Download or read book Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief written by Jerome I. Gellman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jerome I. Gellman observes that the mystic experience of God's presence, a sense of having direct contact with the divine, often compels belief in God's existence. On the basis of widely accepted principles connecting appearance with reality, Gellman contends, the claims people make of having experienced God show that belief in God is strongly rational, meaning that such claims are sufficient in number and variety to support a line of reasoning making it rational to believe that God exists and irrational to deny God's existence. Gellman considers challenges to his thinking based on epistemological grounds and challenges growing out of the diversity of religious experiences across the range of world religions. He thoroughly evaluates reductionist explanations of apparent experiences of God and finds them incapable of invalidating his view. Finally, he directs his attention to the two most compelling arguments against the existence of God: the charge that the idea of a perfect being is logically incoherent, and the threat to theism based on the existence of evil, in both its logical and probabilistic forms. Until and unless stronger objections come along, he concludes, personal experiences of God constitute sufficient evidence of God's existence.
Download or read book Faith and Rationality written by Alvin Plantinga and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by contemporary Calvinist philosophers of religion that examine the epistemology of religious belief between Reformed and Roman Catholic philosophers.
Download or read book God and the Brain written by Kelly James Clark and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does cognitive science show that religious belief is irrational? Kelly James Clark brings together science and philosophy to examine some of humanity’s more pressing questions. Is belief in God, as Richard Dawkins claims, a delusion? Are atheists smarter or more rational than religious believers? Do our genes determine who we are and what we believe? Can our very creaturely cognitive equipment help us discover truth and meaning in life? Are atheists any different from Mother Teresa? Clark’s surprising answers both defend the rationality of religious belief and contribute to the study of cognitive science. God and the Brain explores complicated questions about the nature of belief and the human mind. Scientifically minded, philosophically astute, and reader-friendly, God and the Brain provides an accessible overview of some new cognitive scientific approaches to the study of religion and evaluates their implications for both theistic and atheistic belief.
Download or read book Rationality and Religious Commitment written by Robert Audi and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rationality and Religious Commitment shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age.
Download or read book The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith written by Thomas D. Senor and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A veritable who's who in the field of contemporary philosophy of religion here considers various issues in the epistemology of religious beliefs. The writings of William P. Alston, the leading figure in the revival of the Anglo-American philosophy of religion, provide the focus of these essays, all but two previously unpublished. Philosophers of religion, meta-physicians, epistemologists, and theologians will find in this volume some of the most important work available in the theory of knowledge and the epistemic status of religious belief.
Download or read book Faith Reason and the Existence of God written by Denys Turner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proposition that the existence of God is demonstrable by rational argument is doubted by nearly all philosophical opinion today and is thought by most Christian theologians to be incompatible with Christian faith. This book argues that, on the contrary, there are reasons of faith why in principle the existence of God should be thought rationally demonstrable and that it is worthwhile revisiting the theology of Thomas Aquinas to see why this is so. The book further suggests that philosophical objections to proofs of God's existence rely upon an attenuated and impoverished conception of reason which theologians of all monotheistic traditions might wish to reject. Denys Turner proposes that on a broader and deeper conception of it, human rationality is open to the 'sacramental shape' of creation as such and in its exercise of rational proof of God it in some way participates in that sacramentality of all things.
Download or read book Rational Faith written by Stephen T Davis and published by Lion Books. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If God exists, why doesn't he eliminate suffering and evil? Does evolution disprove Christianity? Can religion be explained by cognitive science? People have grappled for ages with these kinds of questions. And many in today's academic world find Christian belief untenable. But renowned philosopher Stephen Davis argues that belief in God is indeed a rational and intellectually sound endeavor. Drawing on a lifetime of rigorous reflection and critical thinking, he explores perennial and contemporary challenges to Christian faith. Davis appraises objections fairly and openly, offering thoughtful approaches to common intellectual problems. Real questions warrant reasonable responses. Examine for yourself the rationality of the Christian faith.
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 God and Other Minds written by Alvin Plantinga and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Religion and Rationality written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important new volume brings together Habermas' key writing on religion and religious belief. Habermas explores the relations between Christian and Jewish thought, on the one hand, and the Western philosophical tradition on the other. In so doing, he examines a range of important figures, including Benjamin, Heidegger, Johann Baptist Metz and Gershom Scholem. In a new introduction written especially for this volume, Eduardo Mendieta places Habermas' engagement with religion in the context of his work as a whole. Mendieta also discusses Habermas' writings in relation to Jewish Messianism and the Frankfurt School, showing how the essays in Religion and Rationality, one of which is translated into English for the first time, foreground an important, yet often neglected, dimension of critical theory. The volume concludes with an original extended interview, also in English for the first time, in which Habermas develops his current views on religion in modern society. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theology, religious studies and philosophy, as well as to all those already familiar with Habermas' work.
Download or read book On the Nature and Existence of God written by Richard M. Gale and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This influential book evaluates the arguments for the existence and nature of God that emerged in the late twentieth century.
Download or read book The Dawkins Delusion written by Alister McGrath and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath present a reliable assessment of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, famed atheist and scientist, and the many questions this book raises--including, above all, the relevance of faith and the quest for meaning.
Download or read book Rationality Religious Belief and Moral Commitment written by Robert Audi and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is unified by three broad concerns: the rationality of belief in God, the relation between religion and morality, and the explication of the concept of God. The essays are, however, marked by diversity. Some focus on historical figures, such as Aquinas and Locke; others bring recent epistemological and metaphysical developments to bear on problems of religious belief. Some of the papers explore neglected issues central to religious practice, such as the question of how total devotion to God can permit other deep commitments; others apply philosophical distinctions from within a religious tradition, for example, in setting out a Christian approach to the problem of evil.
Download or read book Divine Evil written by Michael Bergmann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven original essays by philosophers and biblical scholars addressing the character of God as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. Includes a critical commentary on each essay by another author, and replies to the critical comments by the original author.
Download or read book Existential Reasons for Belief in God written by Clifford Williams and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lived faith involves doctrines, evidences and rational coherence--but it includes much more. Philosopher Clifford Williams puts forth an argument as to why certain needs, desires and emotions have a legitimate place in drawing people into faith in God. Addressing the strongest objections to these types of grounds for faith, he shows how the personal and experiential aspects of belief play an important part in coming to faith and in remaining a believing person.
Download or read book Justice in Love written by Nicholas Wolterstorff and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Leading the Presence Driven Church written by John Piippo and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2017-12-19 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the primacy and centrality of God and his unsurpassable presence, and what this means for the Church. The presence of God is the core, the sine qua non, of mere Christianity. Gods presence is what is needed to win the day over the present powers of darkness. This book shows what it means for a church to be presence-driven, and what leadership looks like in the presence-driven church.
