietzsche argues in Genealogy of Morals that human rights exist as a means for the weak to constrain the strong; as such, they do not facilitate the emancipation of life, but instead deny it. The young Karl Marx is sometimes considered a humanist, as he rejected the idea of human rights as a symptom of the very dehumanization they were intended to oppose.
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European countries have experienced a decline in church attendance as well as a decline in the number of people professing a religious belief. The 2010 Eurobarometer Poll found that, on average, 51% of the citizens of EU Member States state that they believe there is a God, 26% believe there is some sort of spirit or life force and 20% don't believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force. 3% declined to answer. These figures show a 2% change from theism to atheism since 2005.
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Paul Moser Paul K. Moser (born 1957 in Bismarck, North Dakota) is an American philosopher who writes on epistemology and the philosophy of religion. He is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University ChicagoHome page and past editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly.American Philosophical Quarterly He is the author of many works in epistemology and the philosophy of religion, in which he has supported versions of epistemic foundationalism and volitional theism. His work brings these two positions together to support volitional evidentialism about theistic belief, in contrast to fideism and traditional natural theology.
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A frequent basis of antiscientific sentiment is religious theism with literal interpretations of sacred text. Here, scientific theories that conflict with what is considered divinely-inspired knowledge are regarded as flawed. Over the centuries religious institutions have been hesitant to embrace such ideas as heliocentrism and planetary motion because they contradicted the dominant understanding of various passages of scripture. More recently the body of creation theologies known collectively as creationism, including the teleological theory of intelligent design, have been promoted by religious theists in response to the process of evolution by natural selection.
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The word deus/déiste first appears in French in 1564 in a work by a Swiss Calvinist named Pierre Viret, but was generally unknown in France until the 1690s when Pierre Bayle published his famous Dictionary, which contained an article on Viret.“Prior to the 17th Century the terms ["deism" and "deist"] were used interchangeably with the terms "theism" and "theist", respectively. .. Theologians and philosophers of the 17th Century began to give a different signification to the words. .. Both [theists and deists] asserted belief in one supreme God, the Creator.
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First, the majority (but not all) of freewill theists have affirmed that God is atemporal and so does not experience time. Open theists believe this is incompatible with the biblical portrayal of God interacting with creatures in which there is a before and an after and a give and receive in the divine experience. Also, Sanders believes that divine atemporality is incompatible with the core tenets of freewill theism since an atemporal being cannot be said to receive or respond to anything because an atemporal being simply cannot change in any respect.
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Lewis, the Sneaky Pagan ChristianityToday, 1 June 2004 Lewis disliked modernity, which he regarded as mechanized and sterile and cut off from natural ties to the world. By comparison, he had hardly any reservations about pre-Christian pagan culture. As Christian critics have pointed out, Lewis disdained the non- religious agnostic character of modernity, but not the polytheistic character of pagan religion.See essay "Is Theism Important?" in God in the Dock by C.S.Lewis edited by Walter Hooper Calormen is the only openly pagan society within the fictional Narnian world.
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Nevertheless, Harris resigned from his position at Bowdoin in 1871 after having grown tired of such activities as fund-raising. In the same year, he began working at Yale as the Dwight Professor of Systematic Theology. There, he wrote much more often, especially in the 1880s when he published his first major work, The Philosophical Basis of Theism, which received notice from England to Japan. Additionally, God the Creator and Lord of All explained his doctrinal system and he had been writing an unfinished book at the time of his death.
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Although evolutionary biologists have often been agnostics (most notably Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin) or atheists (most notably Richard Dawkins), from the outset many have had a belief in some form of theism. These have included Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), who in a joint paper with Charles Darwin in 1858, proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace, in his later years, was effectively a deist who believed that "the unseen universe of Spirit" had interceded to create life as well as consciousness in animals and (separately) in humans.Martin Fichman, (2004).
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Chapter one, "A deeply religious non-believer", seeks to clarify the difference between what Dawkins terms "Einsteinian religion" and "supernatural religion". He notes that the former includes quasi-mystical and pantheistic references to God in the work of physicists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, and describes such pantheism as "sexed up atheism". Dawkins instead takes issue with the theism present in religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. The proposed existence of this interventionist God, which Dawkins calls the "God Hypothesis", becomes an important theme in the book.
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In 2004, Sobel published what many consider to be his magnum opus: Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God. The work is a comprehensive overview of many of the arguments on both sides within analytic philosophy of religion. Sobel utilizes symbolic logic, inductive logic, Bayesian notation, set theory and other tools within analytic philosophy to critically analyze cosmological arguments, ontological arguments, teleological arguments and other arguments for God's existence. Sobel also reformulates a new sound version of the logical problem of evil, and reveals tension between God's divine attributes.
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Kant maintained Christian ideals for some time, but struggled to reconcile the faith with his belief in science. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible.Metaphysics, p. 131 However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic.
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Self-realization occurs when Hegel (part of Spirit's nonsupernatural Mind, which is the collective mind of all humans) arrives on the scene and realizes that every "object" is himself, because both subject and object are essentially Spirit. When self-realization occurs and Spirit becomes Absolute Spirit, the "finite" (man, human) becomes the "infinite" ("God," divine), replacing the imaginary or "picture-thinking" supernatural God of theism: man becomes God.Leonard F. Wheat, Hegel's Undiscovered Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis Dialectics: What Only Marx and Tillich Understood (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012), 69, 105-106, 116, 158-59, 160, 291, 338.
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975–1025 CE) and his disciple Kshemarāja (c. 1000–1050). According to Christopher Wallis, the philosophy of Trika Shaivism also adopted much of the ontological apparatus of Sāṅkhya school, such as its system of 25 tattvas, expanding and reinterpreting it for its own system of 36 tattvas.Wallis, Christopher D. The Philosophy of the Śaiva Religion in Context, Field Statement for Dr. Robert Goldman Another important source for Trika is the idealistic and dualistic theism of Shaiva Siddhanta.Dyczkowski, Mark S. G. The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism, Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
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A millennium later, the Protestant Reformation led to a fundamental split in European Christianity and rekindled critical voices about the Christian faith, both internally and externally. With the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, Christianity was criticized by major thinkers and philosophers, such as Voltaire, David Hume, Thomas Paine, and the Baron d'Holbach. The central theme of these critiques sought to negate the historical accuracy of the Christian Bible and focused on the perceived corruption of Christian religious authorities. Other thinkers, like Immanuel Kant, launched systematic and comprehensive critiques of Christian theology by attempting to refute arguments for theism.
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Swinburne's philosophical method reflects the influence of Thomas Aquinas. He admits that he draws from Aquinas a systematic approach to philosophical theology. Swinburne, like Aquinas, moves from basic philosophical issues (for example, the question of the possibility that God may exist in Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism), to more specific Christian beliefs (for example, the claim in Swinburne's Revelation that God has communicated to human beings propositionally in Jesus Christ). Swinburne moves in his writing program from the philosophical to the theological, building his case rigorously, and relying on his previous arguments as he defends particular Christian beliefs.
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Prashasta or Praśasta (Sanskrit: प्रशस्त) means praised or praiseworthy, lauded or laudable, commended or commendable or eulogized. Dayananda Saraswati writes that the Sutras of Kanāda and Padārthadharmasaṅgraha of Praśastapāda do not show much influence of the Nyaya System. Praśastapāda Bhāṣya is actually not a commentary but an independent compendium of the tenets of the Vaisheshika School. Udayanacharya of the Navya-Nyāya School, the author of Lakṣaṇāvalī which gives the definitions of Vaiśeṣika terms, and Nyāya Kusumanjali which is a systematic account of Nyaya Theism, who also belonged to Mithila, had written Kiranavali which is a commentary on Praśastapāda Bhāṣya .
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As an undergraduate student he was most sympathetic to empiricism, particularly its then-current manifestation logical positivism. At the same time, he was attracted to the humanistic outlook of some faculty members. Despite his movement away from theism, Wine decided to join the clergy rather than academia and in 1951 enrolled in the rabbinic program at Reform Judaism's Hebrew Union College. Wine volunteered for service as a chaplain in the U.S. Army after his ordination as a rabbi and served as associate rabbi at the Reform Temple Beth El in Detroit for six months while awaiting induction.
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As a philosopher, Balfour formulated the basis for the evolutionary argument against naturalism. Balfour argued the Darwinian premise of selection for reproductive fitness cast doubt on scientific naturalism, because human cognitive facilities that would accurately perceive truth could be less advantageous than adaptation for evolutionarily useful illusions. As he says: He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, a society studying psychic and paranormal phenomena, and was its president from 1892 to 1894. In 1914, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, which formed the basis for his book Theism and Humanism (1915).
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The questioning of theism was not confined to abstract concerns in philosophy, but also developed as modern historical consciousness dawned. This new historical consciousness was presaged in the seventeenth century controversies of Deism where Biblical miracles, and especially Christ's resurrection, were called into doubt. Alongside the debates about miracles came new conjectures about the authorship of the Biblical books, and investigations into possible sub-documents and written sources undergirding the present biblical texts. A further element of controversy for Christians at that time arose in the wake of the theory of evolution as propounded in 1859 by Charles Darwin.
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The Kipsigis use nomenclature similar to all the other peoples except the Marakwet whose names of persons have been inverted gender-wise; this is said to be probably because of a genocide that may have targeted males or females of the Marakwet. Theism is similar across Kalenjin and it is examined to have radiated from the Kibasisek clan originally from Marakwet. The Kibasisek clan found across most or all the Kalenjin spread the worship of the sun (Asisian Religion). However, further examinations find the Maliri Kalenjin (Pokot and Sebei) to have faceted in former Kalenjin religion (Tororutian Religion).
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However, the first premise is rejected by many philosophers of mind. Frank Jackson, known for the knowledge argument in support of dualism about the mind, comments on the debate between physicalist and dualist conceptions of mind: If one is willing to accept the first premise that reductive forms of physicalism are false, then the argument takes off. Thus, one could think of Moreland as making an argument that tries to move a person from "rejecting physicalism" to "accepting theism". The crucial step in this move is the fifth premise, which asserts that naturalism can not account for non-physical mental states.
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The Nandi use nomenclature similar to all the other tribes except the Marakwet whose names of persons have been inverted gender-wise; this is said to be probably because of a genocide that may have targeted males or females of the Marakwet. Theism is similar across Kalenjin and it is examined to have radiated from the Kibasisek clan originally from Marakwet. The Kibasisek clan found across most or all the Kalenjin spread the worship of the sun (Asiisian Religion). However, further examinations find the Maliri Kalenjin (Pokot and Sebei) to have faceted in former Kalenjin religion (Tororutian Religion).
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Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas all wrote about the issues raised by the Euthyphro dilemma, although, like William James and Wittgenstein later, they did not mention it by name. As philosopher and Anselm scholar Katherin A. Rogers observes, many contemporary philosophers of religion suppose that there are true propositions which exist as platonic abstracta independently of God. Among these are propositions constituting a moral order, to which God must conform in order to be good. Classical Judaeo-Christian theism, however, rejects such a view as inconsistent with God's omnipotence, which requires that God and what he has made is all that there is.
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It discusses whether one should renounce a householder lifestyle for a life as an ascetic, or lead a householder life dedicated to one's duty and profession, or pursue a householder life devoted to a personalized god in the revealed form of Krishna. Thus Gita discusses and synthesizes the three dominant trends in Hinduism: enlightenment-based renunciation, dharma-based householder life, and devotion-based theism. According to Deutsch and Dalvi, the Bhagavad Gita attempts "to forge a harmony" between these three paths. The Bhagavad Gita's synthetic answer recommends that one must resist the "either-or" view, and consider a "both- and" view.
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Philosophical theism conceives of nature as the result of purposive activity and so as an intelligible system open to human understanding, although possibly never completely understandable. It implies the belief that nature is ordered according to some sort of consistent plan and manifests a single purpose or intention, however incomprehensible or inexplicable. However, philosophical theists do not endorse or adhere to the theology or doctrines of any organized religion or church. They may accept arguments or observations about the existence of a god advanced by theologians working in some religious tradition, but reject the tradition itself.
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Mahasi Sayadaw,Thoughts on the Dhamma, The Wheel Publication No. 298/300, Kandy BPS, 1983, "...when Buddha- dhamma is being disseminated, there should be only one basis of teaching relating to the Middle Way or the Eightfold Path: the practice of morality, concentration, and acquisition of profound knowledge, and the Four Noble Truths." Despite this apparent non-theism, Buddhists consider veneration of the Noble OnesBuddhists consider an enlightened person, the Dhamma and the community of monks as noble. See Three Jewels. very important although the two main schools of Buddhism differ mildly in their reverential attitudes.
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A diagram of I Ching hexagrams sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Joachim Bouvet. The Arabic numerals were added by Leibniz. Leibniz, who was corresponding with Jesuits in China, wrote the first European commentary on the I Ching in 1703, arguing that it proved the universality of binary numbers and theism, since the broken lines, the "0" or "nothingness", cannot become solid lines, the "1" or "oneness", without the intervention of God. This was criticized by Hegel, who proclaimed that binary system and Chinese characters were "empty forms" that could not articulate spoken words with the clarity of the Western alphabet.
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Charles' life changed dramatically when he was asked to register for the military. Philosophically he knew he could never hurt another human being or aid anybody in doing this. When he heard there was the category of conscientious objector, he was relieved and registered as such stating that his religion was Moral Theism. In those days COs were sent to Civilian Public Service Camps; he was sent to one in Oregon which was a refurbished CCC forest camp, and he found himself doing hard physical labor, but shortly after his arrival was assigned to office work.
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Brhaspati sutras, also called the Barhaspatya sutras, is an ancient Sanskrit text named after a Vedic era sage Brhaspati, known for its theories of materialism and anti-theism. Its tenets are at the foundation of the Charvaka school of non-orthodox Hindu philosophy. The Brihaspati Sutras manuscript has been lost to history or yet to be found.John M. Koller (1977), Skepticism in Early Indian Thought, Philosophy East and West, 27(2): 155–164 However, the text is quoted in other Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina texts, and this secondary literature has been the source for reconstructing the Brhaspati sutras partially.
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His work also focused on the logic of belief, including why some would not believe in theism. Schlesinger wrote that there is overwhelming evidence in favor of a creator, such as how fine-tuned the universe is in order to support life. He wrote that although the creator is all powerful, just like it is impossible to name the highest integer, it is not possible to create a world which gives the highest desirable state to its inhabitants. In his article, "The First Commandment," he wrote that we are born with a yearning towards a higher power.
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Edgar Saltus was born in New York City on October 8, 1855 to Francis Henry Saltus and his second wife, Eliza Evertson, both of Dutch descent. He attended St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire. After two semesters at Yale University, Saltus entered Columbia Law School in 1878, graduating with a law degree in 1880. He wrote two books on philosophy: The Philosophy of Disenchantment (1885) focused on pessimism and in particular the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Eduard Von Hartmann, while The Anatomy of Negation (1886) tried "to convey a tableau of anti-theism from Kapila to Leconte de Lisle".
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In real life, the real Masons are—allegedly—merely a fraternal organization with, no more noteworthy than any other club. However, due to its perceived secretive nature, Freemasonry has long been a subject of conspiracy theories in which Freemasonry is portrayed as bent on world domination or as being secretly in control of world politics. Not only that, but there has traditionally been religious opposition to it from the Catholic Church on grounds that Catholic Theism is incompatible with Masonic Deism. The fictional Masons seen in Warrior Nun Areala embody the worst traits of all these things.
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Doug Koop, "Closing the Door on Open Theists? ETS to Examine Whether Clark Pinnock and John Sanders Can Remain Members," Christianity Today, Jan/Feb 2003, 24 and Sanders, John, “1994-2004: An Overview of the Debate on Open Theism in Evangelicalism,” The Executive Committee of the ETS held formal hearings with Sanders and Pinnock and decided that they had no problems with Pinnock but said that they could not approve of Sanders’ belief in “probabilistic prophecy”, which claims that some biblical predictions about future events are not guaranteed since they are conditional upon what beings with free will decide to do.
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As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, populism, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors. Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics. Mencken opposed the American entry into both World War I and World War II. Some of the terminology in his private diary entries has been described by some researchers as racist and anti-Semitic, although this characterization has been disputed.
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"This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one's opponent, but it doesn't tell us anything about the content of their beliefs. "The people who are trying to kill us, Sunni jihadist terrorists, are a very, very different breed.".' "The word 'Islamofascism' never had any meaning, except as a catch-all for whatever regimes and groups the word's users wished to make targets for military action. Hitchens is also well known for his tendentious misunderstandings of all forms of religion, likening theism to a supernatural totalitarian regime and attributing all of the crimes of political totalitarianism to religion.
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Underhill's life was greatly affected by her husband's resistance to her joining the Catholic Church to which she was powerfully drawn. At first she believed it to be only a delay in her decision, but it proved to be lifelong. He was, however, a writer himself and was supportive of her writing both before and after their marriage in 1907, though he did not share her spiritual affinities. Her fiction was written in the six years between 1903–1909 and represents her four major interests of that general period: philosophy (neoplatonism), theism/mysticism, the Roman Catholic liturgy, and human love/compassion.
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God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason is a 2012 book by the Dutch philosopher Herman Philipse, written in English and published in the United Kingdom. Philipse found his Atheist Manifesto (1995) to be too hastily and superficially written, and decided to set up a more complete work to systematically refute all the arguments for the existence of God and adherence to any form of theism. To gain insight in how a religious person substantiates the existence of God, Philipse presents a "religious decision tree" that leads to four categories of theists.
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Quakers in the unprogrammed or "silent worship" tradition of Quaker practice have in the 20th century begun to examine the significance of nontheistic beliefs in the Society of Friends, as part of the Quaker tradition of seeking truth. Non-theism among Quakers probably dates to the 1930s, when some Quakers in California branched off to form the Humanist Society of Friends (today part of the American Humanist Association), and when Henry Cadbury professed agnosticism in a 1936 lecture to Harvard Divinity School students. The term "non-theistic" first appeared in a Quaker publication in 1952 on conscientious objection.Tatum, Lyle (ed.). 1952.
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Arguments against empirically based theism date back at least as far as the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, whose objection can be paraphrased as the question "Who designed the designer?". According to philosopher Daniel Dennett, however – one of Dawkins' fellow "brights" – the innovation in Dawkins' argument is twofold: to show that where design fails to explain complexity, evolution by natural selection succeeds as the only workable solution; and to argue how this should illuminate the confusion surrounding the anthropic principle.The notion that "observations of the physical universe must be compatible with conscious and sapient life that observes it" (see Anthropic principle).
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Dawkins summarizes his argument as follows;The God Delusion, p. 157–8. the references to "crane" and "skyhook" are two notions from Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. A central thesis of the argument is that compared to supernatural abiogenesis, evolution by natural selection requires the supposition of fewer hypothetical processes; according to Occam's razor, therefore, it is a better explanation. Dawkins cites a paragraph where Richard Swinburne agrees that a simpler explanation is better but reasons that theism is simpler because it only invokes a single substance (God) as a cause and maintainer of every other object.
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Geisler is known first and foremost as a classical Christian apologist. Between 1970 and 1990 he participated in dozens of public debates and gained a reputation as a defender of theism, biblical miracles, the resurrection of Jesus, and the reliability of the Bible. The first attempt to publish an outline of his apologetic method showed up in an appendix of his 1990 book When Skeptics Ask. The appendix is titled "Reasoning to Christianity from Ground Zero" and in it we see a high-level view of the holistic system of classical apologetics he had been developing over the years.
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They use this assertion to support their claim that modern science is atheistic, and contrast it with their preferred approach of a revived natural philosophy which welcomes supernatural explanations for natural phenomena and supports theistic science. This ignores the distinction between science and religion, established in Ancient Greece, in which science can not use supernatural explanations. Intelligent design advocate and biochemist Michael Behe proposed a development of Paley's watch analogy in which he argued in favour of intelligent design. Unlike Paley, Behe only attempts to prove the existence of an intelligent designer, rather than the God of classical theism.
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Notre Dame philosophy of religion professor and Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga argues, in his evolutionary argument against naturalism, that the probability that evolution has produced humans with reliable true beliefs, is low or inscrutable, unless their evolution was guided, for example, by God. According to David Kahan of the University of Glasgow, in order to understand how beliefs are warranted, a justification must be found in the context of supernatural theism, as in Plantinga's epistemology. (See also supernormal stimuli). Plantinga argues that together, naturalism and evolution provide an insurmountable "defeater for the belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable", i.e.
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Brocklesby retired to Stamford, and employed his leisure in composing an opus magnum, entitled An Explication of the Gospel Theism and the Divinity of the Christian Religion. Containing the True Account of the System of the Universe, and of the Christian Trinity. … By Richard Brocklesby, a Christian Trinitarian (1706) It is crammed with reading from sages, the Church Fathers, the schoolmen, travellers, and poets; it uses terminology of the writer's own. Brocklesby denies the eternal generation of Jesus Christ, and even his pre-existence; but asserts his consubstantiality as God-man begotten of God, 'an humane-divine person' (see especially bk. vi.
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In ancient and medieval Indian mythology, each masculine deva of the Hindu pantheon is partnered with a feminine devi.The Concept of Shakti: Hinduism as a Liberating Force for Women Followers of Shaktism, worship the goddess Devi as the embodiment of Shakti (feminine strength or power). There is a popular perception that there exist millions of Hindu deities.David Lawrence (2012), The Routledge Companion to Theism (Editors: Charles Taliaferro, Victoria S. Harrison, and Stewart Goetz), Routledge, , pages 78-79 However, most, by far, are goddesses (Shakti, Devi, or mother), state Foulston and Abbott, suggesting "how important and popular goddesses are" in Hindu culture.
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The Vedic hymns treat it as "limitless, indescribable, absolute principle", thus the Vedic divine is something of a panentheism rather than simple henotheism. In late Vedic era, around the start of Upanishadic age (~800 BCE), theosophical speculations emerge that develop concepts which scholars variously call nondualism or monism, as well as forms of non-theism and pantheism. An example of the questioning of the concept of God, in addition to henotheistic hymns found therein, are in later portions of the Rigveda, such as the Nasadiya Sukta. Hinduism calls the metaphysical absolute concept as Brahman, incorporating within it the transcendent and immanent reality.
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The ethics of the Bible have been criticized with some calling it immoral in some of its teachings. Slavery, genocide, supersessionism, the death penalty, violence, patriarchy, sexual intolerance, colonialism, and the problem of evil and a good God, are examples of criticisms of ethics in the Bible. The ethics in the Bible have been criticized, such as the commands in the Old Testament by God to commit genocide, and to spare no one among enemy peoples. The existence of evil has been argued as evidence of no omnipotent, omnibenevolent being, however skeptical theism suggests that humans do not have the understanding of the big picture to make an adequate assessment.
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When used with regards to multiple gods, dualism may refer to duotheism, bitheism, or ditheism. Although ditheism/bitheism imply moral dualism, they are not equivalent: ditheism/bitheism implies (at least) two gods, while moral dualism does not necessarily imply theism (theos = god) at all. Both bitheism and ditheism imply a belief in two equally powerful gods with complementary or antonymous properties; however, while bitheism implies harmony, ditheism implies rivalry and opposition, such as between good and evil, bright and dark, or summer and winter. For example, a ditheistic system would be one in which one god is creative, the other is destructive (cf. theodicy).
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The debate with Flew, a major proponent of atheism famous for his argument that theism is not falsifiable, was held at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in Denton, Texas, USA from September 20–23, 1976. This was an exceptionally well attended debate, and Flew describes it as the best attended of his many debates with theists on the existence of God, with audiences each night ranging from 5,000-7,000 people. The Warren-Matson Debate took place in Tampa, Florida, USA from September 11–14, 1978. Matson, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley was, like Flew, a long-time proponent of atheism.
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Hinduism does not have a "unified system of belief encoded in a declaration of faith or a creed", but is rather an umbrella term comprising the plurality of religious phenomena of India. According to the Supreme Court of India, Part of the problem with a single definition of the term Hinduism is the fact that Hinduism does not have a founder. It is a synthesis of various traditions,; the "Brahmanical orthopraxy, the renouncer traditions and popular or local traditions". Theism is also difficult to use as a unifying doctrine for Hinduism, because while some Hindu philosophies postulate a theistic ontology of creation, other Hindus are or have been atheists.
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According to the Gita translator Radhakrishnan, quoted in a review by Robinson, Krishna's discourse is a "comprehensive synthesis" that inclusively unifies the competing strands of Hindu thought such as "Vedic ritual, Upanishadic wisdom, devotional theism and philosophical insight". Aurobindo described the text as a synthesis of various Yogas. The Indologist Robert Minor, and others, in contrast, state the Gita is "more clearly defined as a synthesis of Vedanta, Yoga and Samkhya" philosophies of Hinduism. The synthesis in Bhagavad Gita addresses the question as to what constitutes the virtuous path and one necessary for the spiritual liberation and a release from the cycles of rebirth (moksha).
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Kaal Mimamsa: Dating of all events related to Ramayana and Mahabharata. The Linga And The Great Goddess: Two articles on the meaning of the Linga and the nature of the Great Goddess. Besides doctrinal and mythological clarifications, it presents a sophisticated debate about the nature of Sakti between two traditional schools: Nyaya and Mimamsa, which could be compared with those held in the times of Adi Sankara. Marxvad aur Ramrajya (Marxism and Ramrajya): A detailed biography of Western philosophers and politicians; their time, opinions and comparison with Indian sages; the corollary of theism, the opposition of Marxism in the strong classical light and the principle of 'Nyaya' and 'Vedanta'.
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800 BCE), theosophical speculations emerge that develop concepts which scholars variously call nondualism or monism, as well as forms of non-theism and pantheism. An example of the questioning of the concept of God, in addition to henotheistic hymns found therein, are in later portions of the Rigveda, such as the Nasadiya Sukta. Hinduism calls the metaphysical absolute concept as Brahman, incorporating within it the transcendent and immanent reality.PT Raju (2006), Idealistic Thought of India, Routledge, , page 426 and Conclusion chapter part XIIPaul Deussen, Sixty Upanishads of the Veda, Volume 1, Motilal Banarsidass, , page 91 Different schools of thought interpret Brahman as either personal, impersonal or transpersonal.
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In philosophy, spiritualism is the notion, shared by a wide variety of systems of thought, that there is an immaterial reality that cannot be perceived by the senses.Encyclopædia Britannica, "Spiritualism (in philosophy)", britannica.com This includes philosophies that postulate a personal God, the immortality of the soul, or the immortality of the intellect or will, as well as any systems of thought that assume a universal mind or cosmic forces lying beyond the reach of purely materialistic interpretations. Generally, any philosophical position, be it dualism, monism, atheism, theism, pantheism, idealism or any other, is compatible with spiritualism as long as it allows for a reality beyond matter.
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In his posthumous work Dall'uoma a Dio (From Man to God) he completed his gradual transformation from positivism to theism by arguing for a God who limits Himself by his own creation in order that we human beings can cooperate with Him in creative activity. Varisco therefore believed that philosophy supports a religious attitude of life fully compatible with the tenets of Christianity. His eventual metaphysical view was thus a pluralistic form of Philosophy of Spirit similar to the works of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Hermann Lotze. There is also a strong similarity between the philosophical theories of Bernardino Varisco and his British counterpart, James Ward.
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Though, Vorstius noted, he could not be sure of any of these claims - it was said that he began every theological proposition with the phrase 'it seems that'. Not only did Vorstius appear heterodox but also deeply skeptical, and many of his hearers and readers were convinced that his beliefs and arguments went beyond Christianity, even beyond theism." Vorstian theology did not find any defenders, "even those who had backed his appointment dissociated themselves from his opinions." The opponents of the Calvinists focused instead on the ecclesiological point, "arguing that it was for the civil magistrate and not the clergy to decide who would instruct students at Leiden University.
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Ward defended a philosophy of panpsychism based on his research in physiology and psychology which he defined as a "spiritualistic monism".Vergilius Ture Anselm Ferm A history of philosophical systems Littlefield, Adams, 1968James Ward The Realm of Ends: Or Pluralism and Theism Reprint Edition, 2011, Cambridge University Press, p. 13 In his Gifford Lectures and his book Naturalism and Agnosticism (1899) he argued against materialism and dualism and supported a form of panpsychism where reality consists in a plurality of centers of activity.James Ward Naturalism and Agnosticism New York: Macmillan Company, 1899 Ward's philosophical views have a close affinity to the pluralistic idealism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
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After introducing the moral law, Lewis argues that thirst reflects the fact that people naturally need water, and there is no other substance which satisfies that need. Lewis points out that earthly experience does not satisfy the human craving for "joy" and that only God could fit the bill; humans cannot know to yearn for something if it does not exist.The Life and Writing of C.S. Lewis, Lecture 3; The Great Courses, Course Guidebook; Professor Louis Markos, Houston Baptist University; The Teaching Company; 2000 After providing reasons for his conversion to theism, Lewis goes over rival conceptions of God to Christianity. Pantheism, he argues, is incoherent, and atheism too simple.
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The view more popularly associated with Kaplan is strict naturalism, à la Dewey, which has been criticized as using religious terminology to mask a non-theistic (if not outright atheistic) position. A second strand of Kaplanian theology makes clear that God has ontological reality, a real and absolute existence independent of human beliefs, while rejecting classical theism and any belief in miracles.The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (The Modern Jewish Experience) by Mel Scult - Paperback – March 19, 2015- Publisher: Indiana University Press; Reprint edition (March 19, 2015)- – Page 117 In 1973 he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.
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In fact, the > nearly 77 percent of Americans who self-identify as Christian are a diverse > pluribus of Christianities that are far from any collective unity. Linda Woodhead attempts to provide a common belief thread for Christians by noting that "Whatever else they might disagree about, Christians are at least united in believing that Jesus has a unique significance." Michael Martin evaluated three historical Christian creeds (the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed) to establish a set of basic Christian assumptions which include belief in theism, the historicity of Jesus, the Incarnation, salvation through faith in Jesus, and Jesus as an ethical role model.
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The words deism and theism are both derived from words meaning "god": Latin deus and Greek theos (θεός). The word déiste first appears in French in 1564 in a work by a Swiss Calvinist named Pierre ViretViret described deism as a heretical development of Italian Renaissance naturalism, resulting from misuse of the liberty conferred by the Reformation to criticise idolatry and superstition. Viret wrote that a group of people believed, like the Jews and Turks, in a God of some kind - but regarded the doctrine of the evangelists and the apostles as a mere myth. Contrary to their own claim, he regarded them as atheists.
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In September 1931, Lewis, Tolkien and Dyson had the famous Night of Addison’s Walk where they walked around Magdalen College discussing myth and how Christianity is the true myth. This night served a key moment for Lewis and led to his conversion from Theism to Christianity. A year later, Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress in August 1932 while staying with his long time friend Arthur Greeves in Northern Ireland. During the same time he wrote The Allegory of Love which wouldn’t be published for several more years. Lewis was gifted with lightning fast writing and rarely wrote second drafts so he published The Pilgrim’s Regress in May 1933.
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The abstract pole refers to those elements within God that never vary, such as God's self-identity, while the concrete pole refers to the organic growth in God's perfect knowledge of the world as the world itself develops and changes. Hartshorne did not accept the classical theistic claim of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), and instead held to creatio ex materia (creation out of pre-existent material), although this is not an expression he used. One of the technical terms Hartshorne used is pan-en- theism, originally coined by Karl Christian Friedrich Krause in 1828. Panentheism (all is in God) must be differentiated from Classical pantheism (all is God).
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God is capable of surpassing himself by growing and changing in his knowledge and feeling for the world. Hartshorne acknowledged a God capable of change, as is consistent with pandeism, but early on he specifically rejected both deism and pandeism in favor of panentheism, writing that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations".Charles Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1964), p. 348, Hartshorne did not believe in the immortality of human souls as identities separate from God, but explained that all the beauty created in a person's life will exist for ever in the reality of God.
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William L. Rowe's example of natural evil: "In some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering." Rowe also cites the example of human evil where an innocent child is a victim of violence and thereby suffers. The evidential problem of evil (also referred to as the probabilistic or inductive version of the problem) seeks to show that the existence of evil, although logically consistent with the existence of God, counts against or lowers the probability of the truth of theism.
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If the light comes on without switch flip, surprise will affect one's mind, but one's mind cannot know that the event violated nature. As just a mundane possibility, an activity within the wall could have connected the wires and completed the circuit without the switch's flip. Though apparently enjoying the scandals that trailed his own explanations, Hume was very practical and his skepticism was quite uneven (Flew p 156). Although Hume rejected orthodox theism and sought to reject metaphysics, Hume supposedly extended Newtonian method to the human mind, which Hume, in a sort of antiCopernican move, placed as the pivot of human knowledge (Flew p 154).
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Nontheism or non-theism is a range of both religious and nonreligious attitudes characterized by the absence of espoused belief in a God or gods. Nontheism has generally been used to describe apathy or silence towards the subject of God and differs from an antithetical, explicit atheism. Nontheism does not necessarily describe atheism or disbelief in God; it has been used as an umbrella term for summarizing various distinct and even mutually exclusive positions, such as agnosticism, ignosticism, ietsism, skepticism, pantheism, atheism, strong or positive atheism, implicit atheism, and apatheism. It is in use in the fields of Christian apologetics and general liberal theology.
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He was also interested in human behavior and belief associated with the use of the Internet, and wrote of his theological concerns in The Soul in Cyberspace. His interests in philosophy have also led him to write on topics like Immanuel Kant's epistemology, the rationality of theism, and book-length treatments of the philosophical ideas and methods of Blaise Pascal and Jesus. In 2011, Groothuis published a comprehensive textbook on Christian apologetics. In his teaching career at Denver Seminary, he has taught graduate courses in Christian Apologetics, Problems in Apologetics, Issues in Philosophy of Religion, Christian Ethics and Modern Culture, and Religious Pluralism, among many others.
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Keene has stated in interviews that the name "Autotheism" derives from "auto" meaning self and "theism" meaning belief in God or gods, hence autotheism means "believing in one's self", or "being your own God". The album questions antiquated belief systems that are in play in current society. As well as touching upon religion, the album touches upon growth in technology at an exponential rate, the Holographic Universe theory, and science as a new religion, or alternatively, knowledge and reason as a reigning religion. Keene said in interviews that the inspiration for the album came partly from reading a book by Ray Kurzweil called The Singularity Is Near.
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Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. 2004, page 27 Science organizations then paid attention to the Institute after the document was published online, but Richards wrote "that the mission statement and goals had been posted on the CRSC's website since 1996."Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross. Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. 2004, page 28 Richards has expressed skepticism of global warming.Carbon Dioxide's Day in Court, Jay Richards, Acton Institute, November 29, 2006 In January 2008 at Stanford University Jay Richards had a debate with a leading atheist, Christopher Hitchens, on the topic: Atheism vs. Theism and The Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design.
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University of Notre Dame philosopher Ralph McInerny goes further than Plantinga, arguing that belief in God reasonably follows from our observations of the natural order and the law-like character of natural events. McInerny argues that the extent of this natural order is so pervasive as to be almost innate, providing a prima facie argument against atheism. McInerny's position goes further than Plantinga's, arguing that theism is evidenced and that the burden of proof rests on the atheist, not on the theist.257x257pxWilliam Lane Craig wrote that if Flew's broader definition of atheism is seen as "merely the absence of belief in God", atheism "ceases to be a view" and "even infants count as atheists".
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Objective idealism is an idealistic metaphysics that postulates that there is in an important sense only one perceiver, and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived. One important advocate of such a metaphysics, Josiah Royce (the founder of American idealism),Daniel Sommer Robinson, The Self and the World in the Philosophy of Josiah Royce, Christopher Publishing House, 1968, p. 9: "Josiah Royce and William Ernest Hocking were the founders and creators of a unique and distinctly American school of idealistic philosophy." wrote that he was indifferent "whether anybody calls all this Theism or Pantheism". It is distinct from the subjective idealism of George Berkeley, and it abandons the thing-in-itself of Kant's dualism.
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Some currents of Neopaganism, in particular Wicca, have a ditheistic concept of a single goddess and a single god, who in hieros gamos represent a united whole. Polytheistic reconstructionists focus on reconstructing polytheistic religions, including the various goddesses and figures associated with indigenous cultures. The term thealogy is sometimes used in the context of the Neopagan Goddess movement, a pun on theology and thea θεά "goddess" intended to suggest a feminist approach to theism. The Goddess movement is a loose grouping of social and religious phenomena that grew out of second-wave feminism, predominantly in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1970s, and the metaphysical community as well.
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In 1879 John Fordyce wrote asking if Darwin believed in God, and if theism and evolution were compatible. Darwin replied that "a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist", citing Charles Kingsley and Asa Gray as examples, and for himself, "In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.— I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind." Those opposing religion often took Darwin as their inspiration and expected his support for their cause, a role he firmly refused.
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This etymology suggests that the Mandaeans may well be the only sect surviving from Late Antiquity to identify themselves explicitly as Gnostics. The words deism and theism are both derived from words meaning "god": Latin deus and Greek theos (θεός). The word déiste first appears in French in 1564 in a work by a Swiss Calvinist named Pierre ViretViret described deism as a heretical development of Italian Renaissance naturalism, resulting from misuse of the liberty conferred by the Reformation to criticise idolatry and superstition. Viret wrote that a group of people believed, like the Jews and Turks, in a God of some kind - but regarded the doctrine of the evangelists and the apostles as a mere myth.
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Dystheistic speculation arises from consideration of the problem of evil — the question of why God, who is supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, would allow evil to exist in the world. Koons notes that this is a theological problem only for a eutheist, since a dystheist would not find the existence of evil (or God's authorship of it) to be an obstacle to theistic belief. In fact, the dystheistic option would be a consistent non- contradictory response to the problem of evil. Thus Koons concludes that the problem of theodicy (explaining how God can be good despite the apparent contradiction presented in the problem of evil) does not pose a challenge to _all_ possible forms of theism (i.e.
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Following his existential analysis, Tillich further argues that theological theism is not only logically problematic, but is unable to speak into the situation of radical doubt and despair about meaning in life. This issue, he said, was of primary concern in the modern age, as opposed to anxiety about fate, guilt, death and condemnation. This is because the state of finitude entails by necessity anxiety, and that it is our finitude as human beings, our being a mixture of being and nonbeing, that is at the ultimate basis of anxiety. If God is not the ground of being, then God cannot provide an answer to the question of finitude; God would also be finite in some sense.
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Tillich goes further to say that the desire to draw God into the subject–object dichotomy is an "insult" to the divine holiness. Similarly, if God were made into the subject rather than the object of knowledge (The Ultimate Subject), then the rest of existing entities then become subjected to the absolute knowledge and scrutiny of God, and the human being is "reified," or made into a mere object. It would deprive the person of his or her own subjectivity and creativity. According to Tillich, theological theism has provoked the rebellions found in atheism and Existentialism, although other social factors such as the industrial revolution have also contributed to the "reification" of the human being.
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Sheridan also describes Advaitic Theism as a "both/and" solution for the questions of whether God is transcendent or immanent, and credits the Bhāgavata with a 'truly creative religious moment' for introducing this philosophy. The text suggests that God Vishnu and the soul (atman) in all beings is one in quality (nirguna). Bryant states that the monism in Bhagavata Purana is certainly built on Vedanta foundations, but not exactly the same as the monism of Adi Shankara. The Bhagavata asserts, according to Bryant, that the empirical and the spiritual universe are both metaphysical realities, and manifestations of the same Oneness, just like heat and light are "real but different" manifestations of sunlight.
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In 1950, Leonard W. Ferguson analyzed political values using ten scales measuring attitudes toward: birth control, capital punishment, censorship, communism, evolution, law, patriotism, theism, treatment of criminals and war. Submitting the results to factor analysis, he was able to identify three factors, which he named religionism, humanitarianism and nationalism. He defined religionism as belief in God and negative attitudes toward evolution and birth control; humanitarianism as being related to attitudes opposing war, capital punishment and harsh treatment of criminals; and nationalism as describing variation in opinions on censorship, law, patriotism and communism. This system was derived empirically, as rather than devising a political model on purely theoretical grounds and testing it, Ferguson's research was exploratory.
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A committed atheist, Goldman viewed religion as another instrument of control and domination. Her essay "The Philosophy of Atheism" quoted Bakunin at length on the subject and added: > Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven > and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, > meekness and contentment.... The philosophy of Atheism expresses the > expansion and growth of the human mind. The philosophy of theism, if we can > call it a philosophy, is static and fixed. In essays like "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism" and a speech entitled "The Failure of Christianity", Goldman made more than a few enemies among religious communities by attacking their moralistic attitudes and efforts to control human behavior.
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191 Gardner described his own belief as philosophical theism inspired by the works of philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. While eschewing systematic religious doctrine, he retained a belief in God, asserting that this belief cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by reason or science.Groth (1983) At the same time, he was skeptical of claims that any god has communicated with human beings through spoken or telepathic revelation or through miracles in the natural world.Martin Gardner: 1914-2010: Chris French mourns the passing of Martin Gardner, The Guardian, May 25, 2010 Gardner has been quoted as saying that he regarded parapsychology and other research into the paranormal as tantamount to "tempting God" and seeking "signs and wonders".
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Gandhi declared his allegiance to Advaita Vedānta, and was another popularizing force for its ideas. According to Nicholas Gier, this to Gandhi meant the unity of God and humans, that all beings have the same one soul and therefore equality, that atman exists and is same as everything in the universe, ahimsa (non-violence) is the very nature of this atman. Gandhi called himself advaitist many times, including his letters, but he believed that others have a right to a viewpoint different than his own because they come from a different background and perspective. According to Gier, Gandhi did not interpret maya as illusion, but accepted that "personal theism" leading to "impersonal monism" as two tiers of religiosity.
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Here – in Kaushitaki Upanishad and Chandogya Upanishad – the germs are to be found (of) two of the main ideas of classical Samkhya'.EH Johnston (1937), Early Samkhya: An Essay on its Historical Development according to the Texts, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume XV, pages 80-81 Chandradhar Sharma in 1960 affirmed that Samkhya in the beginning was based on the theistic absolute of Upanishads, but later on, under the influence of Jaina and Buddhist thought, it rejected theistic monism and was content with spiritualistic pluralism and atheistic realism. This also explains why some of the later Samkhya commentators, e.g. Vijnanabhiksu in the sixteenth century, tried to revive the earlier theism in Samkhya.
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Some work in recent epistemology of religion goes beyond debates over evidentialism, fideism, and reformed epistemology to consider contemporary issues deriving from new ideas about knowledge-how and practical skill; how practical factors can affect whether one could know whether theism is true; from formal epistemology's use of probability theory; or from social epistemology (particularly the epistemology of testimony, or the epistemology of disagreement).E.g. see . For example, an important topic in the epistemology of religion is that of religious disagreement, and the issue of what it means for intelligent individuals of the same epistemic parity to disagree about religious issues. Religious disagreement has been seen as possibly posing first-order or higher-order problems for religious belief.
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Wine strove to achieve philosophical consistency and stability by creating rituals and ceremonies that were purely non-theistic. Services were created for Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and other Jewish holidays and festivals, often with reinterpretation of the meaning of the holiday to bring it into conformity with secular humanistic philosophy. Humanistic Judaism was developed as a possible solution to the problem of retaining Jewish identity and continuity among non-religious. Recognizing that congregational religious life was thriving, Wine believed that secular Jews who had rejected theism would be attracted to an organization that provided all the same forms and activities as, for example, Reform temples, but which expressed a purely Secular Humanistic viewpoint.
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In 1849 appeared The Soul, her Sorrows and Aspirations, and in 1850, Phases of Faith, or Passages from the History of my Creed, the former a tender but searching analysis of the relations of the spirit of man with the Creator; the latter a religious autobiography detailing the author's passage from Calvinism to pure theism. It is on these two books that Professor Newman's celebrity will principally rest, as in them his intense earnestness has kept him free from the eccentricity which marred most of his other writings, excepting his contributions to mathematical research and oriental philology. Newman described himself as "anti-everything".I.G. Sieveking, "Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman", London, 1909, p.
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Both of these arguments are understood to be presenting two forms of the 'logical' problem of evil. They attempt to show that the assumed premises lead to a logical contradiction and therefore cannot all be correct. Most philosophical debate has focused on the suggestion that God would want to prevent all evils and therefore cannot coexist with any evils (premises 4 and 6), with defenders of theism (for example, St. Augustine and Leibniz) arguing that God could very well exist with and allow evil in order to achieve a greater good. If God lacks any one of these qualities—omniscience, omnipotence, or omnibenevolence—then the logical problem of evil can be resolved.
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Soul-making theodicy and Process theodicy are full theodical systems with distinctive cosmologies, theologies and perspectives on the problem of evil; cruciform theodicy is not a system but is a thematic trajectory within them. As a result, it does not address all the questions of "the origin, nature, problem, reason and end of evil," but it does represent an important change. "On July 16, 1944 awaiting execution in a Nazi prison and reflecting on Christ's experience of powerlessness and pain, Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned six words that became the clarion call for the modern theological paradigm shift: 'Only the suffering God can help." Classic theism includes "impassability" (God cannot suffer personally) as a necessary characteristic of God.
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In his development of the ontological argument, Leibniz attempted to demonstrate the coherence of a supremely perfect being. C. D. Broad countered that if two characteristics necessary for God's perfection are incompatible with a third, the notion of a supremely perfect being becomes incoherent. The ontological argument assumes the definition of God purported by classical theism: that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect. Kenneth Einar Himma claimed that omniscience and omnipotence may be incompatible: if God is omnipotent, then he should be able to create a being with free will; if he is omniscient, then he should know exactly what such a being will do (which may technically render them without free will).
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Instead, he suggested that religious experience can be either numinous or mystical. He was also influenced by R.C. Zaehner's interest in mysticism, having consulted him at Oxford. He then examined what he took as key religious concepts, such as revelation, faith, conversion and knowledge and analysed what these meant in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism without evaluating any belief in terms of truth or falsity. He was consciously attempting to break out of captivity to Western modes of thought so that for example theism is not taken as an essential component of religion, thus such ideas as theophany or a single ultimate focus or sacrifice do not necessarily translate from the Christian into other religious contexts.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling attempted to rescue theism from Kant's refutation of the proofs for God's existence. "Now the philosophy of Schelling from the first admitted the possibility of a knowledge of God, although it likewise started from the philosophy of Kant, which denies such knowledge." Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Section Three: "Recent German Philosophy," D. "Schelling" With regard to the experience of objects, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) claimed that the Fichte's "I" needs the Not-I, because there is no subject without object, and vice versa. So the ideas or mental images in the mind are identical to the extended objects which are external to the mind.
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But this indirect subsidy is not for the activities that are peculiarly religious in the sense of dogma or doctrine, but for the many other things all churches do... If the words "religious worship" are given a narrow, limited meaning, so as to require a belief in and adoration of a Supreme Being, then grave doubts would exist as to the constitutionality of the section... If the state cannot constitutionally subsidize religion under the First Amendment, then it cannot subsidize theism. If the state can constitutionally subsidize those functions of religious groups which are not related to "religion" in its narrow sense, then it must subsidize those nontheistic groups which perform the same functions.
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The difficulty in precisely defining the time and place of the "discovery" of oxygen, within the context of the developing chemical revolution, is one of Thomas Kuhn's central illustrations of the gradual nature of paradigm shifts in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. During his lifetime, Priestley's considerable scientific reputation rested on his invention of carbonated water, his writings on electricity, and his discovery of several "airs" (gases), the most famous being what Priestley dubbed "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen). However, Priestley's determination to defend phlogiston theory and to reject what would become the chemical revolution eventually left him isolated within the scientific community. Priestley's science was integral to his theology, and he consistently tried to fuse Enlightenment rationalism with Christian theism.
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Homer Dubs, "Theism and Naturalism in Ancient Chinese Philosophy," Philosophy of East and West, Vol 9, No 3/4, pp 163–172, University of Hawaii Press: 1960. In Mozi's Will of Heaven (天志), he writes: Mozi criticized the Confucians of his own time for not following the teachings of Confucius. By the time of the later Han Dynasty, however, under the influence of Xunzi, the Chinese concept of heaven and Confucianism itself had become mostly naturalistic, though some Confucians argued that Heaven was where ancestors reside. Worship of heaven in China continued with the erection of shrines, the last and greatest being the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, and the offering of prayers.
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A deity is typically conceptualized as a supernatural or divine concept, manifesting in ideas and knowledge, in a form that combines excellence in some or all aspects, wrestling with weakness and questions in other aspects, heroic in outlook and actions, yet tied up with emotions and desires. In other cases, the deity is a principle or reality such as the idea of "soul". The Upanishads of Hinduism, for example, characterize Atman (soul, self) as deva (deity), thereby asserting that the deva and eternal supreme principle (Brahman) is part of every living creature, that this soul is spiritual and divine, and that to realize self-knowledge is to know the supreme. Theism is the belief in the existence of one or more deities.
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The agnostic Analytic Philosopher Anthony Kenny rejected the presumption of atheism on any definition of atheism arguing that "the true default position is neither theism nor atheism, but agnosticism" adding "a claim to knowledge needs to be substantiated, ignorance need only be confessed". 160x160px Atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen criticized the presumption of atheism arguing that without an independent concept of rationality or a concept of rationality that atheists and theists can mutually accept, there is no common foundation on which to adjudicate rationality of positions concerning the existence of God. Because the atheist's conceptualization of "rational" differs from the theist, Nielsen argues, both positions can be rationally justified. Analytic philosopher and modal logician Alvin Plantinga, a theist, rejected the presumption of atheism forwarding a two-part argument.
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With additional reference to the works of Sir Martin Rees, Denis Noble, and others, McGrath advocates a modified version of NOMA which he terms "overlapping magisteria". He posits that science and religion co-exist as equally valid explanations for two partially overlapping spheres of existence, where the former concerns itself primarily with the temporal, and the latter concerns itself primarily with the spiritual, but where both can occasionally intertwine. McGrath confirms his position by noting that some prominent scientists are also theists (or at least sympathetic to theism, in Davies' case), pointing specifically to Owen Gingerich, Francis Collins, and Paul Davies as examples. McGrath criticizes Dawkins' portrayal of religion as both an evolutionary by-product and as a memetic virus.
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According to Teeuw, after the publication of Atheis Mihardja immediately became famous. Maier notes that the fame and warm reception to which Atheis was released was influenced not only by the novel's strengths, but also by Mihardja's personality and stature. These qualities were in-line with the nascent government's need to use literature, as the most developed of the new national culture, for nation- building; in 1969, Atheis received a literary award from the government of Indonesia. According to Mihardja, religious thinkers blasted the novel for depicting Hasan, whom they interpreted as representative of religion and religious people, as unable to overcome temptation; they also disliked the novel's lack of in-depth discussion of religion, necessary for a better understanding of theism.
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Phillip E. Johnson (June 18, 1940 – November 2, 2019)Died: Phillip E. Johnson, Lawyer who Put Darwin on Trial was a UC Berkeley law professor, opponent of evolutionary science, co-founder of the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement, author of the "Wedge strategy" and co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC) . He described himself as "in a sense the father of the intelligent design movement". He was a critic of Darwinism, which he described as "fully naturalistic evolution, involving chance mechanisms and natural selection". The wedge strategy aims to change public opinion and scientific consensus, and seeks to convince the scientific community to allow a role for theism, or causes beyond naturalistic explanation, in scientific discourse.
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The dilemma can be modified to apply to philosophical theism, where it is still the object of theological and philosophical discussion, largely within the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. As German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz presented this version of the dilemma: "It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and Goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things." Many philosophers and theologians have addressed the Euthyphro dilemma since the time of Plato, though not always with reference to the Platonic dialogue.
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In 2013, Vosper's beliefs moved from non-theism to atheism after she read about the plight of Pakistani bloggers who faced imprisonment and execution as blasphemers for questioning the existence of God. Although many inside and outside the wider church questioned how an avowed atheist could still be a minister, the United Church leadership still abstained from taking action. In 2015, following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, the United Church published a prayer for those who had been killed. In response, Vosper wrote an open letter to Gary Paterson, then moderator of the United Church, arguing that the use of religious language in the prayer, namely the belief in a supernatural God, only reinforced the beliefs that had motivated the killings.
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Secular theology digested modern movements like the Death of God Theology propagated by Thomas J. J. Altizer or the philosophical existentialism of Paul Tillich and eased the introduction of such ideas into the theological mainstream and made constructive evaluations, as well as contributions, to them. John Shelby Spong advocates a nuanced approach to scripture, as opposed to Biblical literalism, informed by scholarship and compassion which he argues can be consistent with both Christian tradition and a contemporary understanding of the universe. Secular theology holds that theism has lost credibility as a valid conception of God's nature. It rejects the concept of a personal God and embraces the status of Jesus Christ, Christology and Christian eschatology as Christian mythology without basis in historical events.
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Schlesinger wrote many books and articles in the areas of philosophy of religion, theism, the problem of evil, philosophy of science, philosophy of time, philosophy of logic, philosophy of physics, metaphysics, philosophy of probability, philosophy of language, and ethics. His books include Aspects of Time, Intelligibility of Nature, Metaphysics:Methods and Problems , New Perspectives on Old-Time Religion, Range of Epistemic Logic, Religion and the Scientific Method, The Sweep of Probability, and Timely Topics. Schlesinger also contributed towards books written by others, including Challenge: Torah Views on Science and Its Problems and Science in the Light of Torah. His articles appear in many well known Philosophical Journals, including The Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, Mind, Philosophical Studies, Religious Studies, and the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.
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Nature worship or naturismOxford English Dictionary is any of a variety of religious, spiritual and devotional practices that focus on the worship of the nature spirits considered to be behind the natural phenomena visible throughout nature.A Dictionary of Religion and Ethics edited by Shailer Mathews, Gerald Birney Smith, p 305 A nature deity can be in charge of nature, a place, a biotope, the biosphere, the cosmos, or the universe. Nature worship is often considered the primitive source of modern religious beliefs and can be found in theism, panentheism, pantheism, deism, polytheism, animism, totemism, shamanism, paganism and sarnaism. Common to most forms of nature worship is a spiritual focus on the individual's connection and influence on some aspects of the natural world and reverence towards it.
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In traditional Western theism, even though God cannot be created by any other force or being, he cannot be defined as causa sui because such would imply the Spinozian pantheistic idea of 'becoming', which contrasts with the belief of scholastic theology that God is incapable of changing. > The Catholic concept of...God as absolutely independent and self-existent by > nature, and, consequently, all-perfect without any possibility of change > from all eternity, is altogether opposed to the pantheistic concept of > absolute or pure being [that] evolves, determines, and realizes itself > through all time. Changing implies development, and since God is to be considered the Absolute Perfection, there is no further need to change: he is the so-called actus purus, or aseity. P. 413.. P. 384. .
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Situated in relationship to the fields of theology and religious studies, thealogy is a discourse that critically engages the beliefs, wisdom, practices, questions, and values of the Goddess community, both past and present. Similar to theology, thealogy grapples with questions of meaning, include reflecting on the nature of the divine, the relationship of humanity to the environment, the relationship between the spiritual and sexual self, and the nature of belief. However, in contrast to theology, which often focuses on an exclusively logical and empirical discourse, thealogy embraces a postmodern discourse of personal experience and complexity. The term suggests a feminist approach to theism and the context of God and gender within Paganism, Neopaganism, Goddess Spirituality and various nature-based religions.
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Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. . State propaganda initially used the appeal of scientific rationalism to argue that Falun Gong's worldview was in "complete opposition to science" and communism;Lu, Xing Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: the impact on Chinese thought, culture, and communication, University of South Carolina Press (2004). the People's Daily asserted on 27 July 1999, that it "was a struggle between theism and atheism, superstition and science, idealism and materialism." Other rhetoric appearing in the state-run press centered on charges that Falun Gong had misled followers and was dangerous to health. To make the propaganda more accessible to the masses, the government published comic books, some of which compared Falun Gong’s founder to Lin Biao and Adolf Hitler.
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Winter Park Public Library, 1902While deliberating and discussing details, the most crucial decision for the women was not how to get the necessary books, as they had been circulating books among themselves for some time, but where to base their new venture. The first site was the Lamson house at 503 Interlachen Avenue, and initially operating only on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Records for the year of 1887 gave some insight into what was being read that year, including The Scarlet Letter, The Last Days of Pompeii, Jane Eyre, Ivanhoe, and The Rise of Silas Lapham. Biographies were also popular, such as those on Frederick the Great, and religious titles, The Blood of Jesus, Thoughts on Personal Religion, and Scientific Theism.
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In the same essay, Marx states, "[m]an creates religion, religion does not create man". Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche, a prominent nineteenth century philosopher, is well known for coining the aphorism "God is dead" (German: "Gott ist tot"); incidentally the phrase was not spoken by Nietzsche directly, but was used as a dialogue for the characters in his works. Nietzsche argued that Christian theism as a belief system had been a moral foundation of the Western world, and that the rejection and collapse of this foundation as a result of modern thinking (the death of God) would naturally cause a rise in nihilism or the lack of values. While Nietzsche was staunchly atheistic, he was also concerned about the negative effects of nihilism on humanity.
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The Spartan Meritocracy makes minimal assumptions, that are subject to criticism and possible revision, when trying to explain the world - focusing more upon a proper method of inquiry than on reaching any particular or prejudicial conclusions. The Baroque Monarchy, however, relies upon elaborate dogmatic assumptions in the absence of any evidence — assumptions which are placed beyond question, critique or revision. Harbour spends little time directly comparing atheism and theism; rather, he compares these two opposing worldviews and argues that the Spartan Meritocracy is more plausible, more reasonable, and helps make the world a better place to live. Thus, anyone who cares about the truth should be inclined to adopt it rather than blind obedience to dogmatism as in the Baroque Monarchy.
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They also criticized Seiya for being an "underdog" in most battles. Chris Beveridge from AnimeOnDVD found that Seiya was overshadowed by his comrades in the anime's tenth DVD but still found the other characters made the DVD appealing. In a review of the series, writer Jason Thompson notes one of Seiya's early fights against the Black Saints ends with one of the most painful scene as Seiya's blood is contaminated and later his friend Shiryu has to heal him by removing all of his blood. Additionally, Thompson noted that Seiya's speech in the series' last arc regarding how he blames gods for humanity's problems, to the point of being noted as "atheism or anti-theism" comparing him with the 2010 film Clash of the Titans.
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McFague's panentheistic theology stressed God as highly involved in the world (though distinct from it), and concerned (as seen in the life of the paradigmatic Jesus, for example) to see all of it brought to full enjoyment of the richness of life as originally intended in creation. This is not the omnipotent, omniscient and immutable God of classical theism and neo-orthodoxy: for McFague, God is not transcendent in any sense that we can know. This has led some critics to ask whether McFague's theology leaves us with anything that may properly be called God at all. British theologian Daphne Hampson notes ‘the more I ponder this book [Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age], the less clear I am that it is theistic’.
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The society formed the nucleus of the distinguished list of contributors who supported Knowles in his capacity as an editor. In 1870 he succeeded Dean Alford as editor of the Contemporary Review, but left it in 1877 owing to the objection of the proprietors to the insertion of articles (by W. K. Clifford notably) attacking Theism and founded the Nineteenth Century (to the title of which, in 1901, were added the words And After). Both periodicals became very influential under him, and formed the type of the new sort of monthly review which came to occupy the place formerly held by the quarterlies. For example, it was prominent in checking the Channel Tunnel project, by publishing a protest signed by many distinguished men in 1882.
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An Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of the Will which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame or simply The Freedom of the Will, is a work by Christian reformer, theologian, and author Jonathan Edwards which uses the text of Romans 9:16 as its basis. It was first published in 1754 and examines the nature and the status of humanity's will. The book takes the classic Calvinist viewpoint on total depravity of the will and the need of humanity for God's grace in salvation. Although written long before the modern introduction and debate over Open Theism, Edwards' work addresses many of the concerns that have been raised today over this view.
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Criticism of atheism is criticism of the concepts, validity, or impact of atheism, including associated political and social implications. Criticisms include positions based on the history of science, philosophical and logical criticisms, findings in the natural sciences, theistic apologetic arguments, arguments pertaining to ethics and morality, the effects of atheism on the individual, or the assumptions that underpin atheism. Various contemporary agnostics like Carl Sagan and theists such as Dinesh D'Souza have criticised atheism for being an unscientific position. Analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, argues that a failure of theistic arguments might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism; and points to the observation of an apparently "fine-tuned universe" as more likely to be explained by theism than atheism.
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A member of the Orthodox Church, he is noted as one of the foremost Christian apologists, arguing in his many articles and books that faith in Christianity is rational and coherent in a rigorous philosophical sense. William Hasker writes that his "tetralogy on Christian doctrine, together with his earlier trilogy on the philosophy of theism, is one of the most important apologetic projects of recent times." While Swinburne presents many arguments to advance the belief that God exists, he argues that God is a being whose existence is not logically necessary (see modal logic), but metaphysically necessary in a way he defines in his The Christian God. Other subjects on which Swinburne writes include personal identity (in which he espouses a view based on the concept of a soul), and epistemic justification.
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To express his true feelings on the subject of irreducible complexity, McGrath instead cites the work of Richard Swinburne, remarking that the capacity of science to explain itself requires its own explanation – and that the most economical and reliable account of this explanatory capacity lies in the notion of the monotheistic God of Christianity. When considering the subject of Aquinas' Quinque viae, to which Dawkins devotes considerable attention, McGrath interprets the theologian's arguments as an affirmation of a set of internally consistent beliefs rather than as an attempt to formulate a set of irrefutable proofs. McGrath proceeds to address whether religion specifically conflicts with science. He points to Stephen Jay Gould's supposition of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) as evidence that Darwinism is as compatible with theism as it is with atheism.
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The Vaishnava Padavali () movement refers to a period in medieval Bengali literature from the 15th to 17th centuries, marked by an efflorescence of Vaishnava poetry often focusing on the Radha-Krishna legend. The term padavali (also written padaabali) has the literal meaning "gathering of songs" (pada=short verse, lyric; +vali = plural; collection). The padavali poetry reflects an earthy view of divine love which had its roots in the Agam poetry of Tamil Sangam literature (600 BC–300 AD) and spread into early medieval Telugu (Nannaya, Annamayya) and Kannada literatures (Dasa sahitya). The poetic themes spread rapidly as part of the religious Bhakti movement that proposed an intensely personal form of devotion, following the philosophy of Ramanuja and opposing caste distinctions and other brahministic measures implicit in the theism of Adi Shankaracharya.
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At the close of his service in New York, he spent the following two years, 1922-24, preaching in 23 missions across the U.S. and Canada. During the 1920s, he led and participated in numerous theological discussions, disagreements and controversies regarding theism and the encroachment of humanism, which he opposed. From 1924 to 1928 he served as pastor in Missouri at St. Louis' Church of the Messiah, taught at Meadville Theological School and traveled as a lecturer. William Laurence Sullivan married Frances Estelle Throckmorton in 1913, the daughter of Hugh William Throckmorton and Rebecca Ellen Upton, and the granddaughter of U.S. Representative Charles Horace Upton (R-VA), all of Washington, DC. The marriage lasted twenty-two years, until his death, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, six weeks prior to his 63rd birthday.
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In an autobiographical chapter in Flynn's 1993 The Trouble with Christmas, Flynn stated that he was born in 1955 in Erie, Pennsylvania, the only child of a moderately conservative Catholic family. He believed zealously in the teachings of the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, beginning to question its teachings only after many church doctrines and practices were revised in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which affected parish life when Flynn was a young adolescent. He earned his bachelor's degree at Xavier University, the Jesuit university in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the school's emphasis on philosophy and theology gave him the tools he needed to pursue his religious questions at a more serious level. Over several years of inquiry he rejected his Catholicism, then his Christianity, and ultimately his theism.
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A statue of Siddartha Gautama preaching. Since the arrival of Christian missionaries in India in the 10th century, followed by the arrival of Buddhism in Western Europe in the 4th and 5th centuries, similarities were perceived between the practices of Buddhism and Christianity.Macmillan Encyclopedia of Buddhism, 2004, page 160 During the 20th century the differences between these two belief systems were also highlighted. Despite surface level non-scholarly analogies, Buddhism and Christianity have inherent and fundamental differences at the deepest levels, beginning with monotheism's place at the core of Christianity and Buddhism's orientation towards non-theism and its rejection of the notion of a creator deity which runs counter to teachings about God in Christianity; and extending to the importance of Grace in Christianity against the rejection of interference with Karma in Theravada Buddhism, etc.
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In animistic religion, animals, plants, and other entities may be persons or deities. In China's religious philosophy of Taoism, the Tao is a path of life and a divine field; not exhibiting personhood of itself, but "if well-nourished", is supposedly beneficial towards persons and the components of personhood. These sorts of indirect relationships between various religious notions and personhood are often not well-examined philosophically; for example, many generally non-religious Japanese people maintain a degree of Shinto spirituality (thus avoiding fully declared non- spirituality) because the kami are not as central to the Shinto religion as a monotheistic Creator God, thus having an indirect impact on the formation of a mortal individual's personality. The non-centrality of the kami allow an individual to take an ambivalent stance towards atheism or theism and deism.
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Early Nyaya school scholars considered the hypothesis of Ishvara as a creator God with the power to grant blessings, boons and fruits. However, the early Nyaya scholars rejected this hypothesis, though not the existence of God itself, and were non-theistic.John Clayton (2010), Religions, Reasons and Gods: Essays in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Religion, Cambridge University Press, , page 150G. Oberhammer (1965), Zum problem des Gottesbeweises in der Indischen Philosophie, Numen, 12: 1-34 Over time, the Nyaya school became one of the most important defenders of theism in Hindu philosophy.Francis X. Clooney (2010), Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries, Oxford University Press, , pages 18–19, 35–39 In Nyayasutra's Book 4, Chapter 1 examines what causes production and destruction of entities (life, matter) in universe.
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The generic range of these early works (poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, translation), as well as their subject matter and themes (female autonomy and agency, anti-theism, aestheticism, the relationship of literary and political radicalism), indicates the aesthetic principles and themes that would characterize the remainder of Blind's career, while emphasizing the cosmopolitan nature of her sensibility and outlook. Despite her diverse literary interests, Blind remained devoted to poetry, as is evident in an 1869 letter to Richard Garnett: "My only real intense life has been for a long time in writing, and when I cannot swim and float about in the enchanted waters of poetry I am like a fish out of water. I gasp and pant for want of the proper element to breathe in."Mathilde Blind ALS to Richard Garnett, 2 July 1869, Blind Correspondence, British Library, Add.
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While the early Nyaya scholars published little to no analysis on whether supernatural power or God exists, they did apply their insights into reason and reliable means to knowledge to the questions of nature of existence, spirituality, happiness and moksha. Later Nyaya scholars, such as Udayana, examined various arguments on theism and attempted to prove existence of God. Other Nyaya scholars offered arguments to disprove the existence of God.G Jha (1919), Original atheism of the Nyaya, in Indian Thought - Proceedings and Transactions of the First Oriental Congress, Vol ii, pages 281-285Dale Riepe (1979), Indian Philosophy Since Independence, Volume 1, BR Grüner Netherlands, , page 38 The most important contribution made by the Nyaya school to Hindu thought has been its treatises on epistemology and system of logic that, subsequently, has been adopted by the majority of the other Indian schools.
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Ietsism ( () - "somethingism") is an unspecified belief in an undetermined transcendent reality. It is a Dutch term for a range of beliefs held by people who, on the one hand, inwardly suspect - or indeed believe - that "there must be something undefined beyond the mundane and that which can be known or can be proven", but on the other hand do not necessarily accept or subscribe to the established belief system, dogma or view of the nature of a deity offered by any particular religion. Some related terms in English are agnostic theism (though many ietsists do not believe in one or more gods and are thus agnostic atheists), eclecticism, deism and spiritual but not religious. Ietsists might call themselves Christian or followers of another religion based on cultural identification with that religion, without believing in the dogmas of that particular religion.
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This is properly called Isness; students of the Ascended Master Teachings believe that there is One God, the "Universal All- Pervading Presence of Life", "The One", Who is the Source of all Love, Light, and Truth in existence, and that all forms of existence and consciousness emanate from this "Allness of God"—"The One". The Voice of the I AM states "All Life is One" The Voice of the I AM. Saint Germain Press December 1940 page 32 and that there is "One Substance, One Energy, One Power, One Intelligence" as the Source of all consciousness and creation.The Voice of the I AM, Saint Germain Press, July 1942, p. 7. This Divine Being and Mind is considered to be above and distinct from all creation (in the sense of classical theism), transcending all creation yet interpenetrating all existence.
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His written works included his thesis for his Ph.D. degree in metaphysics: "Theism the Result of Completed Investigation", a genealogy of "The Loomis Family in America", and "The Genealogy of Jacob Oberholtzer and His Descendants"'. He also wrote "The Teaching of Mathematics in High Schools", and "Original Investigation Or How to Attack an Exercise in Geometry". Possibly his best-known work however, is "The Pythagorean Theorem", in which he collected, classified, and discussed 344 proofs. The book is still a work of reference.Loomis, Elisha Scott, The Pythagorean Proposition: Its Demonstration Analyzed and Classified and Bibliography of Sources for Data of the Four Kinds of ‘Proofs’, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics,Washington, DC, 1968 Also he prepared in manuscript, ready for publication, books and articles estimated to number over one hundred, but it is not clear how many of them ever were printed.
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Humanist Manifesto II, written in 1973 by humanists Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson, was an update to the previous Humanist Manifesto (1933), and the second entry in the Humanist Manifesto series. It begins with a statement that the excesses of National Socialism and world war had made the first seem too optimistic, and indicated a more hardheaded and realistic approach in its seventeen-point statement, which was much longer and more elaborate than the previous version. Nevertheless, much of the optimism of the first remained, expressing hope that war and poverty would be eliminated. In addition to its absolute rejection of theism and deism, various political stances are supported, such as opposition to racism, opposition to weapons of mass destruction, support of human rights, a proposition of an international court, and the right to unrestricted abortion and contraception.
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Christ and Buddha by Paul Ranson, 1880 Analogies have been drawn between Buddhism and Christianity and Buddhism may have influenced early Christianity. Buddhist missionaries were sent by Emperor Ashoka of India to Syria, Egypt and Greece beginning in 250 BCE and may have helped prepare for the ethics of Christ. Others have noted the significant differences between the two religions beginning with monotheism's place at the core of Christianity, and Buddhism's orientation towards non-theism (the lack of relevancy of the existence of a creator deity) which runs counter to teachings about God in Christianity; and extending to the importance of grace in Christianity against the rejection of interference with karma in Theravada Buddhism, etc. Some early Christians were aware of Buddhism which was practiced in both the Greek and Roman Empires in the pre-Christian period.
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A common misconception is that theism is ancient while atheism is modern, but mankind has been making arguments for and against the existence of deities—including, with the rise of monotheism, God—since the dawn of human history. Bronze Age texts such as the Vedas present various arguments against the deities, such as the problem of evil and the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit, as well as arguments for the deities, such as argument from morality and Pascal's wager. From the ancient Greeks to the medieval Japanese people to the Native Americans, the arguments for and against deities are as old as the idea of a deity itself. Some atheists and theists see the antiquity of their beliefs as a worthy tradition to carry on, while others believe arguing about the existence of a God is a never-ending cycle that produces little fulfillment.
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Blanshard's fullest published reply appears in his book Reason and Analysis. Sympathetic to theism but skeptical of traditional religious and theological dogma, he did not regard his Absolute as having the characteristics of a personal God but nevertheless maintained that it was a proper subject of (rational) religious inquiry and even devotion. Defining "religion" as the dedication of one's whole person to whatever one regards as true and important, he took as his own religion the service of reason in a very full and all-encompassing metaphysical sense, defending what he called the "rational temper" as a human ideal (though one exceedingly difficult to achieve in practice). His admiration for this temper extended his philosophical loyalties across "party lines", especially to the one philosopher he regarded as exemplifying that temper to the greatest degree: Henry Sidgwick.
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He suggests that talk about divine action provides a necessary starting point for theological reflection, and argues that the only reasonable way to think about divine action, in turn, is to begin by considering the constraints on credible talk about divine providence imposed by the reality of suffering and evil.For the latter point, see Analogy 39. Reviewing a range of options in theodicy, he concludes that, while their underlying assumptions (and accounts of creation) are different, classical free will theism and process theology lead to very similar predictions regarding what kinds of divine action are to be expected, and that, in connection with the task of constructive theology, there is therefore no need to choose between them,Analogy 39–49. though the differences continue to matter with respect to questions in the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology.
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When he does directly address questions related to theodicy, he implies that process philosophy offers a more satisfactory theodicy than any alternative approach to theism, but he argues that even the process approach has significant difficulty taking proper account of the reality of animal suffering."Non-Human Animals and Process Theodicy," Religious Studies 42.1 (2006): 3–26. He maintains that Christian attempts to use the Incarnation as a component of theodicy are rendered problematic by the need to articulate belief in incarnational Christology using a robust account of divine action, which seems likely itself to make it harder to resolve the problem of evil (if God is in the business of working miracles, as such a robust view implies, why aren't there more of them?).See "The Incarnation and the Problem of Evil," Heythrop Journal 49 (2008): 110–27.
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As well as Judaism providing an immanent relationship with God (personal theism), in Kabbalah the spiritual and physical creation is a paradoxical manifestation of the immanent aspects of God's Being (panentheism), related to the Shekhinah (Divine feminine). Jewish observance unites the sephirot (Divine attributes) on high, restoring harmony to creation. In Lurianic Kabbalah, the meaning of life is the messianic rectification of the shattered sparks of God's persona, exiled in physical existence (the Kelipot shells), through the actions of Jewish observance.Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction, Joseph Dan, Oxford University Press, chapter "Early modern era: Safed spirituality" Through this, in Hasidic Judaism the ultimate essential "desire" of God is the revelation of the Omnipresent Divine essence through materiality, achieved by a man from within his limited physical realm when the body will give life to the soul.
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The word de-us is the root of deity, and thereby of deism, pandeism, and polydeism, all of which are theories in which any divine figure is absent from intervening in human affairs. This curious circumstance originates from the use of the word "deism" in the 17th and 18th centuries as a contrast to the prevailing "theism", belief in an actively intervening God: Followers of these theories, and occasionally followers of pantheism, may sometimes refer to God as "Deus" or "the Deus" to make clear that the entity being discussed is not a theistic "God". Arthur C. Clarke picks up this usage in his novel 3001: The Final Odyssey. William Blake said of the Deists that they worship "the Deus of the Heathen, The God of This World, & the Goddess Nature, Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Druid Dragon & hidden Harlot".
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He moved to the House with his wife Amy Whadcoat, which they later purchased off of Maude Muff. In 1924, Sherwell sold Red House to Walter Scott Godfrey (1855-1936), the director of a wine and spirits merchant and an author on anti-theism who had been widowed two years previously. Of all the property's residents, he would live there for the shortest time, although carried out one of the largest alterations, by removing the dividing wall between the downstairs waiting room and bedroom to create a study-cum-library and inserted a porthole window between this library and the Pilgrims' Rest, which was designed by his son, the architect Walter Hindes Godfrey. He lived at the house with his youngest daughter and three domestic servants, however felt lonely at the Red House and found its upkeep too expensive.
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Process theology is a type of theology developed from Alfred North Whitehead's (1861–1947) process philosophy, most notably by Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) and John B. Cobb (b. 1925). Process theology and process philosophy are collectively referred to as "process thought". For both Whitehead and Hartshorne, it is an essential attribute of God to affect and be affected by temporal processes, contrary to the forms of theism that hold God to be in all respects non-temporal (eternal), unchanging (immutable), and unaffected by the world (impassible). Process theology does not deny that God is in some respects eternal (will never die), immutable (in the sense that God is unchangingly good), and impassible (in the sense that God's eternal aspect is unaffected by actuality), but it contradicts the classical view by insisting that God is in some respects temporal, mutable, and passible.
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However, he expressed concern that some items for some of the domains of the BMMRS might be "contaminated": "Among its spirituality subscales are meaning, values, and forgiveness subscales [containing] items such as... 'Knowing that I am a part of something greater than myself gives meaning to my life'... [and] 'It is easy for me to admit that I am wrong,' ... these positive traits could very well be the outcome or the results of spirituality. However, should they be part of the definition itself?... completely secular persons and atheists may experience these things as frequently or more frequently than so called 'spiritual persons" (p. 352). Others have empirically tested this issue for the BMMRSs Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale finding that it is composed of two factors - theism and civility — with many people who eschew religion and spirituality scoring highly on civility.
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J. J. C. Smart argues that the distinction between atheism and agnosticism is unclear, and many people who have passionately described themselves as agnostics were in fact atheists. He writes that this mischaracterization is based on an unreasonable philosophical skepticism that would not allow us to make any claims to knowledge about the world. He proposes instead the following analysis: > Let us consider the appropriateness or otherwise of someone (call him > 'Philo') describing himself as a theist, atheist or agnostic. I would > suggest that if Philo estimates the various plausibilities to be such that > on the evidence before him the probability of theism comes out near to one > he should describe himself as a theist and if it comes out near zero he > should call himself an atheist, and if it comes out somewhere in the middle > he should call himself an agnostic.
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His books Kriya Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Siddhas, and The Wisdom of Jesus and the Yoga Siddhas have demonstrated the parallel wisdom teachings of Patañjali, Tirumular, the Tamil Yoga Siddhas, and Jesus. Since the year 2000, he has sponsored and directed a team of six scholars in the Yoga Siddha Research Project in Tamil Nadu, whose objectives include the preservation, transcription, translation, writing of commentaries and publication of the literary works of the 18 Tamil Yoga Siddhas, from ancient palm leaf manuscripts. Until now, these important works of Yoga, Tantra, monistic theism, and Siddha philosophy have been unknown to the English speaking world. The latest of seven publications that have been produced from this project is the first English translation with commentary of the Tirumandiram, which is one of the world's most important sacred texts related to Yoga.
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He claims that the statement "the only reasonable beliefs are those that can be confirmed by the methods of science, by public observation, measurement and experiment" is self-refuting. He contrasts four worldviews—Common Sense, Materialism, Idealism and Christian Theism—and suggests that there are serious problems with Common Sense (science shows that things are often not in fact as they seem at all) and Materialism ("quantum physics seems to dissolve matter entirely", and "consciousness and the contents of consciousness resist translation into purely physical terms... and if ... truth, beauty and goodness ... are things that really exist ... then Materialism will not match our experience at all"). He suggests that "many attacks on religion are based on the belief that idealism is false. There is no spiritual dimension to reality... to make matters worse, thinkers like Richard Dawkins hold that...religious views are based on 'blind faith'".
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Fretheim has published numerous books. More recent titles include: The Pentateuch (Abingdon, 1996); Proclamation 6 (Fortress, 1997); The Bible as Word of God in a Postmodern Era (Fortress, 1998; with K. Froehlich); First and Second Kings (Westminster, 1999); About the Bible: Short Answers to Big Questions (Augsburg, 1999); In God's Image: A Study of Genesis (Augsburg, 1999); A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (Abingdon, 1999), with B. Birch, W. Brueggemann, and D. Petersen; and Jeremiah: A Commentary (Smyth & Helwys, 2002). God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Abingdon, 2005); Hope in God in Times of Suffering (with Faith Fretheim) (Augsburg/Fortress, 2006); Abraham: Journeys of Family and Faith (University of South Carolina Press, 2007). His 1984 book, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective is an exegetical approach to many of the themes and issues associated with process theology and open theism.
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The second volume, The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism, offers various different arguments for religious skepticism that are intended to prepare the reader for the third book – The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion.Schellenberg 2007b, p. 311; Schellenberg 2009, xi. In the third book, Schellenberg argues for a religious orientation grounded not in belief, but in the sort of imaginative faith detailed in the first volume. Instead of focusing on theism, or any other specific idea from today’s religions, this sort of religion, which Schellenberg calls ‘skeptical religion’, is focused on a proposition to which he gives the name ‘ultimism’. Ultimism, as he defines it, is more general than other religious ‘isms’ – it is the proposition that something is ultimate in the nature of things, ultimately valuable, and the source of our ultimate good, but the details of that something it leaves open.
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John Polkinghorne suggests that the nearest analogy to the existence of God in physics is the ideas of quantum mechanics which are seemingly paradoxical but make sense of a great deal of disparate data. Alvin Plantinga compares the question of the existence of God to the question of the existence of other minds, claiming both are notoriously impossible to "prove" against a determined skeptic.see his God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God Cornell (1990) and Warranted Christian Belief OUP (2000) One approach, suggested by writers such as Stephen D. Unwin, is to treat (particular versions of) theism and naturalism as though they were two hypotheses in the Bayesian sense, to list certain data (or alleged data), about the world, and to suggest that the likelihoods of these data are significantly higher under one hypothesis than the other.See e.g.
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He holds that much of Judaism (and other religions) have not successfully created a theology which allows for the role of God in the world and yet is also fully compatible with modern-day evolutionary theory. Troster maintains that the solution to resolving the tension between classical theology and modern science can be found in process theology, such as in the writings of Hans Jonas, whose view of an evolving God within process philosophy contains no inherent contradictions between theism and scientific naturalism. :Lecture God after Darwin: Evolution and the Order of Creation October 21, 2004, Lishmah, New York City, Larry Troster In a paper on Judaism and environmentalism, Troster writes: :Jonas is the only Jewish philosopher who has fully integrated philosophy, science, theology and environmental ethics. He maintained that humans have a special place in Creation, manifest in the concept that humans are created in the image of God.
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" Conversely, other commentators concluded that the film promotes theism or panentheism rather than pantheism, arguing that the hero "does not pray to a tree, but through a tree to the deity whom he addresses personally" and, unlike in pantheism, "the film's deity does indeed—contrary to the native wisdom of the Na'vi—interfere in human affairs." Ann Marlowe of Forbes agreed, saying that "though Avatar has been charged with "pantheism", its mythos is just as deeply Christian." Another author suggested that the film's message "leads to a renewed reverence for the natural world—a very Christian teaching." Saritha Prabhu, an Indian-born columnist for The Tennessean, saw the film as a misportrayal of pantheism: "What pantheism is, at least, to me: a silent, spiritual awe when looking (as Einstein said) at the 'beauty and sublimity of the universe', and seeing the divine manifested in different aspects of nature.
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Taylor makes a distinction between dark green religious phenomena (which emanate from a belief that nature is sacred), and the relatively recent "greening" of certain sectors of established religious traditions (which see eco-friendly activities as a religious obligation). Many of the central figures and seminal texts of dark green religion, as curated by Taylor, express a strong condemnation of Abrahamic theism, which, dark green religionists allege, as Lynn Townsend White, Jr. did in a famous Science essayWhite, Lynn Townsend Jr. "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" , Science, Washington, D.C., 10 March 1968. in 1968, is deeply linked to an anthropocentric worldview that sees human beings as above nature and divinely endowed with the right to dominion over the biosphere. Those aligned in the dark green religion camp have alleged that this cosmogony has played a major role in the desecration and exploitation of the natural world.
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Because of flexibility in the term god, it is possible that a person could be a positive/strong atheist in terms of certain conceptions of God, while remaining a negative/weak atheist in terms of others. For example, the God of classical theism is often considered to be a personal supreme being who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent, caring about humans and human affairs. One might be a positive atheist for such a deity, while being a negative atheist with respect to a deistic conception of God by rejecting belief in such a deity but not explicitly asserting it to be false. Positive and negative atheism are frequently used by the philosopher George H. Smith as synonyms of the less-well-known categories of implicit and explicit atheism, also relating to whether an individual holds a specific view that gods do not exist.
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He argued that the idea of human free will is no defence for those who wish to believe in an omnicompetent being in the face of evil and suffering, as such a being could have given us both free will and moral perfection, thus resulting in us choosing the good in every situation. In 1955 he published "Evil and Omnipotence", which summarized his view that belief in the existence of evil and an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good god is "positively irrational". Mackie's views on this so-called logical problem of evil prompted Alvin Plantinga to respond with his version of the free will defense, to which Mackie later responded in his The Miracle of Theism. In metaphysics, Mackie made significant contributions relating to the nature of causal relationships, especially conditional statements describing them (see, for example, Mackie 1974) and the notion of an INUS condition.
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Scholars have also expressed varying views whether Shvetashvatara Upanishad is a monotheistic, pantheistic or monistic text.A Kunst, Some notes on the interpretation of the Ṥvetāṥvatara Upaniṣad, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 31, Issue 02, June 1968, pages 309-314; Doris SrinivasanD Srinivasan (1997), Many Heads, Arms, and Eyes, Brill, , pages 96-97 and Chapter 9 states that the Upanishad is a treatise on theism, but it creatively embeds a variety of divine images, an inclusive language that allows "three Vedic definitions for personal deity". The Upanishad includes verses wherein God can be identified with the Supreme (Brahman-Atman, Self, Soul) in Vedanta monistic theosophy, verses that support dualistic view of Samkhya doctrines, as well as the synthetic novelty of triple Brahman where a triune exists as the divine soul (Deva, theistic God), individual soul (self) and nature (Prakrti, matter).
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Sobel, J.H. Logic and Theism. Cambridge University Press (2004) pp. 436–37 The dissenters state that while explaining infectious diseases, cancer, hurricanes and other nature-caused suffering as something that is caused by the free will of supernatural beings solves the logical version of the problem of evil, it is highly unlikely that these natural evils do not have natural causes that an omnipotent God could prevent, but instead are caused by the immoral actions of supernatural beings with free will whom God created. According to Michael Tooley, this defense is also highly implausible because suffering from natural evil is localized, rational causes and cures for major diseases have been found, and it is unclear why anyone, including a supernatural being whom God created would choose to inflict localized evil and suffering to innocent children for example, and why God fails to stop such suffering if he is omnipotent.
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Students of the Ascended Master Teachings believe that there is One God, the "Universal All-Pervading Presence of Life", "The One", Who is the Source of all Life, Light, and Love in existence, and that all forms of existence and consciousness emanate from this "Allness of God" - "The One". The Voice of the I AM states "All Life is One" The Voice of the I AM. Saint Germain Press December 1940 page 32 and that there is "One Substance, One Energy, One Power, One Intelligence" as the Source of all consciousness and creation.The Voice of the I AM. Saint Germain Press July 1942 page 7 This Divine Being and Mind is considered to be above and distinct from all creation (in the sense of classical theism), transcending all creation yet interpenetrating all existence. Belief in this "One God" stresses the essential unity of the spiritual and material components of the universe.
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Among the few who did record the impact of Darwin's writings, the naturalist Joseph LeConte struggled with "distress and doubt" following the death of his daughter in 1861, before enthusiastically saying in the late 1870s there was "not a single philosophical question connected with our highest and dearest religious and spiritual interests that is fundamentally affected, or even put in any new light, by the theory of evolution", and in the late 1880s embracing the view that "evolution is entirely consistent with a rational theism". Similarly, George Frederick Wright (1838-1921) responded to Darwin's Origin of Species and Charles Lyell's 1863 Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man 1 vol. 1st edition, Feb. 1863 (John Murray, London) by turning to Asa Gray's belief that God had set the rules at the start and only intervened on rare occasions, as a way to harmonise evolution with theology.
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On his blog, as part of his "why they don't believe" series ("why they reject Christianity and/or theism"), Christian apologist and theologian Randal Rauser invited an anonymous blogger who calls himself Counter Apologist to explain his counter-apologetics, and Rauser provided his own counter-arguments. The New Testament is well understood to contain apologetics, but counter-apologetics also appears in Christian theology. Theologian John Milbank has written in a 2012 work that Christianity "makes room for" counter-apologetics by not being a Gnostic system of thought, and notes the "authentic Christian fusion of apologetic and counter-apologetic" as it stands in opposition to the anti-materialist nihilism of Browning's Caliban. Likewise, Biblical scholar and theologian Loveday Alexander has written that analysis of the Bible's books Luke and Acts by two other authors shows they contain counter-apologetic features perhaps to convey a pro-Roman perspective to the reader.
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Evolutionary biologist Kenneth R. Miller has argued that when scientists make claims on science and theism or atheism, they are not arguing scientifically at all and are stepping beyond the scope of science into discourses of meaning and purpose. What he finds particularly odd and unjustified is in how atheists often come to invoke scientific authority on their non-scientific philosophical conclusions like there being no point or no meaning to the universe as the only viable option when the scientific method and science never have had any way of addressing questions of meaning or lack of meaning, or the existence or non-existence of God in the first place. Atheists do the same thing theists do on issues not pertaining to science like questions on God and meaning. Theologian scientist Alister McGrath points out that atheists have misused biology in terms of both evolution as "Darwinism" and Darwin himself, in their "atheist apologetics" in order to propagate and defend their worldviews.
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He notes that in atheist writings there is often an implicit appeal to an outdated "conflict" model of science and religion which has been discredited by historical scholarship, there is a tendency to go beyond science to make non-scientific claims like lack of purpose and characterizing Darwin as if he was an atheist and his ideas as promoting atheism. McGrath notes that Darwin never called himself an atheist nor did he and other early advocates of evolution see his ideas as propagating atheism and that numerous contributors to evolutionary biology were Christians. Oxford Professor of Mathematics John Lennox has written that the issues one hears about science and religion have nothing to do with science, but are merely about theism and atheism because top level scientists abound on both sides. Furthermore, he criticizes atheists who argue from scientism because sometimes it results in dismissals of things like philosophy based on ignorance of what philosophy entails and the limits of science.
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From their first meeting 1876 until Naden's death in 1889, Lewins and Naden had a close intellectual friendship. In the early years Lewins encouraged Naden to study German and the natural sciences. The development of their intellectual relationship can be partially traced in the letters Lewins wrote to Naden between November 1878 and February 1880, which were edited and published in 1887, with a preface by Naden, as Humanism versus Theism. The went on to work together as peers on their atheist philosophy, Hylo-Idealism, which endeavoured to use scientific knowledge to show that the universe is best explained through a synthesis of materialism and (non-spiritual) idealism. Marion Thain has described how 'what appealed to Naden, came in key part from his poetic ability to elevate monistic theories of life through his rhetoric [... Naden] shares Lewins’ desire to imbue her monism with the same sense of wonder and power which people have traditionally found in religion.
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Scottish anthropologist Andrew Lang concluded in 1898 that the idea of the Supreme Being, the "high God" or "All Father" existed among some of the simplest of contemporary tribes prior to Western contact, and that Urmonotheism (primitive monotheism or henotheism) that worshipped God, as opposed to a pantheon of polytheistic gods, was the original religion of mankind. Urmonotheism was then defended by Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), in his Der Ursprung der Gottesidee appearing from 1912, opposing the "Revolutionary Monotheism" approach that traces the emergence of monotheistic thought as a gradual process spanning the Bronze and Iron Age Religions of the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity. Alleged traces of primitive monotheism were located in the Assyrian deities Ashur and Marduk, and Hebrew YHWH. Monotheism in Schmidt's view is the "natural" form of theism, which was later overlaid and "degraded" by polytheism after deceased ancestors' veneration became worship, and personified natural forces became worshipped as well as gods.
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On the latter book Josiah Royce wrote an article so scathing that Abbot took it as an unfair attempt to destroy his reputation, and eventually responded publicly with Mr. Royce's Libel (1891 October) in which he sought redress from Royce's employer Harvard University. The debate moved to the pages of The Nation, where Charles Sanders Peirce took Abbot's side; William James and Joseph Bangs Warner, less so. In his 1903 obituary of Abbot, Peirce praised Abbot's philosophical work and love of truth, and wrote that, in the introduction to Scientific Theism (wherein Abbot criticized nominalism and traced it through Kant among others), Abbot "put his finger unerringly [...] upon the one great blunder of all modern philosophy." (For the full texts of the public controversy and the obituary, see "External links" below.) Abbot committed suicide in 1903 by taking sleeping pills at his wife's gravesite in Central Cemetery, Beverly, Massachusetts, on the 10th anniversary of her death.
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Michael Newdow speaks at the Atheist Alliance International Convention. Members of secular groups are very likely to be atheists, but also more willing to hold unpopular views and explore new ideas thoroughly. A study on global religiosity, secularity, and well-being notes that it is unlikely that most atheists and agnostics base their decision to not believe in the gods on a careful, rational analysis of philosophical and scientific arguments since science testing scores in societies where atheism or theism is widespread, are just as poor and such societies have widespread supernatural beliefs besides gods. Reviewing psychological studies on atheists, Miguel Farias noted that studies concluding that analytical thinking leads to lower religious belief "do not imply that that atheists are more conscious or reflective of their own beliefs, or that atheism is the outcome of a conscious refutation of previously held religious beliefs" since they too have variant beliefs such as in conspiracy theories of the naturalistic variety.
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This is arguably unexpected on the hypothesis that the universe was designed by a god, especially a personal god. Carrier contends that such a god could have easily created a geocentric universe ex nihilo in the recent past, in which most of the volume of the universe is inhabitable by humans and other lifeforms— precisely the kind of universe that most humans believed in until the rise of modern science. While a personal god might have created the kind of universe we observe, Carrier contends that this is not the kind of universe we would most likely expect to see if such a god existed. He finally argues that, unlike theism, our observations about the nature of the universe are strongly expected on the hypothesis of atheism, since the universe would have to be vast, very old, and almost completely devoid of life if life were to have arisen by sheer chance.
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Frank Hugh Foster in a 1918 lecture announced that modern culture had arrived at a "post-theistic stage" in which humanity has taken possession of the powers of agency and creativity that had formerly been projected upon God.Gary J. Dorrien , The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950 (2003), , p. 177f. Denys Turner argues that Karl Marx did not choose atheism over theism, but rejected the binary "Feuerbachian" choice altogether, a position which by being post- theistic is at the same time necessarily post-atheistic.D. Turner, "Religion: Illusions and liberation", in: Terrell Carver (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Marx (1991), , p. 337. For example, at one point Marx argued "there should be less trifling with the label 'atheism,'” as he insisted "religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself.
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Major deities have inspired a vast genre of literature such as the Puranas and Agama texts as well their own Hindu traditions, but with shared mythology, ritual grammar, theosophy, axiology and polycentrism. Vishnu and his avatars are at the foundation of Vaishnavism, Shiva for Shaivism, Devi for Shaktism, and some Hindu traditions such as Smarta traditions who revere multiple major deities (five) as henotheistic manifestations of Brahman (absolute metaphysical Reality).David Lawrence (2012), The Routledge Companion to Theism (Editors: Charles Taliaferro, Victoria S. Harrison and Stewart Goetz), Routledge, , pages 78-79Guy Beck (2005), Alternative Krishnas: Regional and Vernacular Variations on a Hindu Deity, SUNY Press, , pages 1-2 While there are diverse deities in Hinduism, states Lawrence, "Exclusivism – which maintains that only one's own deity is real" is rare in Hinduism. Julius Lipner, and other scholars, state that pluralism and "polycentrism" – where other deities are recognized and revered by members of different "denominations", has been the Hindu ethos and way of life.
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It ahs been remarked by physics historian Helge Kragh that, in these books, Whittaker was "the only physical scientist of the first rank" who defended the "strong anthropic creation argument", which holds that as entropy always increases, the Universe must have started at a point of minimum entropy, which they argue implies the existence of a god. Whittaker published several articles which draw connections between science, philosophy and theism between 1947 and 1952 in the BBC magazine The Listener, one of which Religion and the nature of the universe was republished in American Vogue, making him "a rare, if not unique, example of a man whose published work not only crossed disciplinary boundaries, but was published everywhere from Nature to Vogue." Among others, Whittaker wrote the biography of a famous Italian mathematician, Vito Volterra for the Royal Society in 1941 and wrote Einstein's obituary for the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society in 1955.
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On the point of probability, Alvin Plantinga claims that if God is a necessary being, as argued by classical theism, God is, by definition, maximally probable; thus an argument that there is no necessary being with the qualities attributed to God is required to demonstrate God's improbability. Eric MacDonald has pointed out that theists assume the coherence of their position when they make arguments for God when, by Plantinga's standards, they would have to present an argument that the concept of God is not logically incoherent before discussing other arguments.Duking it Out Over the God Delusion Plantinga's objection would seem to apply to all atheist arguments that contend that God is improbable, such as evidential arguments about the problem of evil and the argument from nonbelief. But the reason why theists and atheists do not usually address this prior to making their arguments is because they want to go beyond merely discussing whether God is maximally probable or impossible.
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See Collected Papers, v. 1, paragraph 34, Eprint (in "The Spirit of Scholasticism"), where Peirce ascribes the success of modern science less to a novel interest in verification than to the improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, though he himself was a mathematician of logic and a founder of statistics. Peirce's philosophy includes a pervasive three-category system, both fallibilism and anti-skeptical belief that truth is discoverable and immutable, logic as formal semiotic (including semiotic elements and classes of signs, modes of inference, and methods of inquiry along with pragmatism and critical common-sensism), Scholastic realism, theism, objective idealism, and belief in the reality of continuity of space, time, and law, and in the reality of absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and creative love as principles operative in the cosmos and as modes of its evolution.
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As a philosopher of religion, Sutherland had focused on how people continue to be morally responsible human beings in pluralist societies without the metaphysical security of traditional and potentially divisive systems of belief. Influenced by his intellectual mentor, Donald M. MacKinnon, Sutherland's approach has brought the clarity and rigour of the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy into conversation with literary and philosophical thinkers on the European continent. In Atheism and the Rejection of God: Contemporary Philosophy and "The Brothers Karamazov" (1977) and Faith and Ambiguity (1984), he explored continental thinkers including Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Camus and Weil. His Wilde Lectures at Oxford University – published as God, Jesus and Belief: The Legacy of Theism (1984) – explored a range of intellectual, moral and existential issues in contemporary philosophical theology, developing further his argument that Christian ethical and faith traditions continue to have an enduring value at a time when former patterns of belief have broken down.
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Smart was involved in the Assembly of the World's Religions series of meetings (1985, 1990, 1992) sponsored by Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification movement and served as President of the Inter Religious Federation for World Peace. In 1999, he was co-convener of the First Assembly of the Inter-religious and International Federation for World Peace, established by Moon. Smart reiterated his conviction that without improved understanding of the religious and cultural Other, peace in the world would remain elusive. His concept of religions as worldviews, and his value-free approach to religious studies – that is, refraining from elevating a single understanding of "truth" as some sort of evaluative criterion of religious authenticity-opened up for him the study of non-religious ideologies or worldviews (he preferred this term because it does not imply that theism is an essential element) as well as of new religious movements, which he saw as one result of globalisation.
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However, David Berman has argued for an atheistic reading of Toland, demonstrating contradictions between Christianity not Mysterious and Toland's Two Essays (London, 1695). Berman's reading of Toland and Charles Blount attempts to show that Toland deliberately obscured his real atheism so as to avoid prosecution whilst attempting to subliminally influence unknowing readers, specifically by creating contradictions in his work which can only be resolved by reducing Toland's God to a pantheistic one, and realising that such a non-providential God is, for Blount, Toland and Colins, "...no God, or as good as no God...In short, the God of theism is blictri for Toland; only the determined material God of pantheism exists, and he (or it) is really no God."David Berman,"Disclaimers in Blount and Toland", in: Hunter & Wootton (eds.), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 268–272 After his Christianity not Mysterious, Toland's "Letters to Serena" constitute his major contribution to philosophy.
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The French Revolution marked a turning point for the ascendancy of atheism to a preeminent position as a cognitive and cultural stance against papal supremacy and the Holy Roman Empire across Europe and throughout the world. Now known as the atheist Cult of Reason ideology, established by Jacques Hébert, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette and their supporters and intended as a replacement for Christianity, and was replete with ceremonious destruction of Christian relics, conversion of churches into Temples of Reason and the personification of Reason as a goddess; it also held such festivities as the Festival of Reason (or Festival of Liberty), dated on 10 November (20 Brumaire) 1793. The Cult of Reason, which strongly advocated the destruction of Christian and theistic cultural influences by force, was opposed to Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being, which was considered a deistic cult which referred back to the theism of Christianity. The Cult of Reason was finally ended by Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety through their execution of Hébert and several of his followers on 24 March 1794, having ascended just seven months earlier.
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Some non-religious nihilistic and existentialist thinkers have affirmed the prominent theistic position that the existence of the personal God of theism is linked to the existence of an objective moral standard, asserting that questions of right and wrong inherently have no meaning and, thus, any notions of morality are nothing but an anthropogenic fantasy. Agnostic author and Absurdist philosopher Albert Camus discussed the issue of what he saw as the universe's indifference towards humankind and the meaninglessness of life in his prominent novel The Stranger, in which the protagonist accepts death via execution without sadness or feelings of injustice. In his philosophical work, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argues that human beings must choose to live defiantly in spite of their longing for purpose or direction and the apparent lack of evidence for God or moral imperatives. The atheistic existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre proposed that the individual must create his own essence and therefore must freely and independently create his own subjective moral standards by which to live.
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Thus where Toland's term referred to pan- (all) and -theism (god), Higgins refers to Pande- (a root indicating this family of gods) and -ism, a wholly English construction indicating allegiance to an ideology. The term related by Higgins refers to a secret sect of worshipers of these "Pans", which was left in the wake of the collapse of an ancient empire that stretched from Greece (the home of Medea and Perseus) to India (where the Buddhists and the Brahmins coexist). Higgins concludes that his observations: While worthy of note, the above discussion is an example of what Higgins tries to present in his work: that religious scripture is written in a manner to confuse rather than clarify. The exhaustive discussion above comparing "Pandeism" and "Pantheism", while valid, fails to disclose the main emphasis of his effort, which is to show that all religions are the same and from a lost, antediluvian, original source in which all characters are allegoric representations of the zodiac with the primary deity being the sun.
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The Big Bang itself is a scientific theory and as such stands or falls by its agreement with observations. However, as a theory which addresses the nature of the universe since its earliest discernible existence, the Big Bang carries possible theological implications regarding the concept of creation out of nothing. Many atheist philosophers have argued against the idea of the Universe having a beginning – the Universe might simply have existed for all eternity, but with the emerging evidence of the Big Bang theory, many theologians and physicists have viewed it as implying theism; a popular philosophical argument for the existence of God known as the Kalam cosmological argument rests in the concepts of the Big Bang. In the 1920s and 1930s, almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady-state theory, who rejected the implication that the universe had a beginning.
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More recently, pandeism has been classed as a logical derivation of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's proposition that ours was the best of all possible worlds. In 2010, author William C. Lane contended that: Acknowledging that American philosopher William Rowe has raised "a powerful, evidential argument against ethical theism", Lane further contended that pandeism offers an escape from the evidential argument from evil: Cartoonist and pundit Scott Adams wrote God's Debris (2001), which lays out a theory of pandeism. Cartoonist and pundit Scott Adams has written two books on religion, God's Debris (2001), and The Religion War (2004), of which God's Debris lays out a theory of pandeism, in which God blows itself up to see what will happen, which becomes the cause of our universe. In God's Debris, Adams suggests that followers of theistic religions such as Christianity and Islam are inherently subconsciously aware that their religions are false, and that this awareness is reflected in their consistently acting like these religions, and their threats of damnation for sinners, are false.
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In the wake of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, many scholars understand Confucian theology as a natural theology. The Chinese theological conception of the God of Heaven's ongoing self- creation/evolution in the "divine city" and the broader cosmos is contrasted with that of God as a craftsman external to his creation which is the type of theism of Christianity. Contemporary scholars also compare Confucianism and Christianity on the matters of humanity's good nature and of pneumatology, that is to say the respective doctrines of the shen dynamism produced by God's activity (guishen) and of the Holy Spirit, finding that the Confucian doctrine is truly humanistic since the spirit is the creative dynamism always present in humanity, while in the Christian doctrine the Holy Spirit ultimately belongs to God alone. According to the philosopher Promise Hsu, in the wake of Eric Voegelin, while Christianity fails to provide a public, civil theology, Confucianism with its idea of Tian, within broader Chinese cosmological religion, is particularly apt to fill the void left by the failing of Christianity.
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Smith observes that some motivations for explicit atheism are rational and some not. Of the rational motivations, he says: For Smith, critical, explicit atheism is subdivided further into three groups: # the view usually expressed by the statement "I do not believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being" after "the failure of theism to provide sufficient evidence in its favor. Faced with a lack of evidence, this explicit atheist sees no reason whatsoever for believing in a supernatural being"; # the view usually expressed by the statement "God does not exist" or "the existence of God is impossible" after "a particular concept of god, such as the God of Christianity, is judged to be absurd or contradictory"; # the view which "refuses to discuss the existence or nonexistence of a god" because "the concept of a 'god' is unintelligible". For the purposes of his paper on "philosophical atheism", Ernest Nagel chose to attach only the explicit atheism definition for his examination and discussion: In Nagel's Philosophical Concepts of Atheism, he very much agrees with Smith on the three-part subdivision of "explicit atheism" above, though Nagel does not use the term "explicit".
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Max Muller, The Shvetashvatara Upanishad, Oxford University Press, pages xxxiv and xxxvii Grierson as well as Carus note that the first epilogue verse 6.21 is also notable for its use of the word Deva Prasada (देवप्रसाद, grace or gift of God), but add that Deva in the epilogue of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad refers to "pantheistic Brahman" and the closing credit to sage Shvetashvatara in verse 6.21 can mean "gift or grace of his Soul". Doris SrinivasanD Srinivasan (1997), Many Heads, Arms, and Eyes, Brill, , pages 96-97 and Chapter 9 states that the Upanishad is a treatise on theism, but it creatively embeds a variety of divine images, an inclusive language that allows "three Vedic definitions for personal deity". The Upanishad includes verses wherein God can be identified with the Supreme (Brahman-Atman, Self, Soul) in Vedanta monistic theosophy, verses that support dualistic view of Samkhya doctrines, as well as the synthetic novelty of triple Brahman where a triune exists as the divine soul (Deva, theistic God), individual soul (self) and nature (Prakrti, matter). Tsuchida writes that the Upanishad syncretically combines monistic ideas in Upanishad and self-development ideas in Yoga with personification of Shiva-Rudra deity.
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The philosopher Mylan Engel Jr. describes the book as a useful text for philosophy of religion courses, particularly those on the topic of the problem of evil. He argues that the book is useful because it "illustrates just how bleak the theist's prospects are for handling this enduring challenge to the rationality of theistic belief", but raises a concern that Murray "downplays the significance of animal suffering", which could lead some readers to not take steps to reduce animal suffering that they personally contribute to. Joseph J. Lynch also argues that the "Causa Dei" defence of God's existence advocated for in the book "may unjustifiably minimize the significance of animal suffering or simply explain it away", but calls the book comprehensive overall and feels that it will provoke discussion on the topic, even if it doesn't "solve the problem of God and animal pain". T. J. Mawson argues that the book rather than providing a theodicy, is more of a defence for theism in the light of the available evidence and suggests that overall, the book supports a verdict of "case not proven", when it comes to the problem of animal suffering.
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Rollins' unpublished PhD (His Colour is Our Blood: A Phenomenology of the Prodigal Father) offers a survey of religious thinking in the aftermath of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. It engages directly with Martin Heidegger's critique of onto-theology and explores the religious significance of Jacques Derrida's post-structural theory and Jean-Luc Marion's saturated phenomenology (drawing out the points of connection and conflict between them). This manuscript represents Rollins' initial attempt to articulate an approach to faith that would short-circuit the categories of theism and atheism and problematize the various debates that arise from them. In so doing this marks an approach to Christianity that is not related to a system of belief but rather to a particular mode of life. His first book, How (Not) to Speak of God (2006) popularized the main themes of his PhD by blending the apophatic work of Meister EckhartRollins, Peter How (Not) to Speak of God (Paraclete Press, 2006), pp18-19 and pseudo-DionysiusRollins, Peter How (Not) to Speak of God (Paraclete Press, 2006), pp26-29 with the Post-structural work of DerridaRollins, Peter How (Not) to Speak of God (Paraclete Press, 2006), pp45-46 and Marion.
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