If God Exists is Murder Immoral To assert that murder is immoral because God exists is to connect a number of dots, albeit logically, that nonetheless requires discussion in order to be properly understood. As Immanuel Kant points out, God is viewed Continue Reading...
Deity of Christ in the Gospel of John In John's Gospel, the term Son of God is used very frequently but people do not derive the spirituality of Jesus from this title, in fact they refer this title to the messianic position of Jesus. Such a belief h Continue Reading...
If we were to consider it a philosophical argument, then we would understand that Anselm is trying to convince us of the validity of his thesis. If we were to look at it as a personal declaration of faith, then we are likely to detect no persuasion Continue Reading...
Hume and the Lack of a Causal Link Between Our Known Experiences and the Existence of a Supreme Being The "here and now": That is what concerns David Hume. There is simply no value in discussing such amorphous intangibles as one can infer from "the Continue Reading...
Aquinas and His "Five Ways," an Expression of Assumed Faith The Five Ways of the existence of God, penned by the famed Thomas Aquinas are reported to be some of the most practical and real philosophical arguments of the existence of God. Though they Continue Reading...
Republic, Plato's allegory of the cave is included as a way of describing the path from ignorance to enlightenment. Plato describes a group of people chained inside a cave, who cannot see anything except for the shadows cast on the wall in front of Continue Reading...
He states that "there is never, within Scripture itself, an attempt to prove the existence of God; if proving God's existence were demanded of all believers; one might expect to find at least one of the believers in the Bible discussing theistic arg Continue Reading...
Mind-Based Identity: A Problem Impossible to Ignore One of the most basic questions of human existence is essentially "What am I?" Although humans have known in varying degrees throughout recorded history that they are biological beings, there has Continue Reading...
Jesus' Teachings, Prayer, & Christian Life "He (Jesus) Took the Bread. Giving Thanks Broke it. And gave it to his Disciples, saying, 'This is my Body, which is given to you.'" At Elevation time, during Catholic Mass, the pr Continue Reading...
This is pantheism defined cinematically. Pantheism is a departure from Christianity or other theisms as it does not have at its center a God, but suggests that all things, people, animals, creatures, elements, are of the collective; that the collec Continue Reading...
Descartes If a person were to take a can of Red Pop, and another can of 7 Up, and pour these two similar liquids into a common container, the outcome would be a homogeneous mixture of sweet, sparkly red soda. However, if the mixture of the two sodas Continue Reading...
There are further characterizations of God's perfection as a deity, and these include: (1) infinity; (2) unity; (3) simple; and (4) divine. These characteristics, identified by Toner, are evidences that show how monotheism as an idea differs from du Continue Reading...
Ethics On the surface, both ethical relativism and ethical egotism are appealing theories. The ethical relativist avoids many of the problems that arise from encounters with different moral codes, and can help to eliminate some of the culture clashe Continue Reading...
Andre Schwarz-Bart. Translated by: Stephen Becker. New York: Atheneum Publishers. 1960. 374 pages. The Last of the Just is a work of fiction that focuses on an old Hebrew legend of a group of men destined by God to be the culmination of the hearts Continue Reading...
The problem of evil refers to the existence of evil in the world. If God is good, why does He permit evil to occur? Ivan takes the question a bit further by putting it this: he can understand evil happening to those who deserve it, who are not good&m Continue Reading...
Foundation for Faith Review Summary A Foundation for Faith: An Introductory Study of Systematic Theology with References to the Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 by Stanford E. Murrell, Th.D., is a massive work consisting of 6 parts. Continue Reading...
Of course Marx and Russell are radically different on certain aspects of materialism in the physical world. Indeed, Russell spent volumes on taking issue with various aspects of Marx's dialectical materialism (Ironside, 1996, p. 26). Russell comes f Continue Reading...
Initially St. Augustine favoured the dualistic view that evil was external and separate from the world and mankind that in evident from the Manichean worldview. However, he was later to reject this strict dualism and taker another view of the natur Continue Reading...
Pascal's View Of The Heart Pascal seemed, on the surface to make one of the most famous reasoned and calculated defenses of Western Christian philosophy when the French thinker made his 'wager' that it was better to suppose that God existed, rather Continue Reading...
Moral Philosophy Ethical Theories on Animals. The treatment of animals has historically evolved along with human beings' changing views of them. A number of theories trace this changing treatment to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic times when people exer Continue Reading...
Sensory experiences are nor reliable for making any statements, since people often mistake one thing for another. (Descartes talks about mirages). Knowledge based on reasoning is not always trustworthy, because people often make mistakes. (adding nu Continue Reading...
Philosophy (general) Given that experience is argued to be the foundation of knowledge (according to Locke) how - if at all - does Locke make room for what Leibniz would call 'necessary truths'? Gottfried Leibniz made many criticisms of the work of Continue Reading...
Ideals of Fantasy and Reality According to Descarte and Hume This paper considers what is real and what is fantasy by understanding the ideals of philosophers such as Descarte and Hume. Bibliography cites seven sources. The reality of croquet and t Continue Reading...
Priori vs. A Posteriori An Analysis of Morality via A Priori and A Posterior Reasoning As Thomas Reid indicates, the terms a priori and a posteriori have undergone a disignification in modern times: "Previously to Kant the terms a priori and a pos Continue Reading...
For Marx, of course, economics and class conflicts were the base of society, and social change proceeded through revolutions, such as the French, American and English Revolutions against feudalism in the 17th and 18th Centuries. In the future, capit Continue Reading...
Freud makes it clear in one of his letters that he is atheist, though he denies attacking Christianity directly, but as a default to attacking Judaism, which was his faith of birth. It can be called an attack on religion only in so far as any scien Continue Reading...
One of the arguments made by atheists against the existence of God is that there is just no hard, empirical evidence for His existence. Everything ultimately comes down to faith. One believes because one wants to believe—one has faith in God. W Continue Reading...
Worldviews Remification Of Worldviews Mortimer j.Alder an American philosopher an intellect and a person of remarkable wisdom did not believe that education should be determined by social engineering but unchanging standards of truth. What Alder Continue Reading...
geniuses, history will never even be aware that most people even lived at all, much less that their lives had any real purpose, meaning or worth. All ideas of human equality and natural rights are just pious little myths and fables, since only a han Continue Reading...
Personal Theory Self-Exploration When will you begin that long journey into yourself? One of the most famous philosophers in history of mankind, Rumi emphasized on exploring or discovering one self. Self-exploration is one of the fundamentals of p Continue Reading...
philosopher Rene Descartes can be regarded as the supreme rationalist. Descartes believed that only through our rational minds could we fully know God and find evidence of God. Empirical knowledge was not sufficient justification to prove the existe Continue Reading...
William James, Clifford, And Belief William James' "The Will to Believe" was written in response to an essay on religious belief by William Kingdon Clifford. It is worth noting that James himself was a distinguished scholar, and sometime experimente Continue Reading...
Man as a Manifesto of Rationalism The English Restoration of 1660 delineates a dramatic transition in British literature from writing that is elegant, expressive, and often sentimental to prose and poetry that embraces simple, lucid, classical form Continue Reading...
William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice presents an almost unimaginably terrible moral dilemma to the reader. In the novel, the character Sophie and her two children are taken to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Nazi purge of the Jews Continue Reading...
Metaphysical Methods of Inquiry The philosopher Rene Descartes adopted what he called a 'metaphysical' or rationalist approach to understanding the world and the relationship of the human to the divine. In contrast to a physical approach a 'meta-ph Continue Reading...
The popularization of the idea, though was somewhat linguistic in that when speaking of God and the Holy Spirit, different words were used that could mean "person," "nature," "essence," or "substance," -- words that were part of a longer, and far ol Continue Reading...
Philosophy The roots of modern philosophy lie in Greek philosophy, which was based on logic, metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. Modern philosophy began with the works of philosopher Rene Descartes, who founded and led the intellectual revolution Continue Reading...
This can occur without any human intervention. Therefore the issue of permanence becomes incomprehensible to man, regardless of science and logic (or perhaps because of it). As such, we cannot legitimately claim that any object or form is "real" bec Continue Reading...
Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir on Freedom, Being-for-Others, And Sartrean Despair Simone de Beauvoir and JP Sartre were two famous existentialists that converged and diverged on various concepts. These included the existentialist concepts o Continue Reading...
