Download or read book Faith and Knowledge written by John Hick and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revision of his widely read study, John Hick has taken advantage of constructive comments on the first edition to make the book more useful. New material has been added and the overall structure of the volume has been changed to strengthen it both as an introduction to the problem of religious knowledge and as an exposition of the view of faith that seems to him most adequate. There is a new chapter on the Thomist-Catholic view of faith; a new treatment of the controversial notion of eschatological verification, taking account of various published critiques of the concept; and a new section on the way in which the Christian faith-awareness of God expresses itself in a distinctive way of life.
Download or read book Problems of Religious Luck written by Guy Axtell and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There is a strong tendency among adherents of different faith traditions to invoke asymmetric explanations of the religious value or salvific status of the home religion vis-à-vis all others. Attributions of good/bad religious luck and exclusivist dismissal of the significance of religious disagreement are the central phenomena that the book studies. Part I lays out a taxonomy of kinds of religious luck, a taxonomy that draws upon but extends work on moral and epistemic luck. It asks: What is going on when persons, theologies, or purported revelations ascribe various kinds of religiously-relevant traits to insiders and outsiders of a faith tradition in sharply asymmetric fashion? “I am saved but you are lost”; “My religion is holy but yours is idolatrous”; “My faith tradition is true, and valued by God, but yours is false and valueless.” Part II further develops the theory introduced in Part I, pushing forward both the descriptive/explanatory and normative sides of what the author terms his inductive risk account. Firstly, the concept of inductive risk is shown to contribute to the needed field of comparative fundamentalism by suggesting new psychological markers of fundamentalist orientation. The second side of what is termed an inductive risk account is concerned with the epistemology of religious belief, but more especially with an account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. Problems of inductively risky modes of belief-formation problematize claims to religion-specific knowledge. But the inductive risk account does not aim to set religion apart, or to challenge the reasonableness of religious belief tout court. Rather the burden of the argument is to challenge the reasonableness of attitudes of religious exclusivism, and to demotivate the “polemical apologetics” that exclusivists practice and hope to normalize.
Download or read book Knowledge Belief and God written by Matthew A. Benton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent decades have seen a fertile period of theorizing within mainstream epistemology which has had a dramatic impact on how epistemology is done. Investigations into contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environment. New insights from social epistemology and formal epistemology about defeat, testimony, a priority, probability, and the nature of evidence all have a potentially revolutionary effect on how we understand our epistemological place in the world. Religion is the place where such rethinking can potentially have its deepest impact and importance. Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new ideas into philosophy of religion and the epistemology of religious belief. Knowledge, Belief, and God incorporates these myriad new developments in mainstream epistemology, and extends these developments to questions and arguments in religious epistemology. The investigations proposed in this volume offer substantial new life, breadth, and sophistication to issues in the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. They pose original questions and shed new light on long-standing issues in religious epistemology; and these developments will in turn generate contributions to epistemology itself, since religious belief provides a vital testing ground for recent epistemological ideas.
Download or read book Problems and Perspectives in Religious Discourse written by John A. Grimes and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1994-02-03 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious discourse uses ordinary language in an extraordinary way. This book surveys Western and Indian discussions of the nature and aspects of religious discourse. It presents the first cross-cultural elucidation of Advaita Vedānta Implications as religious discourse.
Download or read book Debating Christian Religious Epistemology written by John M. DePoe and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to believe in God? What passes as evidence for belief in God? What issues arise when considering the rationality of belief in God? Debating Christian Religious Epistemology introduces core questions in the philosophy of religion by bringing five competing viewpoints on the knowledge of God into critical dialogue with one another. Each chapter introduces an epistemic viewpoint, providing an overview of its main arguments and explaining why it justifies belief. The validity of that viewpoint is then explored and tested in a critical response from an expert in an opposing tradition. Featuring a wide range of different philosophical positions, traditions and methods, this introduction: - Covers classical evidentialism, phenomenal conservatism, proper functionalism, covenantal epistemology and traditions-based perspectivalism - Draws on MacIntyre's account of rationality and ideas from the Analytic and Conservatism traditions - Addresses issues in social epistemology - Considers the role of religious experience and religious texts Packed with lively debates, this is an ideal starting point for anyone interested in understanding the major positions in contemporary religious epistemology and how religious concepts and practices relate to belief and knowledge.
Download or read book The Problem of Religious Knowledge written by William T. Blackstone and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is designed for those who have this concern and puzzlement (though, of course, it offers no guarantee of resolving such puzzlement). It is not designed to be a highly specialized and technical treatise in philosophy of religion but one which can be read and appreciated by students and educated laymen. It has two specific purposes, that of providing a clear picture of development in contemporary philosophy and the impact of these developments in philosophy of religion, and that of systematically exploring the question, "Is there religious knowledge?" Contemporary philosophy is used as a point of reference for devising a framework within which this question can be answered. Space limitations have forced an all-to-brief treatment of some positions. Such brevity tends to distort but I have made efforts to avoid such distortion." -Author's Preface.
Download or read book The Problem of Religious Knowledge written by Douglas Clyde Macintosh and published by . This book was released on 1940 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Religion and Knowledge written by Dr Elisabeth Arweck and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-12-28 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religions have always been associated with particular forms of knowledge, often knowledge accorded special significance and sometimes knowledge at odds with prevailing understandings of truth and authority in wider society. New religious movements emerge on the basis of reformulated, often controversial, understandings of how the world works and where ultimate meaning can be found. Governments have risen and fallen on the basis of such differences and global conflict has raged around competing claims about the origins and content of religious truth. Such concerns give rise to recurrent questions, faced by academics, governments and the general public. How do we treat statements made by religious groups and on what basis are they made? What authorities lie behind religious claims to truth? How can competing claims about knowledge be resolved? Are there instances when it is appropriate to police religious knowledge claims or restrict their public expression? This book addresses the relationship between religion and knowledge from a sociological perspective, taking both religion and knowledge as phenomena located within ever changing social contexts. It builds on historical foundations, but offers a distinctive focus on the changing status of religious phenomena at the turn of the twenty-first century. Including critical engagement with live debates about intelligent design and the ‘new atheism’, this collection of essays brings recent research on religious movements into conversation with debates about socialisation, reflexivity and the changing capacity of social institutions to shape human identities. Contributors examine religion as an institutional context for the production of knowledge, as a form of knowledge to be transmitted or conveyed and as a social field in which controversies about knowledge emerge.
Download or read book Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge written by C. Stephen Evans and published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. This book was released on 1993 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays reflects the healthy pluralism of contemporary Christian philosophy. Using a wide variety of approaches, the contributors are unified by their conviction that religious knowledge is possible and that to undertand it we must look at the issues in light of post-Enlightenment epistemological perspectives.
Download or read book Making Sense of God written by Timothy Keller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.
Download or read book Occult Roots of Religious Studies written by Yves Mühlematter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historiographers of religious studies have written the history of this discipline primarily as a rationalization of ideological, most prominently theological and phenomenological ideas: first through the establishment of comparative, philological and sociological methods and secondly through the demand for intentional neutrality. This interpretation caused important roots in occult-esoteric traditions to be repressed. This process of “purification” (Latour) is not to be equated with the origin of the academic studies. De facto, the elimination of idealistic theories took time and only happened later. One example concerning the early entanglement is Tibetology, where many researchers and respected chair holders were influenced by theosophical ideas or were even members of the Theosophical Society. Similarly, the emergence of comparatistics cannot be understood without taking into account perennialist ideas of esoteric provenance, which hold that all religions have a common origin. In this perspective, it is not only the history of religious studies which must be revisited, but also the partial shaping of religious studies by these traditions, insofar as it saw itself as a counter-model to occult ideas.
Download or read book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom written by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground. Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains. A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution. Featuring a new preface by the author, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society.
Download or read book Karl Popper and Religious Knowledge written by Leslie Buck and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academic Paper from the year 2017 in the subject Theology - Comparative Religion Studies, , language: English, abstract: The dominance of reductive materialism in contemporary society calls for a new approach to religious epistemology and metaphysics. Traditionally, Christian theology has relied on Greek philosophy to provide its metaphysical grounding, but this is not able to respond adequately to the empiricism that underlies reductive materialism. In these circumstances a new approach is needed, one that can be provided by the epistemology and metaphysics of Karl Popper. Popper’s philosophy, like reductive materialism, is a product of the Enlightenment and can challenge the latter on its own terms. The case for the new approach is argued, first by describing those aspects of Popper’s philosophy which are relevant to theological discourse, and secondly by discussing how the methodology thus presented can be applied to certain typical theological doctrines. The intention is to propose a new approach to theology, not a new theological system. By reductive materialism is meant the belief that all phenomena are reducible to bodily entities and the forces that act upon them, leaving no room for mental and transcendental phenomena other than, at best, as epiphenomena or, at worst, as illusions. Reductive materialism is broad in scope ranging from the hard form adopted by many natural scientists to the soft form adopted, by imitation, by people influenced by secularism and the immense success of scientific endeavour.
Download or read book Critical Terms for Religious Studies written by Mark C. Taylor and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-08-15 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following in the very successful tradition of Critical Terms for Literary Studies and Critical Terms for Art History, this book attempts to provide a revitalized, self-aware vocabulary with which this bewildering religious diversity can be accurately described and responsibly discussed. Leading scholars working in a variety of traditions demonstrate through their incisive discussions that even our most basic terms for understanding religion are not neutral but carry specific historical and conceptual freight.
Download or read book The American Journal of Theology written by University of Chicago. Divinity School and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vols. 2-6 include "Theological and Semitic literature for 1898- 1901, a bibliographical supplement to the American journal of theology and the American journal of Semitic languages and literatures. By W. Muss-Arnolt." (Separately paged)
Download or read book Why We Need Religion written by Stephen T. Asma and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive, serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Stephen Asma argues that, like art, religion has direct access to our emotional lives in ways that science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of wonder and the sublime--we can feel the sacred depths of nature--but there are many forms of human suffering and vulnerability that are beyond the reach of help from science. Different emotional stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike secular authors who praise religion's ethical and civilizing function, Asma argues that its core value lies in its emotionally therapeutic power. No theorist of religion has failed to notice the importance of emotions in spiritual and ritual life, but truly systematic research has only recently delivered concrete data on the neurology, psychology, and anthropology of the emotional systems. This very recent "affective turn" has begun to map out a powerful territory of embodied cognition. Why We Need Religion incorporates new data from these affective sciences into the philosophy of religion. It goes on to describe the way in which religion manages those systems--rage, play, lust, care, grief, and so on. Finally, it argues that religion is still the best cultural apparatus for doing this adaptive work. In short, the book is a Darwinian defense of religious emotions and the cultural systems that manage them.
Download or read book New 20th century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge written by Robert G. Clouse and published by Baker Publishing Group (MI). This book was released on 1991 with total page 942 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
