The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that God is a " substantia seu natura simplex omnino " —an " altogether simple substance or nature " —and the First Vatican Council reiterated the teaching. The doctrine of divine simplicity is at the center of Thomas's natural theology, since it is essentially involved in his attempt to show that the First Cause that he has proved to exist in the Five Ways ha...

The argument from contingency for the existence of God is best understood as a request for an explanation of the total sequence of causes and effects in the universe (‘History’ for short). Many puzzles about how there could be such an explanation arise from the assumption that God is being introduced as one more cause prepended to the sequence of causes that (allegedly) needed explaining. In re...

Manufacturer Brand Assay method Minimal sample volume (uL) Test time (second) Assay range (mg/dL) Hematocrit range (%) Memory (results) Abbott FreeStyle Freedom Lite GDH-PQQ 0.3 ~5 20~500 15~65 400 AgaMatrix WaveSense KeyNote GOD 0.5 4 20~600 20~60 300 Arkray Glucocard X-meter GDH 0.3 5 10~600 30~52 360 Bayer Ascensia Contour GDH-FAD 0.6 5 10~600 0~70 480 Bionime Rightest GM300 GOD 1.4 8 20~600...

IN the first section of this paper, I employ an ontological type argument to show that the possibility of God implies, in a standard system of quantified modal logic, the existence and uniqueness of God. In the second section, I argue that the very idea of a supreme being is meaningful. In the third section, I use a cosmological type argument to prove that it is possible for God to exist. In th...

Although worship has a pivotal place in religious thought and practice, philosophers of religion have had remarkably little to say about it. In this paper we examine some of the many questions surrounding the notion of worship, focusing on the claim that human beings have obligations to worship God. We explore a number of attempts to ground our supposed duty to worship God, and argue that each ...

Joseph Selling proposes a contemporary revision of natural law ethics, making it more person-centered. Earlier James Gustafson insisted that natural law ethics was too egoist or anthropocentric, so his work proposed theocentrism as a corrective. Richard Gula in turn proposed an ethics that centers on imitating God’s relationships. This essay combines the merits of all three with the author’s ow...

Recent evidence indicates that spirituality and religion are associated with both physical and psychological health. Because a belief that rewards are largely determined by external forces tends to be detrimental to mental health, the idea that God can be equated with such an external force seems contradictory to the proven benefits of religion and spirituality. The purpose of this article is t...

One central feature of the God of Israel, highlighted in the holy Scriptures of the Jews, was that he had h)nq. The word means zeal, jealousy, and envy. In other words, Yahweh is a jealous God, envious of and zealous for all that belongs to him. He will give his glory to no other, “nor my praise to graven images”. 2 This God had now chosen Israel to be his people. The people, then, were to show...

I examine the central atheistic argument of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (“Dawkins’s Gambit”) and illustrate its failure. I further show that Dawkins’s Gambit is a fragment of a more comprehensive critique of theism found in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Among the failings of Dawkins’s Gambit is that it is directed against a version of the God Hypothesis that fe...

The effects of the cationic polymer ε-poly-L-lysine (εPL) on the enzymatic reaction rate of glucose oxidase (GOD) with ferrocene derivatives having different ionic charges have been investigated by measuring the ferrocene derivative-mediated catalytic current of oxidation by GOD. When negatively charged ferrocenes were used, the bioelectrocatalytic current, which is related to the enzymatic rea...