Questions tagged [philosophy-of-religion]
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious vocabulary and texts, and the relationship of religion and science. Note that term is somewhat ambiguous as questions regarding atheism, secular humanism and agnosticism is included in the discipline.
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Can any Christian action truly be morally good?
If someone does a morally good action because they fear God, which is a selfish motive, surely this means it is not a morally selfless action.
In the same way, if any morally good action is not ...
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Are there any scholarly critiques of Edward Feser's work?
Have there been any critiques of Feser in academia, particularly philosophy of religion? I'd also like to see if there have been critiques of Aristotelian-Thomism which is what Feser's framework is ...
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What is the difference between the Umma and the Ecclesia?
What is the difference between the Umma and the Ecclesia?
I’m looking for answers only from people who are versed in comparative theology and can give proper, well-thought-out explanations, not just ...
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Could philosophers via Logic prove the validity of some holy books, then use them as a source of trustful knowledge?
Could philosophy or philosophers or some philosophers prove the validity of the text of a holy book, e.g: Qur'an or the Bible, or some holy books, using logic and philosophical means, then use these ...
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How much math must tenured full philosophy professors know?
I'm talking math not logic. I'm referring to full tenured Professors of Philosophy at world famous universities like Oxbridge, Ivy League, Stanford, or MIT. Please be specific and type the math course ...
user8572
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Is Hegel criticizing the Church in On the Prospects for a Folk Religon?
Good morning, I have just started studying Hegel with the oldest work I could find, On the Propspects for a Folk Religion, also called Tübinga Fragments I believe. In the second paragraph it already ...
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Some questions about the cosmological argument given by Samuel Clarke
The exercise I am doing is as follows:
The following are my questions:
Why the exercise says that Samuel Clarke's argument "allow for the possibility of causal chains with no beginning"?
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Is this logical? Topic on death being a black box
People say death is a black box, that you can know nothing about it, but is the following logical?
If you believe real time travel is possible maybe in the future and someone eventually may be able ...
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Authors on consciousness and its relation with suffering
Let's say we take a group of volunteers willing to receive a 120V discharge under fMRI scanners. They all may receive the same intensity but how can we know that they all recieve the same amount of ...
user22051
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Does St. Thomas Aquinas' cosmological argument from contingency assume that an infinite regress of contingent things is impossible?
The Third Way: Argument from Possibility and Necessity (Reductio argument)
We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, that
come into being and go out of being i.e., ...
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Are some religious claims subject to empirical testing?
Almost all (Christian) theists assert that humans experience everlasting bliss in heaven. Is this possible?
So the real issue is whether it is logically possible that an unending life (in which one ...
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Do those who deny a univocal understanding of "God is good" conflate sense and connotation?
Several theologians following Aquinas have said that when we say things like "God is good" that this must mean something different to when we call other things good; this is called analogical use of ...
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Divine temporality and spacetime
According to the IEP,
The majority position today, at least among philosophers, is that God is everlasting but temporal.
How is the idea of divine temporality reconciled with special relativity? ...
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A small reformulation of the Cosmological Argument
I am sure the cosmological argument has been raised here by people like me who know nothing about philosophy numerous times before on this board. But I'm wondering if a slightly different approach can ...
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Why do we punish crime?
I have no formal training whatsoever in philosophy but have a question nonetheless. I am sorry if this is way off topic for this site.
Crime begets punishment: let us say that punishment is prison.
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How would a theist answer this argument against heaven?
Some, if not most, theists assert that time exists in heaven. How can this be?
If time is at all based on physical laws (spacetime, emergence, etc.), it won't be able to exist as it does currently in ...
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Does God still know what He has forgotten?
The following is from the Christian text Hebrews 10:15-17: [my emphasis]
15 The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:
16 “This is the covenant I will make with them
...
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If time is emergent, how can time exist in a Christian heaven?
Many physicists say that time is an emergent property from quantum phenomenon, such as entanglement.
Many Christians theologians also posit that time will exist in heaven, forever.
Let's say that ...
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Can theism be reconciled with the apparent state of dualism?
The SEP states that "dualism has come upon hard times lately, and is widely regarded as being discredited."
It seems to me that most theists (I'm thinking mostly of Christians here) accept dualism to ...
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How can a theist justify not having children?
Most theists (perhaps, most people in general) would say that having a happy person is better than having no person at all. Indeed, most theists admit to this by saying that God "wanted to" or "...
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Does the Kalam cosmological argument prove that the prime Creator created this universe directly
I was reading about the Kalam cosmological argument
on wikipedia. The conclustion of which is:
An uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, ...
user40173
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What is that French phrase about having innate knowledge of God?
I've got something right on the tip of my tongue, and I'd really like to figure it out. The most I remember about it was that it was in French, was two or three words, and had something to do with ...
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Why are there so many religions and gods? [closed]
Why are there so many religions and gods all over the world? Come to think of it, when the idea spread, why did people develop different gods and beliefs rather than follow the same one?
If the idea ...
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How could Occam's razor possibly be used metaphysically?
Occam's razor, or the law of parsimony, states that the simplest explanation for any given data is most likely the correct one.
Some have attempted to use Occam's razor in a metaphysical sense, to ...
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Is it possible to enumerate metaphysical hypotheses?
Recently, I had an argument with someone who stated that the chance of experiencing nothing after death is extremely low. Their reasoning was that one can think of many more metaphysical realities in ...
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Is it immoral to make a living off of a religious product that I made?
I'm a software developer, and I'm making an application that is, basically, a religious-inspired social media platform. It's free, not freemium, no consumables, nothing to pay for and users have ...
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Do people tend to immorality like every Abrahamic religion told? [closed]
In many sentences of the Quran and other Abrahamic religious books, we are told about many different people who were immoral (thieves, corruption, adultery, etc.) until prophets come and help them ...
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Academic papers/longer works on the refutation of God?
The subtitle would be: "or the inevitable arguments which follow said refutation."
Almost all of the work in the atheist department is by pop-culture philosophers like Christopher Hitchens or Sam ...
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Is existence essential to God?
Thomas Aquinas said that God was absolute perfect, God being pure actuality and had no potentiality. If there was a time where there wasn't an existence, then God would have a potentiality and not ...
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Is God a solipsist?
If you accept God: omnipotent, omniscient, eternally omnipresent.
Solipsist: Nothing outside the mind should be believed to exist. If one's own mind is the sum total of existence, then all perceived ...
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Are all explanations either personal or scientific?
In A New Cosmological Argument, Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss offer up a cosmological argument for a personal God, from the weak principle of sufficient reason (among other premises, but the WPSR ...
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Plantinga's Free Will Defense and his stance on God's omnipotence
I'm having trouble understanding exactly what Plantinga is saying in regard to God's omnipotence.
He states quite clearly that it is not logically impossible for a world in which free creatures who ...
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Did Leibniz dismiss reincarnation?
I believe that I many years ago read that Leibniz discarded belief in reincarnation on something like the grounds that there is no difference between not having an earlier life and having a previous ...
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Does our language determine our "religious experiences"?
Does our language determine the character of "religious experiences"? I don't mean merely 'influence', but, as I explain in the next paragraph, whether religious experiences of a certain nature are ...
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What are the known philosophical works about a God without revelations?
Have the following ideas been proposed by philosophers of Religion, all in one package!
The universe is well organised that calls for the belief in the existence of some intelligent agency that ...
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Tautologies in religious language discussion
Influenced by Carnap and Wittgenstein, my view is that the disagreement between religious and non-religious people is mostly a semantic issue: the theistic and atheistic are referring to the same ...
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If persona, anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism are removed as features of God, does anything remain? [closed]
Most organized, monotheistic religions posit the existence of some type of personal interaction between God and humans. Whether it is as inspiration, etc. during life or judgement and either ...
user37981
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How did Heidegger argue for the certainty of death?
How did Heidegger argue for the certainty of death?
I gather that's a component of one characteristic of death, that it's "not to be outstripped". The other component being its indefiniteness, that I ...
user38026
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Principle of proportionate causality - what are virtual and eminent causes?
I'm reading Edward Feser's book Five Proofs of the Existence of God. On pages 32-33 he introduces the principle of proportionate causality (PPC). I'm having trouble understanding what precisely ...
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A Ground or Foundation of Morality
I am currently reading the very fascinating paper Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law by Arthur Allen Leff. It seems that the thrust of his paper is that there is no "naturalistic" way of grounding or ...
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Gödel's incompleteness theorems - what are the religious implications?
Apparently Kurt Gödel believed that his incompleteness theorems have some kind of religious implications. Despite Gödel's belief in a personal God, this was still somewhat surprising to me. ...
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Can nationalism be labeled a non-theistic religion?
I define religion as (taken from a dictionary definition)
a particular system of faith and worship.
One can have faith in government and worship nationalistic symbols (flag,anthem etc) ...
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Does the demand for evidence run contrary to faith?
As the title suggests, and in accordance with a recent theme here on philosophy stack exchange, I'm wondering if the demand for evidence runs contrary to faith. My intuitive notion of faith is that it ...
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Is God's disembodiment problematic?
I understand that most (though not all) Christians believe that God is disembodied.
God cannot be corporeal because that would preclude his being eternal,
immutable, and simple, for example.
...
user35983
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How far can faith reasonably go? [closed]
[EDIT] Faith is not usually invoked in justifying detailed accounts!
To see what I mean, take the following statements:
"I have faith in the determination of our players that I think they'll win the ...
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Isn't the existence of Hell inherently evil, and isn't God therefore evil in allowing Hell to exist?
In many religions, for example, the Abrahamic ones, there exists a place of eternal punishment for those who live in violation of God's commandments.
Assuming an infinitely-long afterlife, in which "...
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How can we argue for the uniqueness of a God-like entity?
(I have in mind here, something similar to "uniqueness" proofs in math. I think if we want to name something, we should show both that it exists and is unique.)
(By "divine attributes", I mean ...
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Did Nietzsche violate Christian morality in his life? Was he urging anyone to do so? [closed]
Did Nietzsche violate Christian morality in his life, in his behaviour? Was he urging anyone to do so? He seems to have had a long standing grudge against it.
user35983
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Is religion necessary for the good life?
According to Aristotle, you will be deemed as living well if you experience worldly pleasures while still being morally upright and virtuous.
How can you identify what is morally right without the ...
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Can simulation theory be considered a form of religion?
The simulation theory has gained track in recent years; even Elon Musk has spoken on it.
As it follows the associated, can belief in the simulation theory be considered a form of religion?
The ...
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