Self‐Directing Religious Coping: A Deistic God,Abandoning God,or No God at All?

Self-directing religious coping has been correlated with both positive and negative outcome variables in previous research. The purpose of this study was to explore the potential meaning behind these mixed findings by clarifying the nature of the self-directing religious coping construct. A new set of subscales was constructed that operationalized different aspects of the construct. This scale, the original Religious Problem Solving Scale, and mental-health measures were given to 262 undergraduate students at a moderate-sized midwestern university. Two factors were identified with the revised self-directing measure: a deistic and supportive but nonintervening God factor and an abandoning God factor. The Abandoning God Subscale was more highly correlated with the original Self-Directing Scale than was the deistic God measure. The Deistic and Supportive God Subscale was correlated with both positive and negative mental-health outcomes, whereas the abandoning God measure consistently related to poorer outcomes.     

Jonathan Edwards, God, and “particular minds”

Although philosophical theologians have sometimes claimed that human beings are necessarily dependent on God, few have developed the idea with any precision. Jonathan Edwards is a notable exception, providing a detailed and often novel account of humanity’s essential ontological, moral, and soteriological dependence on God.     

God knows (but does God believe?)

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (Noûs, forthcoming) report that a non-trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, we add further fuel to the fire, presenting the results of four new studies. Based on our results, we argue that the entailment thesis does not deserve the default status that it is typically granted. We conclude by considering the alternative account of knowledge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel propose to explain their results, arguing that it does not explain ours. In its place we offer a different explanation of both sets of findings—the conviction account, according to which belief, but not knowledge, requires mental assent.     

Incommensurability,incomparability, and God’s choice of a world

Anselmian theism holds that there necessarily exists a being, God, who is essentially unsurpassable in power, knowledge, goodness, and wisdom. This being is also understood to be the creator and sustainer of all that is. In contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, this role is generally understood as follows: God surveys the array of possible worlds, and in his wisdom selects exactly one for actualization, based on its axiological properties. In this paper, I discuss an under-appreciated challenge for this account of the Anselmian God’s selection of a world. In particular, I urge that there are failures of comparability between various possible worlds, and I argue that, given certain assumptions, these failures threaten the rationality of God’s choice of a world. To the extent that rationality is deemed necessary for unsurpassability, this result also challenges the core Anselmian notion that God is an unsurpassable being.     

God, Time and the Kalām Cosmological Argument

The Kalām cosmological argument deploys the following causal principle: whatever begins to exist has a cause. Yet, under what conditions does something ‘begin to exist’? What does it mean to say that ‘X begins to exist at t’? William Lane Craig has offered and defended various accounts that seek to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for when something ‘begins to exist.’ I argue that all of the accounts that William Lane Craig has offered fail on the following grounds: either they entail that God has a cause or they render the Kalām argument unsound. Part of the problem is due to Craig’s view of God’s relationship to time: that God exists timelessly without creation and temporarily with creation. The conclusion is that Craig must abandon either the Kalām argument or his view of God’s relationship to time; he cannot consistently hold both.     

God’s silence

Vagueness manifests itself (among other things) in our inability to find boundaries to the extension of vague predicates. A semantic theory of vagueness plans to justify this inability in terms of the vague semantic rules governing language and thought. According to a supporter of semantic theory, the inability to find such a boundary is not dependent on epistemic limits and an omniscient being like God would be equally unable. Williamson (Vagueness, 1994) argued that cooperative omniscient beings adequately instructed would find a precise boundary in a sorites series and that, for this reason, the semantic theory misses its target, while Hawthorne (Philosophical Studies 122:1–25, 2005) stood with the semantic theorists and argued that the linguistic behaviour of a cooperative omniscient being like God would clearly demonstrate that he does not find a precise boundary in the sorites series. I argue that Hawthorne’s definition of God’s cooperative behaviour cannot be accepted and that, contrary to what has been assumed by both Williamson and Hawthorne, an omniscient being like God cannot be a cooperative evaluator of a semantic theory of vagueness.     

God’s Melancholia

Donald Capps’s (Capps 1997, 2001, 2002a, b) male melancholia theory has been of interest to me during the past few years (Carlin 2003, 2006, 2007), and Capps (2004, 2007a, b) himself has been publishing more on the topic. In his psychobiographical book on Jesus, Capps (2000) notes that psychologists of religion have been reluctant to psychoanalyze Jesus, and here I note that even fewer have been willing to diagnose God, one recent exception being J. Harold Ellens (2007). In this article, I explore the melancholia issue further, this time applying the theory to God by means of theological concepts that deal with the Trinity and the passion of God. And while this article is playful (Pruyser 1974; cf. Dykstra 2001), the upshot is more serious: If men are incurably religious and melancholic, as Capps argues, and if men, by and large, are the creators of religion, wouldn’t one expect to find traces of this melancholy in religion, particularly in its sacred texts and doctrines? By identifying these tendencies in religion, especially in God, the pastoral psychologist, I believe, is helping contemporary Christian men—especially fathers and sons—recognize their own melancholy selves and, perhaps, helping them get along a little better.     

The ‘God beyond God’ in Fiction for Young People

In this article, the author focusses upon two major works of children's fiction which illustrate a post‐Christian concept of spirituality permeating common life. He shows how the narrative, imagery and ideas constitute a challenge to orthodox thought, not only about the way life is, but also about what children should know and think. The central thesis is that literature is the most effective medium for quickening those imaginative powers fundamental to dynamic engagement with ultimate questions, a thesis exemplified in the examination of these works.     

Is God an Aspect?

Neither logical deduction nor empirical induction is capable of mediating the dispute between religious disciples and non-disciples. The case is particularly acute when it comes to the divine Reality (God). Within Wittgenstein’s theoretical framework, some scholars start from the perspective of language games, contending that this dispute is meaningless and should be abandoned, while others are not satisfied with such a settlement and extend Wittgenstein’s aspect theory to religious issues, arguing that God is an aspect. The extension includes analogous and theoretical extensions. This article will show that even if these two extensions are successful, their interpretations with regard to the disputes between religious disciples and non-disciples are not convincing. Worse still, the extension from aspect theory to religious issues is by no means successful in proving that God is an aspect.     

Sartre’s Absent God

Sartre’s memoir Words turns on his mid-life realisation that, although he had abandoned belief in God, he had hitherto based his work on a religious model. From this point God no longer appears as a primary reference in his writings. This is in sharp contrast with the pervasive presence of God in earlier works, especially in his ontology and related reflections on ethics. In ontology Sartre was particularly concerned with the Cartesian idea of the creator God as ens causa sui. Adapting this to his own system, he uses the idea of causa sui to mark the absolute (but non-substantial) existence of for-itself being (consciousness) as separate from the uncreated plenitude of in-itself being. He then argues that the idea of God as a consciousness that founds its own being is an impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself. The idea nonetheless remains fundamental for consciousness, for desire, which arises in response to lack, ultimately the lack of in-itself being, reflects an original choice that leads to constant striving towards the impossible goal of being God. This theme haunts the ontology from beginning to end. Sartre offers a system to rival Descartes or Leibniz, but adopts a quasi-religious framework of salvation in which, apart from the promise of a possible escape from ontological destiny, human beings are condemned to futility. In ethics he explores the idea of conversion from original choice to an authentic choice of freedom, but fails to break out of the closed framework set by the ontology.     

Fool-proof proofs of God?

Summary Two claims have been explored, the first, that fool-proof proofs of the sort that there could be if there were a God like the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not to be expected, on good religious grounds (a claim I found wanting); and second, that there cannot be philosophical proofs of God which work beyond reasonable doubt.The argument that there cannot be philosophical proofs beyond a reasonable doubt is supported by an examination of some of the fundamental issues in the traditional discussions of proofs for God's existence, and by claims about the relativity of methodological rules to world-views which, I maintain, the traditional discussions indicate. I do not claim to have proved that relativity, only to have illustrated the claim that it is there.It is my further opinion, but I do not claim really to have proved it, that the failure of religious excuses for the lack of public demon strations constitutes a good reason for concluding that there is no God of the sort described as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; hence that if there is a God, it must be the God of the philosophers. However I admit that there might be sufficient hidden reasons which would offer persuasive excuses for the God of the ordinary believer.Lastly, I have made some comments about what I think is the more valuable way to view the proofs for God. Such an interpretation does justice to the otherwise baffling and continual philosophical disagreements better than rival theories. It is time we take these disagreements with utmost seriousness, and one can hardly do that while treating basic metaphysical arguments as fool-proof proofs.Readers of the literature on proofs will recognize many of the historical and current discussions on which comment is being made. To provide sources for all the comments would be not only cumbersome but impossible because they are found in so many different places and are not the property of any one in particular.