Results for 'Perfect Being Theology'

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  1. Why perfect being theology?Brian Leftow - 2011 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 69 (2):103-118.
    I display the historical roots of perfect being theology in Greco-Roman philosophy, and the distinctive reasons for Christians to take up a version of this project. I also rebut a recent argument that perfect-being reasoning should lead one to atheism.
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  2.  45
    Perfect Being Theology.Rogers Katherin A. Rogers - 2019 - Edinburgh University Press.
    That being than which a greater cannot be conceived.' This was the way in which the living God of biblical tradition was described by the great Medieval philosophers such as Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas.Contemporary philosophers find much to question, criticise and reject in the traditional analysis of that description. Some hold that the attributes traditionally ascribed to God - simplicity, necessity, immutability, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, creativity and goodness - are inherently incoherent individually, or mutually inconsistent. Others argue that the (...)
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  3. Augustinian perfect being theology and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.Edward Wierenga - 2011 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 69 (2):139-151.
    All of the ingredients for what has become known as Anselmian perfect being theology were present already in the thought of St. Augustine. This paper develops that thesis by calling attention to various claims Augustine makes. It then asks whether there are principled reasons for determining which properties the greatest possible being has and whether an account of what contributes to greatness can settle the question whether the greatest possible being is the same as the (...)
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  4.  81
    Is Perfect Being Theology Informative?Brian Leftow - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1):164-183.
    Jeff Speaks has recently argued that perfect being theology treating God as the greatest possible being—he calls it alethic perfect being theology—cannot deliver new information about God. This argument is central to his critique of all forms of perfect being theology. For as Speaks sees it, other forms of perfect being theology may collapse into alethic perfect being theology, i.e. fail in the end to (...)
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  5.  79
    Perfect Being Theology and Modal Truth.Jeff Speaks - 2016 - Faith and Philosophy 33 (4):465-473.
    In 'Perfection and possibility,' Brian Leftow responded to some of the arguments given in my 'The method of perfect being theology.' I argue here that Leftow's defense of the perfect being theologian is unsuccessful, and consider the prospects of perfect being theology more generally.
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  6.  49
    Perfect Being Theology and Analogy.Gregory R. P. Stacey - 2021 - American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1):21-48.
    Thomas Williams has argued that the doctrine of univocity is true and salutary. Such a claim is frequently contested, particularly in regard to the property—if there be any such—of existence or being. Inspired by the thought of Francisco Suárez, I outline a way of understanding the thesis of the analogy of being that avoids the criticisms levelled by Williams and others against analogy. I further suggest that the metaphysically committed version of univocal predication favoured by many analytic philosophers (...)
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  7. The Method of Perfect Being Theology.Jeff Speaks - 2014 - Faith and Philosophy 31 (3):256-266.
    Perfect being theology is the attempt to decide questions about the nature of God by employing the Anselmian formula that God is the greatest possible being. One form of perfect being theology—recently defended by Brian Leftow in God and Necessity—holds that we can decide between incompatible claims that God is F and that God is not F by asking which claim would confer more greatness on God, and then using the formula that God (...)
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  8.  26
    Perfect Being Theology.Mark Owen Webb - 1997 - In Charles Taliaferro & Philip L. Quinn, A Companion to Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 225–234.
    This chapter contains sections titled: History Contemporary Problems Conclusion Works cited.
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  9. Perfect Being Theology.Thomas Morris - 1987 - Noûs 21 (1):19-30.
  10.  52
    Objective Morality and Perfect Being Theology: Three Views.Daniel A. Dombrowski - 2008 - American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 29 (2):205 - 221.
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  11. Divine Forgetting and Perfect Being Theology.Christopher Willard-Kyle - 2023 - Faith and Philosophy 40 (3):404–429.
    I sympathetically explore the thesis that God literally forgets sins. I articulate some altruistic God might have for forgetting certain sins. If so, then God may have altruistic reasons to relinquish a great-making trait (omniscience). But according to traditional Anselmian perfect being theology, God is necessarily perfect and so incapable of acting on these altruistic reasons. More broadly, a God who necessarily has all the perfections is a God who is incapable of making a certain kind (...)
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  12. Anselm's perfect being theology.Brian Leftow - 2004 - In The Cambridge Companion to Anselm. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 132--156.
     
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  13. Two (or Maybe One and a Half) Cheers for Perfect Being Theology.William Wainwright - 2009 - Philo 12 (2):228-251.
    In a series of influential articles published in the 1980s, Thomas Morris argued that the most promising approach to many issues in the philosophy of religion is “perfect being theology.” A philosopher who adopts it begins by construing God as a maximally perfect being and then fills the conception in by using his or her modal intuitions and intuitions concerning what properties are and are not perfections. While I am sympathetic with Morris’s program, two aspects (...)
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  14. Why the One Cannot Have Parts: Plotinus on Divine Simplicity, Ontological Independence, and Perfect Being Theology.Caleb M. Cohoe - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (269):751-771.
    I use Plotinus to present absolute divine simplicity as the consequence of principles about metaphysical and explanatory priority to which most theists are already committed. I employ Phil Corkum’s account of ontological independence as independent status to present a new interpretation of Plotinus on the dependence of everything on the One. On this reading, if something else (whether an internal part or something external) makes you what you are, then you are ontologically dependent on it. I show that this account (...)
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  15. “Re-envisioning a Caitanya Vaiṣṇava ‘Perfect Being Theology’ and Demonstrating Its Theodical Implications”.Akshay Gupta - 2020 - Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 1 (33):42-52.
    Popular imaginations and receptions of Hinduism often neglect to consider its theological dimensions that conceive of the divine reality along conceptual pathways analogous to those of the major Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Thus, within Western scholarship, there have been no systematic attempts to delineate central doxastic elements within the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition by suggesting correlations with distinctive Christian concepts, and this scholarly lacuna within Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism restricts comparative theological dialogue between Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism and Christianity. In order to address this lacuna, I (...)
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  16.  22
    Free Will and Classical Theism: The Significance of Freedom in Perfect Being Theology.Hugh J. McCann (ed.) - 2016 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
    The articles in the present collection deal with the religious dimension of the problem of free will. All of the papers also have implications for broader philosophical and theological issues, and will thus be of interest to a wide variety of scholars, both religious and secular. Together they provide a historical and contemporary overview of problems in the theology of freedom, together with recent work by some important philosophers in the field aimed at resolving those problems. The chapters are (...)
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  17.  93
    A Proposal to Change the Tradition of Perfect Being Theology.Jeanine Diller - 1999 - Southwest Philosophy Review 15 (1):233-240.
  18.  36
    Hugh McCann, ed. Free Will and Classical Theism: The Significance of Freedom in Perfect Being Theology.Daniel Speak - 2019 - Journal of Analytic Theology 7 (1):759-764.
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  19. Hugh J. McCann (ed.), Free will and Classical Theism: The Significance of Freedom in Perfect Being Theology[REVIEW]Garrett Pendergraft - 2017 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 16.
    This volume collects a set of papers that were presented at a conference on “Big Questions in Free Will,” held at the University of Saint Thomas in October of 2014. It is dedicated to its editor, who passed away shortly after completing the manuscript. I will briefly summarize each of the 11 chapters and then offer a few critical comments.
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  20.  78
    Why the Perfect Being Theologian Cannot Endorse the Principle of Alternative Possibilities.Samuel Director - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (4):113-131.
    I argue that perfect being theologians cannot endorse the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. On perfect being theology, God is essentially morally perfect, meaning that He always acts in a morally perfect manner. I argue that it is possible that God is faced with a situation in which there is only one morally perfect action, which He must do. If this is true, then God acts without alternative possibilities in this situation. Yet, unless (...)
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  21.  95
    Perfect being ethics.Richard E. Creel - 2008 - Think 6 (17-18):173-186.
    In a 1987 paper Thomas Morris introduced the phrase ‘perfect being theology’ and argued that in our efforts to construct an adequate theistic conception of God the most fruitful procedure will be for us to engage in reflection and dialogue about what a maximally perfect being would be like . To some of us that approach seems so obvious as to be without a significant alternative, but there are other approaches that have been followed – (...)
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  22.  41
    Perfect Being Attacked! Jeff Speaks’s The Greatest Possible Being[REVIEW]Brian Leftow - 2021 - Faith and Philosophy 38 (2):262-273.
    Jeff Speaks’s The Greatest Possible Being criticizes several sorts of perfect being theology. I show that his main discussions target what are really idealizations of actual perfect-being projects. I then focus on whether Speaks’s idealizations match up with the real historical article. I argue that, in one key respect, they do not and that it would be uncharitable to think that one of them does. If the idealizations do not represent what perfect (...) thinkers have actually been doing, a question arises about how much Speaks’s critique should worry those pursuing projects modelled on real historical perfect being theology. (shrink)
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  23. The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings. [REVIEW]Greg Welty - 2011 - Faith and Philosophy 28 (4):451-456.
    This is a book review of Michael Almeida, The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings (New York: Routledge, 2008).
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  24. Miracles and the Perfection of Being: The Theological Roots of Scientific Concepts.Alex V. Halapsis - 2016 - Anthropological Measurements of Philosophical Research 9:70-77.
    Purpose of the article is to study the Western worldview as a framework of beliefs in probable supernatural encroachment into the objective reality. Methodology underpins the idea that every cultural-historical community envisions the reality principles according to the beliefs inherent to it which accounts for the formation of the unique “universes of meanings”. The space of history acquires the Non-Euclidean properties that determine the specific cultural attitudes as well as part and parcel mythology of the corresponding communities. Novelty consists in (...)
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  25.  19
    Promethean Metaphysics: The Idea of a More Perfect Being in Descartes's Discourse on Method.John F. Cornell - 2018 - Review of Metaphysics 72 (1):77-99.
    The proofs of the existence of God in part 4 of Descartes’s Discourse on Method may yet surprise us. These arguments appear to be crafted with such ambiguity that their deeper import has rarely been suspected. This essay proposes that, in spite of the text’s conventional appearance, Descartes exposes the error of scholastic metaphysics, namely, that it mistakes the perfectibility of the human mind for a transcendent perfect being. Superficially, the thinker’s “idea of a more perfect (...)” serves to ground the traditional theology; but surreptitiously, this idea refers to human possibility and supplies the metaphysical basis for scientific progress, freed from theology altogether. This ironic result is obtained not by speculating on Descartes’s irony directly, but by submitting the “idea of a more perfect being” itself to the Cartesian test of truth and falsehood. In that light, the text’s proofs of God reveal their skeptical, philanthropic intent. (shrink)
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  26. Being Perfect is Not Necessary for Being God.Jeanine Diller - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (2):43-64.
    Classic perfect being theologians take ‘being perfect’ to be conceptually necessary and sufficient for being God. I argue that this claim is false because being perfect is not conceptually necessary for being God. I rest my case on a simple thought experiment inspired by an alternative I developed to perfect being theology that I call “functional theology.” My findings, if correct, are a boon for theists since if it (...)
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  27. Leibniz on Substance and God in “That a Most Perfect Being Is Possible”.Nicholas Okrent - 2000 - Philosophy and Theology 12 (1):79-93.
    Leibniz used Descartes’ strict notion of substance in “That a Most Perfect being is Possible” to characterize God but did not intend to undermine his own philosophical views by denying that there are created substances. The metaphysical view of substance in this passage is Cartesian. A discussion of radical substance without any sort of denial in the possibility of other substances does not indicate Spinozism. If this interpretation is correct, then the passage is neither anomalous nor mysterious. There (...)
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  28.  74
    Nowhere Men and Divine I’s: Feminist Epistemology, Perfect Being Theism, and the God’s-Eye View.Amber Griffioen - 2021 - Journal of Analytic Theology 9:1-25.
    This paper employs tools and critiques from analytic feminist scholarship in order to show how particular values commonly on display in analytic theology have served both to marginalize certain voices from the realm of analytic theological debate and to reinforce a particular conception of the divine—one which, despite its historical roots, is not inevitable. I claim that a particular conception of what constitutes a “rational, objective, analytic thinker” often displays certain affinities with those infinite or maximal properties that analytic (...)
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  29. An Advocacy of the Homo Theologicus: Theologal Thinking and Being Toward Meaning.Inti Yanes - forthcoming - International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society.
    Human being is essentially a homo theologicus. Its thinking is a theologal way of being. The origin of theological thinking is the onto-existential condition of man as being in the world toward the Transcendence through death in the quest for Meaning. Transcendence is the perfect union of the ontological (Being) and the epistemological (Meaning) in an analogical relationship with the identity between “kalon” and “agathon” as present in Plato. There is an essential correspondence between (...) and Meaning that has ontological preeminence over the correspondence between Being and time. The present paper examines Heidegger’s main onto-existential categories in the horizon opened by E. Stein and V. Frankl. A critical approach to Heidegger’s anthropological ontology is carried out aiming to develop a theandric ontology of Dasein. A provisional general definition of the homo theologicus is acquired, in which human being is thought of as thankful thinking in the perpetual celebration of Meaning. (shrink)
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  30. Analytic Philosophical Theology and the recovery of metaphysics. An interview with Brian Leftow.Agustín Echavarria & Martin Montoya - 2016 - Anuario Filosófico 49 (3):663-679.
    In this interview Prof. Brian Leftow answers questions concerning the causes of the emergence of Analytic Philosophical Theology within the analytic tradition; the advantages of maintaining the traditional picture of perfect being theology with regards to divine attributes; his conception about the origin of necessary truths; the problem of evil; and the importance for universities of investing in research on philosophical theology.
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  31.  8
    Anthropomorphism and Mystery.David M. Holley - 2009 - In Meaning and Mystery: What It Means to Believe in God. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 109–128.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Mental Toolkits God as Personal Agent Anthropomorphism Perfect Being Theology Do Words Apply? Alternatives to God as Agent God as Object and Subject Notes.
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  32.  18
    Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ by Alexis Torrance (review).Joshua H. Lim - 2023 - Nova et Vetera 21 (1):373-381.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ by Alexis TorranceJoshua H. LimHuman Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ by Alexis Torrance, Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), ix + 239 pp.As a part of the series Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology, Alexis Torrance's Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology examines (...)
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  33.  13
    Being Perfect: A Lutheran Perspective on Moral Formation.Ian A. McFarland - 2020 - Studies in Christian Ethics 33 (1):15-26.
    Jennifer Herdt argues that Luther’s account of human ethical action implies an absolute passivity before God that both leads to psychological paralysis and fails to appreciate the non-competitive nature of the relationship between divine and human agency. This article argues that neither accusation can be sustained. Not only does Luther’s work lack any evidence of the paralysis Herdt ascribes to him, but Luther’s understanding of the relationship between divine and human action reflects a more theologically persuasive understanding of the distinct (...)
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  34. God in the Gap: Rethinking Divine Gender and Moving Toward Reconciliation.Hamid Nourbakhshi - forthcoming - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.
    In this paper, I explore how Christian theology grapples with whether God has a gender—or if God transcends gender altogether—and how these perspectives influence both doctrine and worship. Many theologians insist on referring to God as exclusively masculine, while feminist and egalitarian voices challenge this practice, claiming that an overtly gendered God can conflict with the ideals of equality and with the principle of the imago Dei. After examining the socio-linguistic and historical factors behind the predominance of masculine divine (...)
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  35.  31
    Theology (Kalām) in Terms of al-Fārābī’s Metaphysics of Perfection.Rıza Tevfik Kalyoncu - 2023 - Kader 21 (1):246-269.
    This article is about the place of kalām (theology) within the general structure of al-Fārābī's metaphysics. In this framework, the article consists of two parts. The first part examines the position of metaphysics within the framework of al-Fārābī's idea of perfection. In the second part, a close reading of al-Fārābī's al-Ibāna ʿan ġarażi Arisṭuṭālīs fī kitābi mā baʿda al-ṭabīʿa is made and al-Fārābī's approach to the theoretical aspect of theology within the theory of milla is analyzed. Since al-Fārābī's (...)
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  36. Towards a Buddhist Theism.Davide Andrea Zappulli - 2023 - Religious Studies 59 (4):762-774.
    My claim in this article is that the thesis that Buddhism has no God, insofar as it is taken to apply to Buddhism universally, is false. I defend this claim by interpreting a central text in East-Asian Buddhism – The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna – through the lenses of perfect being theology (PBT), a research programme in philosophy of religion that attempts to provide a description of God through a two-step process: (1) defining God in terms (...)
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  37.  49
    The life of faith as a work of art: a Rabbinic theology of faith.Samuel Lebens - 2017 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (1-2):61-81.
    This paper argues that God, despite his Perfection, can have faith in us. The paper includes exegesis of various Midrasihc texts, so as to understand the Rabbinic claim that God manifested faith in creating the world. After the exegesis, the paper goes on to provide philosophical motivation for thinking that the Rabbinic claim is consistent with Perfect Being Theology, and consistent with a proper analysis of the nature of faith. Finally, the paper attempts to tie the virtue (...)
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  38. Can God be free?: Rowe's dilemma for theology.William Hasker - 2005 - Religious Studies 41 (4):453-462.
    In his book, Can God Be Free?, William Rowe has argued that if God is unsurpassably good He cannot be free; if He is free, He cannot be unsurpassably good. After following the discussion of this topic through a number of historical figures, Rowe focuses on the recent and contemporary debate. A key claim of Rowe's is that, if there exists an endless series of better and better creatable worlds, then the existence of a morally perfect creator is impossible. (...)
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  39.  11
    Being Exalted: An A Priori Argument for the Trinity.Harry James Moore - forthcoming - Sophia:1-23.
    This paper presents an original a priori argument for the existence of the Holy Trinity. The argument is based on the notion of exaltation. It will be argued that ‘being exalted’ is a great-making property, and that a divine individual, as possessing all such properties, must also possess the property of ‘being exalted’. For a divine individual to possess this property, a second divine individual must exalt the first, since only in this way do we avoid both the (...)
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  40. The Theological Interpretation of Myth.Edward P. Butler - 2005 - Pomegranate 7 (1):27-41.
    This article seeks in the Platonic philosophers of late antiquity insights applicable to a new discipline, the philosophy of Pagan religion. An impor¬tant element of any such discipline would be a method of mythological hermeneutics that could be applied cross-culturally. The article draws par¬ticular elements of this method from Sallust and Olympiodorus. Sallust’s five modes of the interpretation of myth (theological, physical, psychical, material and mixed) are discussed, with one of them, the theological, singled out for its applicability to all (...)
     
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  41. Moral perfection.Laura Garcia - 2008 - In Thomas P. Flint & Michael Rea, The Oxford handbook of philosophical theology. New York: Oxford University Press.
    In the 1970s, Alvin Plantinga made use of the Anselmian concept of God to develop a modal version of Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence. His definition describes the God of perfect-being theology as one that exists necessarily and is essentially omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect, and this definition has become standard in discussions about the nature and existence of the God of western theism. Hence, these discussions operate with a relatively thin conception of God, since (...)
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  42.  11
    Five Types of Theologies.John R. Shook - 2010 - In The God debates: a 21st century guide for atheists and believers (and everyone in between). Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 30–46.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Categorizing Theologies Theology From The Scripture Theology From The World Theology Beyond The World Theology In The Know Theology Into The Myst.
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  43.  14
    The Perfect Human Being in Sohrawardi’s Illuminative Thought and Farabi’s Philosophical System: A Comparative Study of the “Qutb” and the “Ideal Ruler”.Tahereh Kamalizadeh & Muhammad Kamalizadeh - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 25 (4):135-162.
    Thoughts and theoretical reflections about “governance” in Islamic society, whether theorizing about the desired structure of government or describing the characteristics of an ideal ruler, is one of the most important topics studied in the field of political thought and philosophy in Islam, to which great names such as Farabi, etc. are connected. In this context, this research, through a comparative approach, seeks to examine and analyze the views of Farabi and Sohrawardi about the ideal ruler from the perspective of (...)
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  44.  36
    Natural theology in eastern religions.Iessica Frazier - 2013 - In J. H. Brooke, F. Watts & R. R. Manning, The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology. Oxford Up. pp. 166.
    This chapter examines natural theology perspectives from Eastern religions. It begins by exploring the possibility of a broader definition of ‘natural theology’ that encompasses the various forms it takes outside the Abrahamic religions. The chapter then considers the ways in which Eastern natural theologies can offer answers to Western questions, by focusing on Hindu approaches to the causal argument. Hindu conceptions of the divine provide a glimpse of what the options would be if the West had not decided (...)
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  45.  95
    The role of theology in current evolutionary reasoning.Paul A. Nelson - 1996 - Biology and Philosophy 11 (4):493-517.
    A remarkable but little studied aspect of current evolutionary theory is the use by many biologists and philosophers of theological arguments for evolution. These can be classed under two heads: imperfection arguments, in which some organic design is held to be inconsistent with God's perfection and wisdom, and homology arguments, in which some pattern of similarity is held to be inconsistent with God's freedom as an artificer. Evolutionists have long contended that the organic world falls short of what one might (...)
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  46.  76
    Theological necessity.George N. Schlesinger - 1997 - Religious Studies 33 (1):55-65.
    Anselm begins his famous ontological argument by describing God as the being greater than which none is conceivable. His description seems coherent and intelligible. Consequently a divine being thus described may be spoken of as existing in the understanding. But if so, He must actually exist as well, otherwise a being greater than Him could possibly exist, namely, one of whom the additional great-making-term ‘actual existence’ may also be predicated. The result would be a contradiction, for we (...)
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  47.  1
    Divine disclosures: religious experiences as evidence in theology.Hugh D. P. Burling - 2023 - Leuven: Peeters.
    Are religious experiences evidence about God's nature? How should we judge between two religious experiences with conflicting contents, when both have passed the tests we would normally use to sort reliable from misleading experiences? Divine Disclosures argues that the best arguments for skepticism about religious experience stem from a lack of a good answer to the second question, and sets out to devise and defend a method for evaluating religious experiences in a way that avoids charges of vicious circularity and (...)
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  48.  20
    Ethico-Theology without Postulates: Questioning the Prehistory of Kant’s Philosophical Theology.Andrey K. Sudakov - 2020 - RUDN Journal of Philosophy 24 (4):637-656.
    According to the prevailing opinion of the Kantian scholars, Kants critique of the traditional philosophical theology in the chapter of his Critique of Pure Reason dedicated to the ideal of reason motivated his rejection of transcendental theology in favor of a construction foundeв on postulates of reason. An examination of Kants sistematics of philosophical-theological disciplines reveals nonetheless some changeability of the borderlines of transcendental theology. This means that Kants critical arguments do not necessarily affect all kinds of (...)
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  49.  59
    How Can We Be Nothing? The Concept of Nonbeing in Athanasius and Maximus the Confessor.Emma Brown Dewhurst - 2017 - Analogia: The Pemptousia Journal for Theological Dialogue 2 (1):29-34.
    For Athanasius, non-being describes the original state of creatures, and the state that creatures return to when they are not sustained by God. ‘Being’ is a gift given to creatures. Sin, for Athanasius, is creaturely rejection of God and therefore rejection of being itself. This implies that when we sin, humans fall into nothingness and cease to exist, leading to the implication that fallen human nature and personal sin should result in our immediate non-existence. In this paper (...)
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  50. Digital Theology: Is the Resurrection Virtual?Eric Steinhart - 2012 - In Morgan Luck, Philosophical Explorations of New and Alternative Religious Movements. Ashgate. pp. 133 - 152.
    Many recent writers have developed a rich system of theological concepts inspired by computers. This is digital theology. Digital theology shares many elements of its eschatology with Christian post-millenarianism. It promises a utopian perfection via technological progress. Modifying Christian soteriology, digital theology makes reference to four types of immortality. I look critically at each type. The first involves transferring our minds from our natural bodies to superior computerized bodies. The second and third types involve bringing into (...) a previously living person, or person who has never existed, within an artificial digital environment. The fourth involves promotion of our lives into some higher level computational reality. (shrink)
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