In this brief reply to Walls’ challenging critique, I try to do two things: first, clarify the most fundamental point on which I think Walls and I disagree, and second, argue that, as surprising as it may first appear, Walls’ free will theodicy of hell requires that God interfere with human freedom in inappropriate ways. For a number of years now I have considered Jerry Walls to be one of my be...

The fundamental constants that are involved in the laws of physics which describe our universe are finely tuned for life, in the sense that if some of the constants had slightly different values life could not exist. Some people hold that this provides evidence for the existence of God. I will present a probabilistic version of this fine-tuning argument which is stronger than all other versions...

""""'\e righteousness of God" is an ..I. important theme in the Old and New Testaments about which there is great debate. l It is concerned with the way lost men and women can be right with God (Cars on 1992).2 Throughout the history of the church scholars have articulated various positions of the righteousness of God or justification. The topic is related to the law, Jewish and Christian relat...

This is an essay in comparative ethics within the Platonist tradition. Although the primary focus is on Augustine’s account of rightly ordered love of neighbor in De vera religione, it analyzes Augustine’s account of the love of finite goods by comparing it with Plato’s grounding of the love of imperfect creatures within an ontological hierarchy in Symposium. Against the backdrop of the critiqu...

Some theists maintain that they need not answer the threat posed to theistic belief by natural evil; they have reason enough to believe that God exists and it renders impotent any threat that natural evil poses to theism. Explicating how God and natural evil co-exist is not necessary since they already know both exist. I will argue that, even granting theists the knowledge they claim, this does...

The co-immobilization of Aspergillus niger glucose oxidase (GOD) with bovine liver catalase (CAT) onto florisil (magnesium silicate-based porous carrier) was investigated to improve the catalytic efficiency of GOD against H2O2 inactivation. The effect of the amount of bound CAT on the GOD activity was also studied for 12 different initial combinations of GOD and CAT, using simultaneous and sequ...

The need to belong can motivate belief in God. In Study 1, 40 undergraduates read bogus astrophysics articles "proving" God's existence or not offering proof. Participants in the proof-for-God condition reported higher belief in God (compared to control) when they chronically imagined God as accepting but lower belief in God when they imagined God as rejecting. Additionally, in Study 2 (72 unde...

Historically, the development of God concepts in human cognition has been explained anthropomorphically. In other words, for children especially, God is a big, superhuman who lives in the sky. Recent empirical research on the development of these concepts may suggest an alternative hypothesis. In this paper, we review this research and outline the "preparedness hypothesis," which suggests that ...

Famous medieval philosophers Al-Sijistani and Maimonides argued that the use of double negation helps us to better understand issues related to theology. To a modern reader, however, their arguments are somewhat obscure and unclear. We show that these arguments can be drastically clarified if we take into account the 20 century use of double negation in constructive logic. 1 Double Negation The...