Undoubtedly, the most important issue that the Qur'an focuses on regarding divinity has been the creed of tawhid. While the Qur'an was constructing a vision of God in this direction in the minds of its first interlocutors, there was no problem in understanding the relevant verses. However, as a result of the encounter of Islamic thought with ancient cultures and civilizations with the conquests, religious texts have been addressed with different perspectives. On the one hand, a viewpoint based on discontinuity (...) in the relationship between God and man has been displayed by interpreting the expressions in religious texts that describe God with the characteristics of creatures. On the other hand, an understanding has emerged that opposes interpretation by understanding the expressions of the related texts as they are. Both understandings, which try to understand the mutashabih and khabari attributes in the Qur'an on the axis of tanzih-tashbih, constituted two opposite poles. Proponents of tanzih sometimes took the matter into obscurity regarding the nature of Almighty Allah. Proponents of tashbihhave on the other hand, has opened the door to anthropomorphist god conceptions, since it Paves the waytowards a conviction based on continuity in the God-human relationship. However, no sect has openly advocated such an idea. Therefore, this perception about them was mostly based on the claims and accusations of their opponents. In general, it is possible to examine the sects accused of anthropomorphist god understanding in three categories in the historical process. The first of these is the extremist branches of the Shī‘a, and they have developed some discourses in order to strengthen their political ideas rather than having a theoretical idea of divinity. It is understood that the religion and belief systems that existed in the region before Islam had an impact on their understanding. Another sect accused of the anthropomorphic God concept is the Karramiyya sect, which stands out with its tajseem view. Members of this sect, described by their opponents as Mujassema because they used the word "body" for God, tried to prove that they byusingthatword, were pointing to the existence of God rather than an anthropormorphist understanding of God. Another denomination accused in this regard is the Hashwiyya. This understanding, which is against interpretation in religious texts in general, maintained the same attitude for mutashabih and khabariattributes. Mu’tazila’s understanding of divinity based on interpretation was effective in their attitudes. The Hashwiyya school, which basically did not have an anthropomorphic understanding of divinity, naturally faced such an accusation because they did not question their purpose when accepting the expressions in religious texts as they were. In this article, after discussing the concept of anthropomorphism in terms of religion and philosophy, all three understandings will be examined in the context of anthropomorphism based on their own sources. It will be tried to reach a conclusion by comparing the views of the relevant sects with the discourses of their opponents.In this context, it is claimed by the opponents that they have a belief in God that is incompatible with the belief of tawhid. However, the understandings of divinity of the sects, which seem to be influenced by pre-Islamic and post-Islamic social, cultural and religious factors, will be tried to be understood in their own context and in an impartial way. (shrink)

Postmodern understandings of the god concept, based upon sociological and anthropological insights, support the ontological reality of the god concept. AII such god constructs can be understood as real but human products which come out of a situated Drama of the Holy. The reality quotient of any god concept can be seen as a function of solidarity activities within a society. Social justice concerns are, thus, the best indicators of that reality quotient while divisive, exploitative and oppressive practices in the (...) world tend to desanctify both society and nature thus justify Death of God analyses. Two interrelated solidarity activities are discussed for their efficacy in sanctification of nature and society: 1) situated Dramas of the Holy and, 2) social policies in the political economy. A variety of grand narratives are mentioned, each with differing foundational concepts, with which to institute social justice as we move into the 21st century. (shrink)

Within a German sample, the current cross-sectional questionnaire study conducts interreligious and interdenominational comparisons between Catholics, Protestants, free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, Muslims, Spiritualists, i.e., religiously unaffiliated persons who label themselves as “spiritual,” and religious/spiritual “nones.” The comparisons refer to self-ratings of religiosity and spirituality, centrality of religiosity, as assessed by the Centrality of Religiosity Scale, and God concepts. The study is largely exploratory in nature, but also aims at identifying contexts of faith in which the term “spiritual” is typically used as (...) a self-description. The results show that only Spiritualists and free-church Protestants substantially label themselves as “spiritual.” However, they differ in many respects from each other, thus representing two distinct contexts of faith. The results further reveal a medium position of Catholics and Protestants in between the other subgroups, commonalities as well as specific differences between free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, and Muslims, and some religious/spiritual approaches even within the “nones.”. (shrink)

Trusting Others, Trusting God is an investigation of the concepts of moral and religious trust.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there emerged a radically new kind of music based on recorded environmental sounds instead of sounds of traditional Western musical instruments. Centered in Paris around the composer, music theorist, engineer, and writer Pierre Schaeffer, this became known as musique concrète because of its use of concrete recorded sound fragments, manifesting a departure from the abstract concepts and representations of Western music notation. Furthermore, the term sound object was used to denote our perceptual images (...) of such fragments. Sound objects and their features became the focus of an extensive research effort on the perception and cognition of music in general, remarkably anticipating topics of more recent music psychology research. This sound object theory makes extensive use of metaphors, often related to motion shapes, something that can provide holistic representations of perceptually salient, but temporally distributed, features in different kinds of music. (shrink)

We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students’ concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects’ awareness of their theological beliefs, we were able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendency to anthropomorphize may be (...) generalizable to other agents. God (and possibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some contexts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood.. (shrink)

Before beginning a paper on metaphysics, it is wise to acknowledge the paper’s own “metaphysical” assumptions. In what follows, we must bear in mind that the history of philosophy is as interpretively diverse as it is long. We will begin with the premise that Metaphysics is indeed a foundational science. We will posit that Aristotle’s corpus is unified; that is, that Aristotle can be read as a “systematic” philosopher. Moreover, we will assume that the history of philosophy is itself a (...) unity. If we posit such, “philosophy” can be read as a comprehensible continuity: a certainly contestable position. We must bear in mind that similitude is decidedly not identity; however, similitude does imply a certain conceptual correlation, one which, when pressed, may yield interesting, if not unexpected, results. Thus, we will travel at lightning speed through what took a snail’s pace to develop, “mapping,” so to speak, the structure of the unmoved mover of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1941) onto the traditional historical divisions of the history of philosophy. We will begin with Aristotle himself in the Ancient period, move to Averroes (the Ibn-Rushd of this paper) in the Medieval period, focus on Descartes and Spinoza as Modern thinkers and, finally, end in Heidegger and Sartre in Contemporary philosophy. This is philosophy with a capital “P,” which may or may not be the reader’s preferred position, let alone the writer’s. But, for our purposes here, it is, nonetheless, inevitable. (shrink)

In this compact essay, Hubbeling compares and evaluates the merits of a theistic, Christian conception of God with a pantheistic one. Both are defined rather broadly: the former as that of an active self-conscious being; the latter as the very facticity of the world. Hubbeling wants to show that the dynamic categories in the metaphysics of the "ego-structured" God-concept provide the more fertile ground for philosophical inquiry. His thesis is suggestive though the argument is inconclusive.—L. O.

concepts are defined as concepts that cannot be experienced directly through the sensorimotor modalities. Explaining our understanding of such concepts poses a challenge to neurocognitive models of knowledge. One account of how these concepts come to be represented is that sensorimotor representations of grounded experiences are reactivated in a way that is constitutive of the abstract concept. In the present experiment, we investigated how sensorimotor information might constitute GOD-related concepts, and whether a person’s self-reported religiosity modulated this grounding. To do (...) so, we manipulated both the state of the body and the state of stimuli in two tasks that required conceptual categorization of abstract words. Linear Mixed Effects model fitting procedures were used to determine which manipulated factors best predicted response latency and accuracy in both tasks. We successfully replicated previous research demonstrating faster categorization of GOD-related words when they were presented at the top of the screen. Importantly, results demonstrated that the kneeling posture manipulation enhanced this effect, as did religiosity, as participants who scored higher in religiosity showed a greater effect of the posture manipulation on the speed with which word categorization occurred when those words were presented in the higher visuospatial presentation condition. Overall, we interpreted our findings to suggest that directly manipulating sensorimotor information can facilitate the categorization of abstract concepts, supporting the notion that this information in part constitutes the representation of abstract concepts. (shrink)

Virtuosity in music performance is often associated with fast, precise, and efficient sound-producing movements. The generation of such highly skilled movements involves complex joint and muscle control by the central nervous system, and depends on the ability to anticipate, segment, and coarticulate motor elements, all within the biomechanical constraints of the human body. When successful, such motor skill should lead to what we characterize as fluency in musical performance. Detecting typical features of fluency could be very useful for technology-enhanced learning (...) systems, assisting and supporting students during their individual practice sessions by giving feedback and helping them to adopt sustainable movement patterns. In this study, we propose to assess fluency in musical performance as the ability to smoothly and efficiently coordinate while accurately performing slow, transitionary, and rapid movements. To this end, the movements of three cello players and three drummers at different levels of skill were recorded with an optical motion capture system, while a wireless electromyogrphy (EMG) system recorded the corresponding muscle activity from relevant landmarks. We analyze the kinematic and coarticulation characteristics of these recordings separately and then propose a combined model of fluency in musical performance predicting music sophistication. Results suggest movements from expert performers' are characterized by consistently smooth strokes and scaling of muscle phasic coactivation. The explored model of fluency as function of movement smoothness and coarticulation patterns was shown to be limited by the sample size but serves as a proof of concept. Results from this study show the potential of a technology-enhanced objective measure of fluency in musical performance, which could lead to improved practices for aspiring musicians, instructors, and researchers. (shrink)

There is a well known debate between those who defend a traditional (or classical) concept of God and those who defend a process (or neoclassical) concept of God. Not as well known are the implications of these two rival concepts of God in the effort to understand religious experience. With the aid of the great pragmatist philosopher John Smith, I defend the process (or neoclassical) concept of God in its ability to better illuminate and render as intelligible as possible mystical (...) experience. (shrink)

The object of attitudes valorized in the major religious traditions is typically regarded as maximally great. Conceptions of maximal greatness differ but theists believe that a maximally great reality must be a maximally great person or God. Theists largely agree that a maximally great person would be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and all good. They do not agree on a number of God's other attributes, however. We will illustrate this by examining the debate over God's impassibility in western theism and (...) a dispute over God's relation to the space time world in Indian theism. The entry concludes by examining some concepts of limited deities. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that the more individuals view observable entities as animate, the more those entities are associated with having psychological and physiological experiences. This study examined the relationship between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for concepts of unobservable scientific (i.e., germ) and religious (i.e., God) entities. This study further explored how children's conceptions vary according to the social learning opportunities (i.e., discourse, rituals) parents reportedly create. Parent–child dyads with young children from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds participated. (...) Three central findings emerged. First, children readily associated God with psychobiological characteristics but did not do so to the same extent for germs. Second, children applied more psychobiological properties to both entity types when they believed that the entity was animate. Third, engaging in rituals and discourse with parents was indirectly related to children's concepts of God but not related to their concepts of germs. Overall, this study presented support for a connection between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for unobservable entities, and an indirect effect of cultural input on this reasoning. The implications of these findings will be discussed. (shrink)

The question of life’s meaning is a universal question that not only cuts across various cultures but also resides at the back of the mind of almost every individual that has ever existed. The very desire to continue striving in this world suggests that there is something about life that makes it worth living. Even in the throes of despair and suicide, there is something that drives the existential angst that awakens such despair. Both striving and despair in life stand (...) as subtle and benign answers to questions about whether one considers his/her life meaningful. In African philosophy today, answer to the question of life’s meaning from an African perspective is receiving more attention now than it has in the last few decades. This chapter is a summary of some of the dominant views in the current literature on African conceptions of meaning. Specifically, it explores traditional conceptions of meaning such as the love view, the God’s purpose view (destiny and divine law view), the vital force view, the communal view, and the (Yoruba) Cluster view, as well as the more contemporary views such as living a religious life and the contemporary cluster view. (shrink)

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the recovery by western Christendom from the Arabs, Jews and Greeks of the metaphysical treatises of Aristotle, and their translation into Latin, caused a ferment in the intellectual world comparable to that produced by Darwin in the nineteenth century. To vindicate traditional methodoxy Albertus Magnus undertook to harmonize the doctrines of the Church with the Peripatetic philosophy, and this work was carried to its conclusion by his pupil, St Thomas Aquinas, with such success (...) that the latter has become the official philosopher of Roman Catholicism. The system of Aquinas centres in his conception of God, to the exposition and criticism of which this book is devoted. (shrink)

According to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism, God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent. This volume shows that philosophy of religion needs to take seriously alternative concepts of the divine, and demonstrates the considerable philosophical interest that they hold.

This article discusses the concept of God with a focus on the translation of God in the Chinese and Yoruba religious contexts. Translating the word God is of the essence when comparing concepts of god. The translation of the Christian God as Olodumare misrepresents the latter. As suggested by Africanists, there should be appropriate translations for God, Olodumare, and other African gods. As a preliminary comparative attempt, this article presents a case on the introduction of God to the Chinese people. (...) The translation of God into Chinese reflects different views regarding the correlation between the Christian God and the Chinese gods. (shrink)

According to the Standard Model account of religion, religious concepts tend to conform to “minimally counterintuitive” schemas. Laypeople may, to varying degrees, verbally endorse the abstract doctrines taught by professional theologians. But, outside the Sunday school exam room, the implicit representations that tend to guide people’s everyday thinking, feeling, and behavior are about minimally counterintuitive entities. According to the Standard Model, these implicit representations are the essential thing to be explained by the cognitive science of religion. It is argued here (...) that this theoretical orientation of mainstream CSR misses a whole dimension of religiosity—the acceptance of certain religious authorities, that is, the acceptance of other people’s superior expertise. Average believers tend to accept the authority of religious experts who espouse highly counterintuitive ideas that they understand in a distorted form, if at all.... (shrink)

Supernatural agent concepts are regarded as a defining trait of religion. The interaction of the minimally counterintuitive mnemonic effect and the hypersensitive agency detection device may be employed to explain the universal presence of concepts of gods and deities. Using the measure of free-recall, a broad model of cultural transmission investigated this pan-cultural transmission bias with a large age-representative sample in UK and China. Results were analyzed by four-way mixed ANOVA considering counterintuitiveness, familiarity, ontological category, and delay, and with age (...) as a covariate. A significant interaction of counterintuitiveness × HADD was found for both UK and China samples. These findings support assertions that supernatural agent concepts are more easily transmitted than other concepts because the present study finds that concepts similar to supernatural agents were more readily recalled. (shrink)

Three of the most venerable objections to anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine are traceable to Xenophanes and his critique of the early Greek gods. Though suitably revised, these ancient criticisms have persisted over the centuries, plaguing various religious communities, particularly those of classical Christian commitment. Xenophanes complained that anthropomorphism leads to unseemly characterizations, noting that both over the ages, the list of unseemly characteristics has expanded somewhat.

This article explores the various ways in which Muslims, in the past and the present, think about God. The article canvasses a range of views on questions and puzzles pertaining to the essence and attributes of God, the basis of God's Justice, the transcendence of God, and our ability to know and understand God. We encounter a diverse, and at times radically divergent range of views on how best to understand divinity within the tradition of Islam. Given the various (...) class='Hi'>conceptions of divinity, available within the tradition, I develop an argument for the view that God is best understood as love. The view that God is love, I contend, emerges directly from the Quran, which is a document that sits at the very heart of the Islamic tradition. (shrink)

During World War I, Bertrand Russell's outspoken pacifism resulted in his being committed to jail. When he entered the prison, he was met by the warden who showed himself to be quite ecumenical in his religious beliefs, as indicated by this anecdote: ‘I was much cheered on my arrival by the warder at the gate, who had to take particluars about me. He asked my religion and I replied “agnostic”. He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: (...) “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God”. This remark kept me cheerful about a week.’. (shrink)

CHAPTER I THE EARLY THOUGHT OF ROYCE The Religious Aspect of Philosophy was the first major work of Josiah Royce and it established his reputation as a ...

At the outset of this paper, a couple of clarifications are in order: first of all, I will be concerned with the origin of the concept of God, not with the origin of various anthropomorphic depictions or purported incarnations of God, such as Osiris, Christ, Zeus, Krishna, or Azura-Mazda. Secondly, by the adjective “phenomenological” I mean to differentiate this analysis from other approaches which have a legitimacy of their own—the anthropological approach which is concerned with the sociocultural emergence of the (...) notion of a divinity; the psychological approach which traces the God concept to responses to the environment or to inner needs, drives, or archetypes; the semantical approach which focuses on the problems of reference and denotation in god language; and so forth. That being said, however, I should also explain that I intend my approach to be “phenomenological” not in a kind of Husserlian sense, i.e., as concerned specifically with discovering certain a priori grounds for the notion of God in human subjectivity itself, but in a Kantian-Hegelian sense, which is somewhat wider. In this latter sense, “phenomenological” means “connected with the basic experience of subject-object distinction in consciousness, and with the exigencies, characteristics and/or dynamics of that distinction.”. (shrink)

There is a variety of concepts of the divine in the eastern and western theological and philosophical traditions. There is, however, not enough reflection on the logic behind concepts of God and their justification. I clarify some necessary and sufficient conditions any attempt to explicate a concept of God has to take into account. I argue that each concept of God is a cypher for a particular worldview and distinguishes three types of justification frequently used to bestow content on particular (...) concepts of God: philosophical, theological, and scientific. I turn to four fundamental models of the God–world relation and argue that the most promising concept of God is panentheistic, on which the universe is essentially divine but is not exhaustive of the divine being. (shrink)

This special issue of the Journal of Applied Logics deals with the logical aspects of the concept of God. It contains the following articles: Logic and the Concept of God, by Stanisław Krajewski and Ricardo Silvestre; Mathematical Models in Theology. A Buber-inspired Model of God and its Application to “Shema Israel”, by Stanisław Krajewski; Gödel’s God-like Essence, by Talia Leven; A Logical Solution to the Paradox of the Stone, by Héctor Hernández Ortiz and Victor Cantero; No New Solutions to the (...) Logical Problem of the Trinity, by Beau Branson; What Means ‘Tri-’ in ‘Trinity’ ? An Eastern Patristic Approach to the ‘Quasi-Ordinals’, by Basil Lourié; The Éminence Grise of Christology: Porphyry’s Logical Teaching as a Cornerstone of Argumentation in Christological Debates of the Fifth and Sixth Centruies, by Anna Zhyrkova; The Problem of Universals in Late Patristic Theology, by Dirk Krasmüller; Intuitionist Reasoning in the Tri-unitrian Theology of Nicolas of Cues, by Antonino Drago. (shrink)

In this book, the author considers the doctrine of ultimate reality - God - within five world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. By closely studying an orthodox writer in each tradition, the author builds up "pictures" of God and uncovers a common core of belief.

In this paper I will present some important ideas about the relation between religious experience and metaphysics in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy. This endeavor is significant for the topic from two points of view: firstly, Whitehead’s thinking is among the most comprehensive and widely extended from the 20th Century, the applications of his ‘speculative scheme’ covering issues from ecology, physics and the foundations of mathematics, to art and religion; secondly, the concept of ‘God’, with a meaning ascribed to it by (...) Whitehead in relation both with the history of philosophy and with his own ideas, plays a key-role in Process and Reality, his most important treatise. For Whitehead, religion is linked, broadly speaking, to the most intimate inner evolution of a human person. Although this assertion may seem trivial, in the context of his thinking, which defines terms such as ‘process’, ‘value’ or ‘satisfaction’ as essentially bounded with the evolution of any actual being, to associate a kind of experience, the religious one, to the fact itself of inner becoming conveys to this experience a fundamentally profound and inalienable metaphysical character. It is this character and ‘definiteness’ which I will describe and analyze. (shrink)

Het sublieme is fascinerend en verwarrend. Het maakt kunst tot Kunst, tekent verzet aan bij kitsch, McDonaldization en Disneyization, en kan een gecommercialiseerde samenleving humaniseren. 'God undercover' brengt een cultureel-maatschappelijk gesprek op gang door het fenomeen van het sublieme. Het sublieme is voor het eerst op noemer gebracht door de Griekse Longinus, tijdgenoot van Jezus - en heeft daarna steeds een rol gespeeld in het westerse denken. Doopsgezind em. predikant Herman Heijn integreert het sublieme in de theologie. Het sublieme kan (...) een door en door gecommercialiseerde samenleving humaniseren. Het doorbreekt patronen waarbij mensen als productiekrachten worden geïnstrumentaliseerd en als consumenten worden opgehemeld. Het sublieme blijkt 'undercover' aanwezig bij theologen, filosofen, kunstenaars en economen. Heijns synthese werpt een nieuw licht op de relatie tussen geloofsgemeenschappen en de samenleving."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Engaging recent developments within the bio-cultural study of religion, Shults unveils the evolved cognitive and coalitional mechanisms by which god-conceptions are engendered in minds and nurtured in societies. He discovers and attempts to liberate a radically atheist trajectory that has long been suppressed within the discipline of theology.

Constructing Moral Concepts of God in a Global Age sets aside arguments about God's existence and focuses on what people say and think about God. It offers a theological method, or step-by-step approach to exploring and, if warranted, reframing personal convictions about God and the worldviews shaped by those convictions. Since a moral God is more likely to foster a moral life, this method integrates an ethical check to ensure that conceptions of God and their associated worldviews are validly (...) moral. The proposed method builds on the work of 20th Century theologian Gordon Kaufman during the Kantian phase of his work. It anticipates a person-like God who hears prayers, loves without end, and comforts in times of hardship. To accommodate today's pluralistic and globalized world, the moral check integrated in the method is a widely-collaborative and vetted global ethic, the Parliament of the World's Religions "Declaration Towards a Global Ethic." This volume of constructive philosophical theology is written for seminary students, educators, clergy, study groups, and anyone interested in delving more deeply and systematically into understandings of God, whether their own or other understandings. (shrink)

Introduction -- The mathematical roots of the concept of analogy -- Aristotle : the uses of analogy -- Aristotle : analogy and language -- Thomas Aquinas -- Immanuel Kant -- Karl Barth -- Final reflections.

Medieval theories of ethics tended on the whole to regard self-perfection as the goal of human life. However there was profound disagreement, particularly in the late thirteenth century, over how exactly this was to be understood. Intellectualists such as Aquinas famously argued that human perfection lay primarily in coming to know the essence of God in the next life. Voluntarists such as the Franciscan John Peckham, by contrast, argued that ultimate perfection was to be achieved _in patria_ through the act (...) of loving God. The present article argues that Giles of Rome and Henry of Ghent defended a different sort of voluntarism with respect to the final destiny of human beings. Rather than claiming that the goal of human life lay in the perfection of the self, they argued instead that ultimate union with God was to be achieved mystically through an act of self-transcendence, which occurred through ecstasy or quasi-deification. (shrink)

Why should Gordon Kaufman's mid-career theological method be of renewed interest to contemporary theists? Two distinguishing characteristics of the West today are its increasing religious pluralism and the growing numbers of theists who rely on hybrid approaches to construct concepts of God. Kaufman's method is well suited to this current state of affairs because it is open to diverse religious and theological perspectives and to perspectives from science and secular humanism. It also militates against the weaknesses inherent to hybrid approaches—ad (...) hoc constructs of God unable to motivate their holders to overcome human self-centeredness and so to contribute to the well-being and fulfillment of others. It achieves this by providing checks to reduce the risk of producing human-writ-large God-constructs. Lastly, Kaufman's method provides criteria to help theists identify humane and humanizing experiences, relationships, concepts, images, and texts (i.e., the basic material from which God-constructs are fashioned) from the plethora of options available, whether religious, cultural, or secular. (shrink)