New answers tagged philosophy-of-religion
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I'm admittedly new to philosophy (and as such cannot yet refer to widely-accepted posts that would easily answer this or clear this up more concretely), but I'll give this a shot regardless.
Pascal's wager (and yes, you are referring to the modern version) is, I think, different from the scenario you described. Ultimately, the Wager is not concerned with the ...
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Could it be as basic as the separation of the natural and the supernatural?
Most scientists focus on the "natural," which can be loosely defined as the tangible universe around us. Some scientists also believe in the supernatural (e.g. "God"), but they aren't likely to conduct experiments or write papers on religion.
Miracles are generally attributed to a ...
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This question conflates two separate and distinct issues:
The existence of an event (a singular phenomenon): something that someone encounters as an experience and records in the stream of intellectual and social memory.
The existence of a class of events (a normative category): a pattern or type of event that occurs often enough to give it its own ...
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When it comes to inductive reasoning (and based on how I define induction it includes abduction), I’m a convinced Bayesian. I'll offer an answer from that perspective.
Given a piece of evidence, E, my credence in an explanation, H, will be a function of its prior probability, P(H), and its explanatory power relative to alternative explanations (that is, the ...
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Part of the problem you are having lies in the way you are framing the issue, i.e., where you say:
The worshiped gods [...] require the care of humans worshiping them at
their "houses" (temples) on earth
You've inverted the relationship. Gods do not need the care of humans on earth; humans want to appeal to the power that gods ostensibly have, and ...
5
Two writers who have produced 'global' hypotheses about the features of polytheism are Jean-Pierre Vernant and Walter Burkert.
Vernant identifies the following features:
A god is a power that represents a type of action, a kind of force. Within
the framework of a pantheon, each of these powers is defined not in
itself as an isolated object but by ...
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Your question is a good one, and there is an answer -- that pursued by methodological naturalism.
One of the problems you have encountered in this question is the multiple equivocations that have infected the usage of naturalism and supernatural.
For naturalism, there has been significant effort spent to clarify different meanings, and among philosophers,...
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Under what conditions would we have to accept that the supernatural has influenced the reality?
From a systemic point of view, any interaction between an object (in this case, the supernatural) and a subject (reality, in this case), produces a change on both of them (even if almost insignificant, it is a change). Otherwise, there is no interaction. ...
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There are many shades of Godless belief and atheists debate their own "theologies" every bit as much as religious believers do. Just because one atheist makes a claim it does not mean that all the others will accept it. And there is always the example of Buddhism as a Godless religion to be accommodated.
But really, as Dr. Susan Blackmore has argued (in ...
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There are multiple answers to this question, which is to say, that different Christians have answered it very differently over the years. In the United Methodist Church tradition, for instance, reason is considered to be one of four legitimate sources of doctrine and theology (also including scripture, tradition, and Christian experience). Reason was also ...
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Mathematics is the observation of immutable laws and principles.
Take a simple observable, immutable reality, such as the conservation of energy.
One can express it as an invariant equation such as the following:
E(t1) = E(t2)
For any two times t1 and t2.
For dynamical laws that involve variability and yet for which there are still immutable constraints (...
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There are many different kinds of theists... So there would have to be many different answers to this, with none more correct than another.
The broadest scope of answers though based on my experience with many theists, would simply be that God makes it work... When one has crafted or inherited the idea of a plane of existence that has no empirical data ...
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Here's an argument that comes close. I have seen it somewhere, but I don't remember where.
If A is omnipotent, A can bring about anything that is logically possible.
A's being omniscient is logically possible.
Therefore: If A is omnipotent, A can bring about his or her own omniscience.
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Well, the ideas are certainly closely related. I would say that both omnipotence and omniscience are possible only for something which is purely actual, and that which is purely actual must be both omnipotent and omniscient.
Feser argues this at length in Five Proofs of the Existence of God. In Chapter 6, The Nature of God and of His Relationship to the ...
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One problem with heaven is boredom. After catch-up talking with our dead relatives in heaven, what are we going to do forever and ever and ever and ever and ever?
Long ago, I read the early Christian fathers were aware of this heavenly problem and claimed people in heaven would be, like God, outside time, would not experience time, and, therefore, would not ...
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