New answers tagged philosophy-of-religion
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Essentialism
'Christianity' is a porous term. We can't define necessary and sufficient conditions for a set of beliefs or practices to be Christian. Christianity is an essentially contested concept. Any nuclear, essentialist approach is bound to fail.
Following this line of thought, which does full justice to the history of religious ideas, we can't say ...
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In order to respond effectively to this question some background will be required which will provide a context that will frame this response into something meaningful. What will be presented then is a Spinozistic frame for the relationship between god and human and why Spinoza employed the term god even though all teleological, anthropomorphic and ...
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Languages are not completely inter-translatable as, to take an easy example, anyone knows who has (tried to) translate from Classical Greek into English : Classical Greek has words for which we do not have precisely corresponding terms and concepts in modern English. 'Arete* don't quite mean 'virtue' or 'excellence'. Eudaimonia doesn't exactly mean '...
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He did dismiss it, at least for the purposes of ethics. Oddly enough, it is not aimed at ancient or Oriental metempsychosis, but comes in passing in a polemic against... Descartes and his substance dualism. Here is from Leibniz's Letter on Cartesianism (to an unknown correspondent):
"I say, then, that the immortality of the soul, such as Descartes ...
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What is language?
I would describe language in a general sense as a mechanism for communicating ideas. When two speak the same language, theoretically, communication of their ideas is optimal; however, two speaking different languages may well be able to effectively communicate ideas. In fact, two speaking no words at all can communicate ideas.
Does ...
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If you are a part of the mainstream of the Christian religion, then yes, you accept that Jesus could, and did, suspend what we call "scientific law." It's an important part of orthodox (small "o") Christian belief that Jesus' divine nature granted command over the realities of the universe; a power that Jesus wielded, not indiscriminately, but as an ...
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Michael Polanyi claims (page 7)
...all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge.
If that is the case the relationship suggested in the title is backwards. Our tacit sense of the divine determines the explicit language we use to understand it. Polanyi's The Study of Man provides an introduction to his views on personal knowledge.
For a list ...
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There are two questions:
Does believing in Christianity imply believing in miracles?
Is this belief in miracles consistent with believing in laws of nature?
Answers to the first question depend on what a particular Christian means by Christianity. To avoid setting up a straw man, I will quote an influential Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, who takes a ...
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The main problem with the argument is in the first line:
So if we have two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive hypotheses, with equal prior probabilities, say, evolution and creation ("E" and "C"), and a observation, say, homologies (H) if one of the hypotheses entails the observation, that hypothesis is more likely, given the observation, than the ...
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The first three requirements suggest deism as a place to look for those holding all six positions. Wikipedia describes deism as
Deism...is the philosophical belief which posits that although God exists as the uncaused First Cause – ultimately responsible for the creation of the universe – God does not interact directly with that subsequently created world....
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This is only a partial answer, but hopefully it provides additional references.
There was a similar project to remove disagreements "on the reference terminology", however, only among scientists, that A. J. Ayer credits with Otto Neurath: (page 82)
It was his acceptance of this doctrine of physicalism that let Neurath to insist so much upon the unity of ...
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According to C. S. Lewis if "persona, anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism were removed as features of God" one would be left with Pantheism:
Pantheism is congenial to our minds not because it is the final stage in a slow process of enlightenment, but because it is almost as old as we are. It may even be the most primitive of all religions....If '...
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