bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Immutability
Authors: Leftow Brian 
Published: September 2018

The doctrine of divine immutability consists in the assertion that God cannot undergo real change. Plato and Boethius infer divine immutability from God’s perfection, Aristotle from God’s being the first cause of change, Augustine from God’s having created time. Aquinas derives divine immutability from God’s simplicity, his having no parts or attributes which are distinct from himself. All of these arguments finally appeal to aspects of God’s perfection; thus, the doctrine of divine immutability grew from a convergence of intuitions about perfection. These intuitions dominated Western thought about God well into the nineteenth century.
The doctrine’s foes argue that God’s power, providence and knowledge require its rejection. Their arguments contend that since the world does in fact change through time, this must entail change in God. If God responds to changing historical circumstances and to prayers, that would seem to require some sort of change in him (from not responding to responding). And if he does not intervene to prevent a war, for example, then after the war, he will have lost the power to prevent it (assuming, as many do, that God cannot alter the past), so again there is a change of state. Finally, it is argued that God’s knowledge of tensed truths (for example, ‘it is now noon’) must change as what time ‘now’ is changes. Some responses to these arguments appeal to the claim that God is in some sense outside time.
Liberation theology
Authors: Haight Roger 
Published: September 2018

Also known as theology of liberation, liberation theology is simultaneously a social movement within the Christian Church and a school of thought, both of which react against human suffering due to poverty and various forms of oppression. The essence of liberation theology consists in an interpretation of Christian salvation that retains its transcendent eschatological content and draws out its historical dimensions and their implications for personal life, the social sphere and the public action of the Church. Salvation contains various levels of liberation.
Liberation theology is most commonly associated with Latin America, where it emerged during the 1960s. As both movement and theology, it is at present a worldwide phenomenon, taking on different characteristics according to culture, situation, the kind of oppression that predominates, and concrete political and social exigencies. Although some liberation theologians have employed Marxist language as a tool for social analysis, the underpinnings of liberation theology lie in Christian faith.
Liberation theology is predominately Roman Catholic in Latin America because of the Catholic majority; but as a movement and a school of thought it unites Catholic and mainstream Protestant Churches. Evangelical Christians are often antipathetic to liberation theology because of their individualism and other-worldliness.
Manicheism
Authors: Kirwan Christopher 
Published: September 2018

Manicheism is a defunct religion, born in Mesopotamia in the third century ad and last attested in the sixteenth century in China. Its founder, Mani (c.216–76), had some familiarity with Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, and aimed to supplant them all. He taught a form of dualism, influenced by earlier Gnostics: God is opposed by forces of darkness; they, not God, created human beings, who nevertheless contain particles of light which can be released by abstemious living. Two points of contrast with Catholic Christianity are particularly striking. First, in Manicheism, sinfulness is the natural state of human beings (because of their creators), and does not stem from Adam’s Fall. Second, the Manichean God did not create and does not control the forces of darkness (although he will eventually triumph); hence the problem of evil does not arise in as stark a form as it does for the all-powerful Christian God.
Although Mani’s own missionary journeys took him eastwards, it was in the Roman Empire to the west that the main impact of his teaching was first felt; Augustine of Hippo was an adherent for nine years. The religion was eventually suppressed in the Roman Empire, and driven east by the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia. In the West, various Christian heresies were loosely called Manichean throughout the Middle Ages.
Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973)
Authors: McInerny Ralph 
Published: September 2018

Maritain was one of the most influential twentieth-century interpreters of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. His interests spanned many aspects of philosophy, including aesthetics, political theory, philosophy of science, metaphysics, education, liturgy and ecclesiology.
His acknowledged masterpiece is The Degrees of Knowledge (1932). In this work, Maritain expands on Thomistic thought and seeks to explain the links between philosophy, science and religion as branches of wisdom. Rather than being a close study of Thomism, this work expands on Thomistic ideas and puts them into the context of the modern world. In natural science, for example, he distinguishes between empirical knowledge of nature and philosophy of nature; the latter consists in the knowledge of essence, while the former is concerned with the knowledge of form.
In moral philosophy, Maritain expands on Aquinas, holding that no true conception of the human ultimate end is philosophically possible, and that moral philosophy therefore must be subordinated to moral theology. Later in his career, Maritain concentrated more strongly on theology, but throughout his life his Roman Catholic faith informed all of his works. He continues to be read widely today, with a worldwide reputation which is especially strong in France and North America.
Miracles
Authors: Basinger David 
Published: September 2018

Does God at times miraculously intervene in earthly affairs? That is, do some events occur because God has entered our space-time continuum and directly modified or circumvented the relevant natural laws? Few philosophers today deny that this is possible. But many question whether we could ever justifiably maintain that such intervention has taken place.
According to some philosophers, it is not even necessary to grant that the types of events believers label miracles – for instance, healings or resurrections – actually occur as reported. Since the evidence supporting the occurrence of such events is the personal testimony of a few, possibly biased, individuals, while the basis for doubt is the massive amount of objective research upon which the relevant laws are based, it is always justifiable, according to this view, to conclude that such reports are erroneous. Others contend, however, that the presence of some forms of evidence – for instance, independent confirmation from reputable sources – could make it most reasonable in some cases to acknowledge that even the most unexpected of events had actually occurred.
Some philosophers also deny that we could ever justifiably conclude that an event could not have been produced by natural causes alone. Since we will never be in a position to identify all that nature can produce, they declare, it will always be most reasonable for the scientist facing a currently unexplainable counterinstance to a natural law to continue to look for a natural explanation. Many believers, however, are quite willing to grant that nature could in principle produce any event, since what they wish to maintain is only that nature does not do so in the case of miraculous interventions.
Finally, while many philosophers acknowledge that belief in direct divine intervention may at times be justifiable for those who already believe that God exists, some also argue that no single event or series of events could ever compel all thoughtful individuals to acknowledge the existence of a perfectly good supernatural causal agent, given all we experience – for instance, the tremendous amount of horrific evil in our world. Many believers, though, are also willing to grant this point.
Monotheism
Authors: Mavrodes George I. 
Published: September 2018

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are usually cited as the major monotheistic religions. These are religions which acknowledge only a single god, and which construe that god as transcendent – that is, as a being who is distinct from the ordinary world and superior to it. They also construe this god as a person or as very much like a person. The polytheistic religions agree with monotheism, for the most part, in construing the gods in personalistic terms, but they acknowledge a plurality of gods. Pantheists, on the other hand, usually accept the singularity of the deity, but reject the transcendence, identifying the deity more closely with the ordinary universe, perhaps as a certain aspect of the universe or as the totality of the universe considered in a certain way. They also are likely to reject the personalistic idea of the deity.
This entry will discuss some philosophical aspects of the contrast between monotheism and polytheism. There are different ways of understanding ‘acknowledge’ in the characterization of monotheism given above. One may believe that there exists only one god. Or one may believe that more than one god exists, but worship only one, or hold that it is wrong to worship more than one. A closely related issue concerns the concept of deity that is employed in such beliefs and claims. The ‘high’ Anselmian conception of Christianity’s god – a being than whom no greater can be conceived – is only one account. Perhaps of most philosophical interest is the problem as to whether logical argument can demonstrate polytheism to be false and establish the truth of the Anselmian account.
Negative theology
Authors: Braine David 
Published: September 2018

The term ‘negative theology’ refers to theologies which regard negative statements as primary in expressing our knowledge of God, contrasted with ‘positive theologies’ giving primary emphasis to positive statements. The distinction was developed within Muslim, Jewish and Christian theism. If the negative way (via negativa) is taken to its limits, two questions arise: first, whether one may speak of God equally well in impersonal as in personal terms (blurring the distinction between theism and, say, the philosophical Hinduism of Śaṅkara); and second, whether it leads ultimately to rejecting any ultimate being or subject at all (blurring the distinction between theism and, say, the atheism of Mahāyāna Buddhism). However, within their original theistic context, positive and negative statements about God are interdependent, the second indispensably qualifying the first, the negative statements taken alone useless.
Negative qualifications on positive statements attributing so-called ‘perfections’ to God – for example, existence, life, goodness, knowledge, love or active power (‘strength’) – are obviously necessary if God is unimaginable. If his presence is always of his whole being and life all at once, in each place in space and time, he must be non-spatial and non-temporal in being and nature, and clearly he must be unimaginable. However, his supposed ‘simplicity’ and ‘infinity’ imply that he is much more radically outside the reach of understanding or ‘comprehension’, imposing the negative way at a deeper level than mere unimaginability. This unimaginability and incomprehensibility are key to theistic accounts of prayer and the mystical life.
Personalism
Authors: Yandell Keith E. 
Published: September 2018

Personalism is the thesis that only persons (self-conscious agents) and their states and characteristics exist, and that reality consists of a society of interacting persons. Typically, a personalist will hold that finite persons depend for their existence and continuance on God, who is the Supreme Person, having intelligence and volition. Personalists are usually idealists in metaphysics and construct their theories of knowledge by inference from the data of self-awareness. They tend to be nonutilitarian in ethics and to place ultimate value in the person as a free, self-conscious, moral agent, rather than in either mental states or in apersonal states of affairs. Typically, holding that a good God will not allow what has intrinsic value to lose existence, they believe in personal survival of death.
The term ‘personalism’, even as a term for philosophical systems, has myriad uses. There is said to be, for example, atheistic personalism (as in the case of McTaggart, famous for embracing both atheism and the immortality of the soul), absolute idealistic personalism (Hegel, Royce, Calkins), and theistic personalism (Bowne, Brightman, Bertocci). Leibniz and Berkeley are seen as early personalists; both were theists and idealists. Kant, while not strictly a personalist, was influential in personalism’s history. In particular, B.P. Bowne (1847–1910) borrowed freely from Kant, while refusing to accept a Kantian transcendentalism in which our basic concepts or categories apply in a knowledge-giving way only to appearances and not to reality. R.H. Lotze made personality and value central to his worldview, and was a European precursor of American personalism.
Phenomenology of religion
Authors: Westphal Merold 
Published: September 2018

The phenomenology of religion is a descriptive approach to the philosophy of religion. Instead of debating whether certain religious beliefs are true, it asks the question ‘What is religion?’ It seeks to deepen our understanding of the religious life by asking what (if anything) the phenomena we normally take to be religious have in common that distinguishes them from art, ethics, magic or science. Since the search for what is common presupposes difference and brings to light an astonishing array of divergent beliefs and practices, the quest for the essence of religion unfolds quite naturally into questions of typology ‘What are the most illuminating ways of classifying religious differences?’
Sometimes the phenomenology of religion is motivated by a desire for quasi-scientific objectivity, combined with at least a soft scepticism about metaphysical speculation; if we cannot decisively resolve the metaphysical mysteries of life, people with this approach argue, at least we can give an unbiased description of those interpretations of the world we normally designate religious. At other times the phenomenology of religion has a more existential orientation: whether or not our arguments can settle questions about the ultimate shape of being, we have to choose our own mode of being-in-the-world; and if we are to decide intelligently whether or not to be religious, we need to be as clear as we can about what it means to be religious – ineluctable uncertainty may make faith something of a leap, but the leap need not be blind.
Postmodern theology
Authors: Westphal Merold 
Published: September 2018

The term ‘postmodernism’ is loosely used to designate a wide variety of cultural phenomena from architecture through literature and literary theory to philosophy. The immediate background of philosophical postmodernism is the French structuralism of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Barthes. But like existentialism, it has roots that go back to the critique by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche of certain strong knowledge claims in the work of Plato, Descartes and Hegel. If the quest for absolute knowledge is the quest for meanings that are completely clear and for truths that are completely certain, and philosophy takes this quest as its essential goal, then postmodernism replaces Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God with an announcement of the end of philosophy.
This need not be construed as the death of God in a different vocabulary. The question of postmodern theology is the question of the nature of a discourse about deity that would not be tied to the metaphysical assumptions postmodern philosophy finds untenable. One candidate is the negative theology tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart. It combines a vigorous denial of absolute knowledge with a theological import that goes beyond the critical negations of postmodern philosophy. A second possibility, the a/theology of Mark C. Taylor, seeks to find religious meaning beyond the simple opposition of theism and atheism, but without taking the mystical turn. Finally, Jean-Luc Marion seeks to free theological discourse from the horizon of all philosophical theories of being, including Heidegger’s own postmodern analysis of being.
Prayer
Authors: Mavrodes George I. 
Published: September 2018

The concept of prayer is now most commonly applied to any sort of communication which is addressed to God. That is, prayer is that activity in which believers take themselves to be speaking to God. One may ask God to do something (petitionary prayer), but that need not be the only sort of content that prayer may have. There are prayers in which one thanks God for something, and others in which one praises God and expresses one’s adoration. A worshipper may also pray to express (or to make) a commitment to God, or to make a vow. Penitents pray to confess their sins, to express their repentance, and to ask for divine mercy and forgiveness. In general, any sort of speech-act which might be addressed by one human being to another could also be addressed to God, and thus be a prayer. Some such acts (such as, perhaps, commanding) might be thought inappropriate when addressed to God, but no doubt there can be inappropriate prayers. And some prayers may even be tentative and unsure about the existence of the addressee, prayers which might be thought of as beginning ‘O God, if there is a God…’.
Some writers, principally from within a tradition of mysticism, also apply the notion of prayer in a somewhat broader sense – in, for example, expressions like ‘prayer of quiet’ and ‘prayer of union’. Here ‘prayer’ seems to mean any intentional state – worship, adoration, enjoyment of the divine presence and love, and so forth – which the worshipper believes to be associated with a genuine contact with the divine, regardless of whether it contains an element of communication addressed to God.
In the sense of a communication addressed to the divine, prayer seems to fit best with the theistic religions, which construe God as a person, or as something like a person. Here the addressee is taken to be someone who is an appropriate recipient of a communicative act. The fit seems rather more awkward in those religions which construe the divine reality in impersonal terms. With reference to prayer in the theistic religions, a principal topic of philosophical interest involves the omniscience and benevolence of God – if he knows all my needs and desires, why inform him of them through prayer? And will he not satisfy all my needs regardless of whether I pray? If divine benevolence is conditional on prayer, it seems less than perfect. A response to the first question is to point out that not all speech-acts need be construed as conveying information; a response to the second is to argue that our having to ask for things on behalf of ourselves and others might make for a better world than if this were not the case. Another issue is the way in which God responds to prayer. Some argue that God responds through miracles; others suggest that God, knowing our future prayers, providentially created a world that would satisfy them – thus prayer causally influences earlier events.
Predestination
Authors: Mavrodes George I. 
Published: September 2018

Predestination appears to be a religious or theological version of universal determinism, a version in which the final determining factor is the will or action of God. It is most often associated with the theological tradition of Calvinism, although some theologians outside the Calvinist tradition, or prior to it (for example, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas), profess similar doctrines. The idea of predestination also plays a role in some religions other than Christianity, perhaps most notably in Islam.
Sometimes the idea of predestination is formulated in a comparatively restricted way, being applied only to the manner in which the divine grace of salvation is said to be extended to some human beings and not to others. John Calvin, for example, writes:
We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others. Therefore, as any man has been created to one or the other of these ends, we speak of him as predestined to life or to death.
(Institutes, bk 3, ch. 21, sec. 5)
At other times, however, the idea is applied more generally to the whole course of events in the world; whatever happens in the world is determined by the will of God. Philosophically, the most interesting aspects of the doctrine are not essentially linked with salvation. For instance, if God is the first cause of all that happens, how can people be said to have free will? One answer may be that people are free in so far as they act in accordance with their own motives and desires, even if these are determined by God. Another problem is that the doctrine seems to make God ultimately responsible for sin. A possible response here is to distinguish between actively causing something and passively allowing it to happen, and to say that God merely allows people to sin; it is then human agents who actively choose to sin and God is therefore not responsible.
Process theism
Authors: Basinger David 
Published: September 2018

Process theism is a twentieth-century school of theological thought that offers a nonclassical understanding of the relationship between God and the world. Classical Christian theists maintain that God created the world out of nothing and that God not only can, but does, unilaterally intervene in earthly affairs. Process theists, in contrast, maintain that God and the basic material out of which the rest of reality is composed are coeternal. Moreover, process theists believe that all actual entities always possess some degree of self-determination. God, it is held, does present to every actual entity at every moment the best available course of action. And each entity does feel some compulsion to act in accordance with this divine lure. But process theists deny that God possesses the capacity to control unilaterally the activity of any entity. Thus, what occurs in relation to every aspect of reality involving a multiplicity of entities – for example, what happens in relation to every earthly state of affairs – is always a cooperative effort.
This understanding of the God–world relationship has significant theological implications. For instance, while classical Christians must attempt to explain why God does not unilaterally intervene more frequently to prevent horrific evils, process theists face no such challenge since the God of process thought cannot unilaterally control any earthly state of affairs. On the other hand, while most classical Christians maintain that God at times unilaterally intervenes in our world primarily because divine assistance has been requested, process theists naturally deny that God can be petitioned efficaciously in this sense since they believe that God is already influencing all aspects of reality to the greatest possible extent. Moreover, while most Christian theists believe that God will at some point in time unilaterally bring our current form of existence to an end, process theists maintain that the same co-creative process now in place will continue indefinitely.
Not everyone finds the process characterization of the God–world relationship convincing or appealing. But few deny that process theism has become a significant force in modern American theology.