ETERNITY IS A PRESENT,TIME IS ITS UNWRAPPING

There is debate in the philosophy of religion about whether the being of God is timelessly eternal or is instead temporal but unbounded. In this paper, I seek to defend the first view by motivating and deriving it from the Christian doctrines of the trinity and salvation. My goal is to present the notion of eternity in a way that makes clear that it belongs to God by nature and to man by grace, with the condition of time being part of the medium of grace. To this end, I also employ the doctrine of theosis, as found in Maximus the Confessor and Dumitru Staniloae, and the Augustinean theory of time.     

PROBABILISTIC ARGUMENTS FOR MULTIPLE UNIVERSES

Abstract:  In this paper, we discuss three probabilistic arguments for the existence of multiple universes. First, we provide an analysis of total evidence and use that analysis to defend Roger White's "this universe" objection to a standard fine-tuning argument for multiple universes. Second, we explain why Rodney Holder's recent cosmological argument for multiple universes is unconvincing. Third, we develop a "Cartesian argument" for multiple universes. While this argument is not open to the objections previously noted, we show that, given certain highly plausible assumptions about evidence and epistemic probability, the proposition which it treats as evidence cannot coherently be regarded as evidence for anything. This raises the question of whether to reject the assumptions or accept that such a proposition cannot be evidence.     

AFFECTION AND RECIPROCITY IN SELF-DISCLOSING COMMUNICATION

Affection for and reciprocated disclosure by the other are generally thought to increase a person's willingness to engage in self-disclosing communication. The relationship between affection and disclosure is not consistently supported by the data, however, and the relationship between reciprocity and disclosure may well be an artifact of a confounded conceptualization of dyadic relations. Wright's model of same-sex friendships is proposed as more adequate than simple affection as a conceptualization of interpersonal relationships, and an adapted form of Chaffee and McLeod's coorientational paradigm is employed as a model of reciprocated disclosure. The hypotheses that affection accounts for less variance in disclosure than other criteria of friendship and that disclosure varies as a function of perceived rather than actual similarity were strongly supported. Although male and female subjects disclosed differently, hypotheses about sex differences in disclosure were not supported, failing to replicate previous findings. The implications of these data for further studies of self-disclosing communication are discussed.