Download or read book The Concept of God A Construct of Human Thought written by KHRITISH SWARGIARY and published by ERA, US. This book was released on 2024-09-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Concept of God: A Construct of Human Thought, I, Khritish Swargiary, argue that the belief in God is not an inherent truth of the universe but a man-made construct, born out of fear, uncertainty, and the need for control. This book challenges the assumption that belief in a higher power is necessary for ethical living, and instead posits that human beings are capable of constructing moral systems without the need for divine oversight.

Download or read book Inventing God written by Jon Mills and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this controversial book, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills argues that God does not exist; and more provocatively, that God cannot exist as anything but an idea. Put concisely, God is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. Mills argues that the idea or conception of God is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation; a self-relation to an internalized idealized object, the idealization of imagined value. After demonstrating the lack of any empirical evidence and the logical impossibility of God, Mills explains the psychological motivations underlying humanity’s need to invent a supreme being. In a highly nuanced analysis of unconscious processes informing the psychology of belief and institutionalized social ideology, he concludes that belief in God is the failure to accept our impending death and mourn natural absence for the delusion of divine presence. As an alternative to theistic faith, he offers a secular spirituality that emphasizes the quality of lived experience, the primacy of feeling and value inquiry, ethical self-consciousness, aesthetic and ecological sensibility, and authentic relationality toward self, other, and world as the pursuit of a beautiful soul in search of the numinous. Inventing God will be of interest to academics, scholars, lay audiences and students of religious studies, the humanities, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines. It will also appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and mental health professionals focusing on the integration of humanities and psychoanalysis.

Download or read book Philosophy of Religion written by Tim Bayne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the philosophy of religion? How can we distinguish it from theology on the one hand and the psychology/sociology of religious belief on the other? What does it mean to describe God as eternal? And should religious people want there to be good arguments for the existence of God, or is religious belief only authentic in the absence of these good arguments? In this Very Short Introduction Tim Bayne introduces the field of philosophy of religion, and engages with some of the most burning questions that philosophers discuss. Considering how religion should be defined, and whether we even need to be able to define it in order to engage in the philosophy of religion, he goes on to discuss whether the existence of God matters. Exploring the problem of evil, Bayne also debates the connection between faith and reason, and the related question of what role reason should play in religious contexts. Shedding light on the relationship between science and religion, Bayne finishes by considering the topics of reincarnation and the afterlife. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Download or read book New Proofs for the Existence of God written by Robert J. Spitzer and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responding to contemporary popular atheism, Robert J. Spitzer's New Proofs for the Existence of God examines the considerable evidence for God and creation that has come to light from physics and philosophy during the last forty years. --from publisher description.

Download or read book Skeptic written by Michael Shermer and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected essays from bestselling author Michael Shermer's celebrated columns in Scientific American For fifteen years, bestselling author Michael Shermer has written a column in Scientific American magazine that synthesizes scientific concepts and theory for a general audience. His trademark combination of deep scientific understanding and entertaining writing style has thrilled his huge and devoted audience for years. Now, in Skeptic, seventy-five of these columns are available together for the first time; a welcome addition for his fans and a stimulating introduction for new readers.

Download or read book Making the Social World written by John Searle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are few more important philosophers at work today than John Searle, a creative and contentious thinker who has shaped the way we think about mind and language. Now he offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality--a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.

Download or read book The Meaning of God in Human Experience written by William Ernest Hocking and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author discusses what God has meant to mankind; what effect religion has had on human affairs; and what results religion as had in man's personal life. -- Dust jacket.

Download or read book The Theological Imagination written by Gordon D. Kaufman and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 1981-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this challenging work, Gordon Kaufman asserts that the prime task of theology is the imaginative construction of the doctrine of God. Kaufman maintains that both the absoluteness of the divinity and our own necessity demand that we construct the doctrine of God critically and in a manner appropriate to our own time and place. In thorough examinations of God and theology, Christ and christology, and of the ultimate foundations of religious thought, he shows how this construction can be accomplished faithfully and in full realization of our own humanity.

Download or read book The Believing Brain written by Michael Shermer and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths. Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.

Download or read book God Theology Cognitive Modules written by Lorin Friesen and published by . This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does God exist? It is possible to postpone dealing with this question and look instead at how the mind forms an image of God and how this image of God affects personal behavior. This book presents a model of the mind, based in cognitive modules which map onto brain regions, that was developed by studying personality. This book starts with the approach that is taken by the emerging field of cognitive science and religion but goes significantly further, analyzing religious doctrine in substantial detail. In addition, this same model of the mind is used to analyze scientific thought, including an extensive discussion of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions as well as Willard Quine's Web of Belief. This radically interdisciplinary book attempts to be reasonably rigorous while still explaining concepts clearly and simply. The more technical information has been placed in appendices. This 250,000 word volume presents a new integrated model of cognition, which views the human mind as a set of seven interacting modules: Two of these modules function emotionally, two handle knowledge and skills, one is related to the dopamine desire circuit, one controls planning and technical thought, while the final module adjusts the operation of the other six. This book uses the operation and interaction of these seven modules to provide a cognitive explanation for religious concepts such as an image of God, mysticism, conscience, blind faith, worship, monotheism, the trinity, incarnation, atonement, righteousness, a belief in heaven, a belief in hell, holy books, chosenness, fundamentalism, the supernatural, and the Christian 'prayer of salvation'. This same approach is also used to explain scientific concepts such as the basis for science, the paradigm, the paradigm shift, the exemplar, induction, hypothesis, analogy, logic, syllogism, algebraic manipulation, the function, and the physics of music and harmony. In addition, psychological and philosophical concepts are explained such as Piaget's stages of development, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, cognitive styles, Foucault's epistemes, Kant's categorical imperative, Plato's Forms, and Heiddeger's dasein and authenticity. The author has done almost thirty years of research in the area of personality and cognitive science. "Lorin Friesen deserves thanks for a volume which is innovative, unique, challenging, highly integrative, and mind-stretching. The serious reader will be greatly rewarded." John H. Redekop Ph.D. Professor Emeritus Wilfrid Laurier University

Download or read book Models of God written by Sallie McFague and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this award-winning text, theologian Sallie McFague challenges Christians' usual speech about God as a kind of monarch. She probes instead three other possible metaphors for God as mother, lover, and friend.

Download or read book The Question of God s Perfection written by Yoram Hazony and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Question of God’s Perfection brings together leading scholars from the Jewish and Christian traditions to critically examine the theology of perfect being in light of the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic sources.

Download or read book Knowing God written by Frank Sheed and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atheists deny we can know God because they deny there is a God to know. But even believers who affirm Gods existence sometimes dont know him. They dont know much about God because they neglect to think much about God and what God has revealed about himself. They accept that there is a God but they dont give much thought to what God is like. And even if they know a great deal about God in the sense of being able to state truths about him, they dont necessarily know him personally and intimately. In Knowing God (previously titled God and the Human Mind) the great Catholic writer, teacher, and publisher Frank Sheed helps readers to know that God exists, to think about who and what God is, and to know God personally. He clears away popular misunderstandings of God, often held by otherwise knowledgeable people. A masterful, lucid writer, Sheed is not timid about tackling the most challenging questions the human mind can pose about God, yet he does not reduce divine mystery to dry propositions or neglect the necessity of faith. Sheed acknowledges the limits of human words and human minds when it comes to God. At the same time, he carefully explains the meaning of Spirit, the role of theology and revelation, including the place of the Bible in the Church, and the experience of God in mysticism. In the final section, Sheed goes into the heart of the mystery of God, exploring God as the Trinity and the difference the Trinity should make in understanding God and ourselves.

Download or read book God and Humans in Islamic Thought written by Maha Elkaisy-Friemuth and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of The Iranian World Prize for the Book of the Year 2007 in the Philosophy and Mysticism category. This new and original text provides a timely re-examination of Islamic thought, presenting a stark contrast to the more usual conservative view. The explanation of the relationship between God and humans, as portrayed in Islam, is often influenced by the images of God and of human beings which theologians, philosophers and mystics have in mind. The early period of Islam reveals a diversity of interpretations of this relationship. Elkaisy-Friemuth discusses the view of three scholars from the tenth and eleventh century: Abd al-Jabbar, Ibn Sina and Al-Ghazali, which introduce three different approaches of looking at the relationship between God and Humans. God and Humans in Islamic Thought attempts to shed light on an important side of medieval rational thought in demonstrating its significance in forming the basis of an understanding of the nature of God, the nature of human beings and the construction of different bridges between them.

Download or read book Dawkins GOD written by Alister E. McGrath and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alister E. McGrath is one of the world’s leading theologians, with a doctorate in the sciences. Richard Dawkins is one of the bestselling popular science writers, with outspoken and controversial views on religion. This fascinating and provoking work is the first book-length response to Dawkins’ ideas, and offers an ideal introduction to the topical issues of science and religion. Addresses fundamental questions about Dawkins’ approach to science and religion: Is the gene actually selfish? Is the blind watchmaker a suitable analogy? Are there other ways of looking at things? Tackles Dawkins’ hostile and controversial views on religion, and examines the religious implications of his scientific ideas, making for a fascinating and provoking debate Written in a very engaging and accessible style, ideal to those approaching scientific and religious issues for the first time Alister McGrath is uniquely qualified to write this book. He is one of the world’s best known and most respected theologians, with a strong research background in molecular biophysics A superb book by one of the world’s leading theologians, which will attract wide interest in the growing popular science market, similar to Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999).

Download or read book Hegel s Concept of God written by Quentin Lauer and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1983-06-30 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If one takes a panoramic view of Hegel's entire philosophical endeavor—the endeavor to come to grips with and to be committed to reality in the concrete—one is struck by one inescapable idea: The Hegelian enterprise is an extraordinarily unified and grandiose attempt to elaborate one concept, which Hegel sees as the root of all intelligibility—the concept of God, whatever that term is going to turn out to mean... "...The question with which we are faced ... is neither whether Hegel is correct in what he says nor whether his interpreters are justified in what they say of him. Rather the question is one of finding out just what Hegel does say and of determining what impact that can have on our own thinking... "...Why, then, the 'Concept of God'? The answer is to be found in the culmination of the entire Hegelian system, 'The Philosophy of Absolute Spirit.' Only in the light of 'absolute Spirit' is anything Hegel says intelligible ... in Hegel's view, 'absolute Spirit' is in fact to be identified with God and that, therefore, only if Hegel's 'Concept of God' is intelligible, will anything Hegel says be intelligible." — from the Introduction

Download or read book God written by Reza Aslan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Zealot and host of Believer explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle