CAN CHRISTIAN TALK ABOUT GOD BE LITERAL?

This article discusses whether Christian talk about God can be literal. First, it is argued that the meaning of a word cannot be reduced to its use, that metaphorical language is indirect in its use of words, and that the change of meaning of a word by analogical extension differs from the change of meaning by repeated metaphorical use. Next, it is shown that in Christian talk about God, God can be literally referred to by God's proper name, “YHWH,” and by words that in contexts of prayer and praise function as proper names. Then it is argued that terms for non‐basic actions can be literally applied to the Christian God, and that some of God's essential properties can be literally described on the basis of his self‐revealing actions.     

语言与儿童心理理论关系的一种新观点

语言与心理理论的关系是儿童研究领域的研究者们长期探讨的话题,大量的实验结果表明二者的确存在密切的关系,但具体机制尚未弄清。该文介绍了探讨二者关系的一种新思路,即把心理理论重铸为对认知灵活性的测量,来考察语言在心理理论中的作用。文中介绍了语言的标签效应对认知灵活性影响的实验证据,并预期了在心理理论任务中使用语言标签可能出现的结果。     

《上帝是幻觉》

该书批判了宗教教条、历代对上帝存在的一些论证，试图为无神论建立一个科学框架。该书认为“上帝假说”同任何假说一样，应该受到人们怀疑性分析和批判；驳斥了“没有上帝，人们就没有道德”；并肯定了美国哲学家R·Pirsig的观点：“当一个人出现一种幻觉的时候，叫做精神失常；当许多人出现一种幻觉的时候，叫做宗教。”     

WORSHIPPING AN UNKNOWN GOD

This paper examines the religious tradition of ‘negative theology’, and argues that it is doubtful whether it leaves room for belief in God at all. Three theologians belonging in different degrees to this tradition are discussed, namely John Scotus Eriugena, Anselm of Canterbury and Nicolas of Cusa, and it is argued that all three, in maintaining the ineffability of God, reach positions that are in effect forms of agnosticism. There is a paradox here: if God is inconceivable, is it not self‐refuting to talk about him at all, even to state his inconceivability? The final part of the paper examines the work of the nineteenth‐century poet Arthur Hugh Clough, two of whose poems, Hymnos Aumnos, and Qui Laborat Orat, explore the paradox of talking about the inconceivable Godhead. Clough gives eloquent expression to the idea that leaving God unnamed is not equivalent to disowning him. There is room for a devout agnosticism.     

FORGIVENESS WITHOUT GOD?

Of the many forgiveness‐related questions that she takes up in her novels, the one with which Iris Murdoch wrestles most often is the question, “Is forgiveness possible without God?” The aim of this essay is to show, in the first instance, why the question Murdoch persistently raises is a question worth asking. Alongside this primary aim stands a secondary one, which is to consider how one might glean moral insights from the Christian tradition even if one does not (any longer) endorse its theological commitments.     

GOD IN THE CAVE

When Finite and Infinite Goods was published in 1999, it took its place as one of the few major statements of a broadly Augustinian ethical philosophy of the past century. By “broadly Augustinian” I refer to the disposition to combine a Platonic emphasis on a transcendent source of value with a traditionally theistic emphasis on the value‐creating capacities of absolute will. In the form that this disposition takes with Robert Merrihew Adams, it is the resemblance between divine and a finite excellence that makes the finite excellence objectively of value, and it is the correspondence of an obligation to a divine command that makes the obligation objectively obligatory. I look closely at the complexity of this ethical division of labor—between the good and the right—mainly as it appears in the context of Finite and Infinite Goods, but also with attention to the broader corpus of Adams's writings, particularly his work on Leibniz and the essays of his that have been gathered together in The Virtue of Faith. I argue that there is a creative tension in his work between his desire to secure an objective basis for ethics and his affirmation of the value of grace, a love that is not proportioned to the excellence of its object. This tension, I further argue, ought to be resolved in the direction of grace.     

THE NATURAL GOD: A GOD EVEN AN ATHEIST CAN BELIEVE IN

Abstract. In this paper, I attempt to dissolve the theism/atheism boundary. In the first part, I consider last things, according to mainstream science. In the second part, I define the Natural God as the Force of Nature—evolving, unifying, maximizing—and consider Its relation to last things. Finally, I discuss our knowledge of the Natural God and Its relevance to our personal lives. I argue that we can know the Natural God through scientific reason combined with global intuition, and that this knowledge, from the perspective of last things, may help us achieve universal love, ethical action, and personal salvation.     

THE DESIRE OF GOD

By exploring the contours of human longing and desire, particularly in its complex relationship with the body and material reality, the article shows that it is in the very nature of the humanum to seek after and promise the presence of a divinity whose arrival cannot be guaranteed (not from the human side, at least). Biblical poetry from the Psalms and the Song of Songs will be invoked and explored as exemplars of that psycho‐theological landscape. While human desire is not enough to guarantee God's arrival, desire perseveres on the basis of a mysterious sense of call or promise which, while experienced and apprehended within the self, nevertheless appears to emanate or broadcast as from another place.     

GOD EMBODIED IN,GOD BODYING FORTH THE WORLD: EMERGENCE AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

Abstract. I expand on Philip Clayton's application of emergence—in the context of a metaphysical position he calls emergent monism—to conceiving God's relationship to the world. Like Clayton, I adopt a panentheistic perspective, but in a way that I argue is consistent with classical philosophical theism and its grammatical analysis of Christian discourse about divine transcendence. In order to exploit further the analogical potential of an emergentist account of human mentality and agency, I argue that the standard panentheistic metaphor The world is the body of God should be complemented by the metaphor God is the body of the world.