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...

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...

Recent advances in our knowledge of mental illness have not lr*ade it any easier to reconcile this suffering with a belief in Cod. As long as all mental illness could be ascribed to evil spirits the Question of God's responsibility was not so great. The dichotomy of ^?d and the devil did give, as it were, a working solution to the problem although it did not give any final answer. The very idea of

Is classical tragedy contingent upon a Greco-Roman sense of morality? Or can tragedy exist within a Judeo-Christian universe as well? Literary critic Northrop Frye’s theory of high-mimetic tragedy inherits distinctions that Aristotle draws between tragedy and comedy in the Poetics. As a brief philological excursion will demonstrate, the binary distinctions upon which Aristotle builds his tragic...

OBJECTIVE The present study explored the role of the emotional experience of God (i.e., positive and negative God images) in the happiness of chronic pain (CP) patients. Framed in the transactional model of stress, we tested a model in which God images would influence happiness partially through its influence on disease interpretation as a mediating mechanism. We expected God images to have bot...

PHILOSOPHY Ever since the time of Pascal men have feared that the 'God' worshipped by believers and the 'God' contemplated by philosophers were somehow different. The former was personal, historically active, slow to anger and plentiful in mercy: the latter was dubiously able to be described in personal terms at all, and infinite in such a way as to baffle the imagination. The 'God' of the form...

Religiosity and participation in religious activities have been linked with decreased risky behavior. In the current research, we hypothesized that exposure to the concept of God can actually increase people's willingness to engage in certain types of risks. Across seven studies, reminders of God increased risk taking in nonmoral domains. This effect was mediated by the perceived danger of a ri...

Anthropomorphism is a default strategy for making the unfamiliar familiar, but is it a uniform strategy? Do all dimensions of anthropomorphism “hang together”? We explored this question by involving adults (n = 99) in a speeded property-attribution task in which they decided, as quickly as possible, whether properties of two types— psychological and physiological—could be attributed to God. Par...