Background and Objectives: Spirituality and the quality of communication with God with an emphasis on Islamic teachings can play an essential role in life, including marital relationships. On the other hand, the applicability of relationship with God quality in prohibition, activation, and verbal dialogue is important in this regard. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the model of marriage...

During the several thousand years of Jewish history, much has been written about the nature of the Jewish concept of God. This brief section is a summary of some of the major themes. There are different definitions of the concept of "God." We do not all mean the same thing when we use the word God, even with a capital "G." While there are some similarities in the Jewish and Christian beliefs ab...

Some philosophers claim that it is not possible for God, if God exists, to figure in the phenomenological content of experience. W.T. Stace was one such philosopher committed to this claim, but he offered nothing in the way of an argument for it. William Forgie, however, has argued that on the assumption of two putatively plausible theses about the phenomenology of experience, phenomenologicall...

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...

This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about per...

In this paper I critically examine Brian Leftow’s attempt to construct a theistic semantics for counterpossibles, one that can be used to make sense of the fact that propositions, which exist necessarily, nevertheless depend on God as their cause. I argue that the impressive theoretical framework erected by Leftow cannot guarantee an asymmetrical dependence of propositions on God, and ultimatel...

This paper contrasts materialism and theism in their ability to give a plausible account of mathematics. The ideal, abstract entities of mathematics do not fit readily within a materialist world. Truth, logic, and mathematics require the existence of universal norms. However, materialism has no place for abstract entities or universal norms. How can such ideal norms, inert in themselves, influe...

553 Earlier this year, South Korean researchers were the first to successfully clone human embryos and create a pluripotent embryonic stem cell from one of the cloned blastocysts (Hwang WS et al (2004) Science 303: 1669–1674). In December 2002, the Raelian religious sect claimed to have cloned the first human baby, albeit without any supporting proof. These episodes—and several other studies an...

A OCCIDENTALS, we are the heirs of Ancient Greek civilization. Given that the practice of anesthesia is considered less than 200 yr old, it seems hard to believe that the unusual idea of putting someone to sleep during a painful medical procedure was actively discussed and intricately imagined more than 25 centuries ago. Yet the Greek myths tell us of a Homeric warrior named Philoctetes who was...