The prohibition in the Bible against pictorial representations of God is as famous as it is poorly understood. After all, why is it forbidden to depict God in pictures, but it is not forbidden to depict God in words (cf. Halbertal & Margalit, 1992)? God has been richly represented in written or oral narratives in and out of the Bible. If so, why is it permitted to write about God’s hand or face...

A. Cosmological proof of the Existence of God In the 3rd Meditation, Descartes attempts to prove that God (i) exists, (ii) is the cause of the essence of the meditator (i.e. the author of his nature as a thinking thing), and (iii) the cause of the meditator's existence (both as creator and conserver, i.e. the cause that keeps him in existence from one moment to the next). The proof that God exi...

Pascal’s wager attempts to provide a mortal with a proper choice of believing or not believing in a god, based on the expected reward of a given belief. It is essentially a Bayesian approach to the existence of a supreme being, as it deals with a degree of belief approach to proability. However, given the ineffability of a supreme being, the idea of finding a Bayesian prior for performing infer...

Background Depressive patients can derive consolation as well as struggle from their religion. Outside the Western-Christian cultures these phenomena have not received much empirical exploration. The current study aims to describe how positive and negative religious coping strategies relate to depressive symptoms in different ethnic groups in The Netherlands. Methods Interview data were derived...

The emergent new science of synthetic biology is challenging entrenched distinctions between, amongst others, life and non-life, the natural and the artificial, the evolved and the designed, and even the material and the informational. Whenever such culturally sanctioned boundaries are breached, researchers are inevitably accused of playing God or treading in Frankenstein's footsteps. Bioethici...

A wide literature demonstrates that people prefer harm caused by omissions over equal or lesser harm caused by actions. This omission bias has been explained referring to several principles, such as causality or responsibility. A convincing research view has been suggested by Sunstein (2005): harmful acts are generally worse than harmful omissions when moral intuitions reflect the “Do not play ...

the word relation is a new concept that did not used in its today`s meaning one hundred and fifty years ago. in spite of this situation, its substitute concepts like friendliness is used in nahj ul-balāghah many times and each of them express varieties & places in general relation between human and god and other relations. on the whole, we face four relations: human relation with god, himself a...

A well-known objection to divine will/divine command moral theories is that they commit us to the view that God’s will is arbitrary. I argue that several versions of divine will/divine command moral theories, including two of Robert Adams’s versions of the DCT and my own divine preference theory, can be successfully defended against this objection. I argue that, even if God’s preferences are so...

From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act “with logos” is contrary to God’s nature. . . . [T]he faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which unlikeness remains infinitely grea...