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...

Deciding how best to respond to a patient’s spiritual devotion can raise complex ethical challenges. This is particularly true for medical students and residents who may have little formal training in the area of religion and spirituality. This article explores the challenges inherent to the encounter between a secular physician or medical trainee and a religious patient. A clinical vignette is...

We examine how understandings of ordinary and extraordinary communication develop. Three- to 10-year-old children and adults (N = 183) were given scenarios in which a protagonist wanted help from a human (their parent) or from God. Scenarios varied in whether protagonists expressed their desires aloud (by asking) or silently (by hoping), whether (for human scenarios) parents were nearby or far ...

Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human properties to nonhuman entities, is often posited as an explanation for the origin and nature of God concepts, but it remains unclear which human properties we tend to attribute to God and under what conditions. In three studies, participants decided whether two types of human properties-psychological (mind-dependent) properties and physiological (b...

A three-dimensionally (3D) ordered freestanding porous platinum (Pt) nanowire array electrode (PPNWAE) with pores of several nanometers in size and a Pt nanowire array electrode (PNWAE) without pores were facilely fabricated by metal electrodeposition and direct integration with a Pt disk electrode. The unusual PPNWAE with high active area showed excellent sensitivity (0.36 mA cm(-2) mM(-1)) an...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To examine the psychometric properties of the Image of God Scale (IGS) in a clinical population. DESIGN Descriptive, cross-sectional. SETTING University and community oncology practices in the southeastern United States. SAMPLE 123 breast cancer survivors no more than two years from completion of treatment. METHODS Scale reliability was determined with the coefficient...

Continuous alterations and extensions of a software system introduce so called god classes, accumulating ever more responsibilities. As god classes make essential steps in program comprehension harder, it is expected that effective and efficient techniques to resolve them will facilitate future maintenance tasks. This work reports on a laboratory experiment with 63 computer science students, in...

GOD (General Ontology Discovery) is an unsupervised system to extract semantic relations among domain specific entities and concepts from texts. Operationally, it acts as a search engine returning a set of true predicates regarding the query instead of the usual ranked list of relevant documents. Our approach relies on two basic assumptions: (i) paradigmatic relations can be established only am...