bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Providence
Authors: Hasker William 
Published: September 2018

Divine providence is God’s care, provision, foresight and direction of the universe in such a way that the universe as a whole and individual creatures within it fulfil God’s purposes. Belief in providence was affirmed by some Greek philosophers (especially the Stoics), and is a fundamental tenet of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In modern times, questions have arisen about the possibility of divine intervention in worldly affairs; this creates a difficulty for belief in providence, because it makes it hard to see how God can shape events so as to carry out his providential purposes.
Theories of providence differ with regard to the extent to which God has direct and specific control over earthly events, as opposed to guiding the course of affairs in a general way towards his overall goals. The strongest affirmation of divine control comes from Calvinism, which accepts a compatibilist view of free will (that is, that free will is compatible with determinism) and affirms God’s absolute control over everything that happens. Other views affirm libertarian free will for creatures; some place limitations on God’s knowledge of the future, and process theology places stringent limits on God’s power to affect worldly events. These limitations tend to give creatures a limited degree of independence over against God, and lessen God’s direct and specific control over events.
Religion and morality
Authors: Mouw Richard J. 
Published: September 2018

The relationship between religion and morality has been of special and long-standing concern to philosophers. Not only is there much overlap between the two areas, but how to understand their proper relationship is a question that has stimulated much debate. Of special interest in philosophical discussions has been the question of divine authority and the moral life. If there is a God, how are we to understand the moral status of his commands? Are there moral standards that even God must acknowledge? Or does God’s commanding something make it morally binding? Secular thinkers have insisted that these questions pose a serious dilemma for any religiously based ethic: either the moral standards are independent of God’s will, with the result that God’s authority is not supreme, or God’s will is arbitrary, which means that what appears to be a morality is really a worship of brute power. Many religious ethicists have refused to acknowledge the dilemma, arguing for an understanding of divine moral directives as expressions of the complexities and excellences of God’s abiding attributes.
The impact of religion on moral selfhood has also been much disputed. Secularists of various stripes have insisted that religion is not conducive to moral maturity. Religious thinkers have responded by exploring the ways in which one’s notion of moral maturity is shaped by one’s larger worldview. If we believe that there is a God who has provided us with important moral information, then this will influence the ways we understand what is to count as a ‘mature’ and ‘rational’ approach to moral decision making.
Religious ethicists have had a special interest in the ways in which worldviews shape our understandings of moral questions. This interest has been necessitated by the fact of diversity within religious communities. Different moral traditions coexist in Christianity, for example, corresponding to the rich diversity of theological perspectives and the plurality of cultural settings in which Christian beliefs have taken shape. This complexity has provided some resources for dealing with the ‘postmodern’ fascination with moral relativism and moral scepticism.
The relationship between religion and morality is also important for questions of practical moral decision. Religious ethical systems have often been developed with an eye to their ‘preachability’, which means that religious ethicists have a long record of attempting to relate theory to practice in moral discussion. The ability of a moral system to provide practical guidance is especially important during times of extensive moral confusion.
Religion and science
Authors: Murphy Nancey 
Published: September 2018

Philosophical discussion of the relation between modern science and religion has tended to focus on Christianity, because of its dominance in the West. The relations between science and Christianity have been too complex to be described by the ‘warfare’ model popularized by A.D. White (1896) and J.W. Draper (1874). An adequate account of the past two centuries requires a distinction between conservative and liberal positions. Conservative Christians tend to see theology and science as partially intersecting bodies of knowledge. God is revealed in ‘two books’: the Bible and nature. Ideally, science and theology ought to present a single, consistent account of reality; but in fact there have been instances where the results of science have (apparently) contradicted Scripture, in particular with regard to the age of the universe and the origin of the human species.
Liberals tend to see science and religion as complementary but non-interacting, as having concerns so different as to make conflict impossible. This approach can be traced to Immanuel Kant, who distinguished sharply between pure reason (science) and practical reason (morality). More recent versions contrast science, which deals with the what and how of the natural world, and religion, which deals with meaning, or contrast science and religion as employing distinct languages. However, since the 1960s a growing number of scholars with liberal theological leanings have taken an interest in science and have denied that the two disciplines can be isolated from one another. Topics within science that offer fruitful points for dialogue with theology include Big-Bang cosmology and its possible implications for the doctrine of creation, the ‘fine-tuning’ of the cosmological constants and the possible implications of this for design arguments, and evolution and genetics, with their implications for a new understanding of the human individual.
Perhaps of greater import are the indirect relations between science and theology. Newtonian physics fostered an understanding of the natural world as strictly determined by natural laws; this in turn had serious consequences for understanding divine action and human freedom. Twentieth-century developments such as quantum physics and chaos theory call for a revised view of causation. Advances in the philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century provide a much more sophisticated account of knowledge than was available earlier, and this has important implications for methods of argument in theology.
Religious experience
Authors: Alston William P. 
Published: September 2018

Philosophy is interested in religious experience as a possible source of knowledge of the existence, nature and doings of God. The experiences in question seem to their possessors to be direct, perceptual awarenesses of God. But they may be wrong about this, and many philosophers think they are. Many philosophers think that such experiences are never what they seem, and that no one has a veridical experience of the presence and/or activity of God. The main philosophical reason for supposing that such experiences are in fact sometimes veridical is a principle according to which any apparent experience of something is to be regarded as veridical unless we have sufficient reasons to the contrary. Experiences are innocent until proven guilty. If we do not accept that principle, we will never have sufficient grounds for taking any experience to be veridical – religious, sensory or whatever.
There are critics who think that we do have sufficient reasons to the contrary in the case of religious experience. For one thing, we do not have the same capacity for intersubjective checks of religious experiences that we have with sense perceptions. But to this it can be replied that we should not suppose that sense perception represents the only way in which we can achieve genuine cognitive contact with objective reality. For another thing, it is widely supposed that religious experience can be adequately explained by psychological and social factors, without bringing God into the picture. But even if this-worldly factors are the only immediate causes of the experience, God could figure as a cause farther back in the causal chain. Finally, the disagreements between alleged experiences of God, especially across different religions, provide a reason for doubting the deliverances of religious experience. But it is possible for a number of people to be genuinely experiencing the same thing, even though they disagree as to what it is like. This is a common occurrence in sense perception.
Sin
Authors: Quinn Philip L. 
Published: September 2018

The most archaic conception of human fault may be the notion of defilement or pollution, that is, a stain or blemish which somehow infects a person from without. All the major religious traditions offer accounts of human faults and prescriptions for dealing with them. However, it is only when fault is conceived within the context of a relationship to a personal deity that it makes sense to speak of it as an offence against the divine will. The concept of sin is the concept of a human fault that offends a good God and brings with it human guilt. Its natural home is in the major theistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
These religious traditions share the idea that actual or personal sins are individual actions contrary to the will of God. In the Hebrew Bible, sin is understood within the context of the covenantal relation between Yahweh and his chosen people. To be in covenant with Yahweh is to exist in holiness, and so sin is a deviation from the norms of holiness. In the Christian New Testament, Jesus teaches that human wrongdoing offends the one whom he calls Father. The Qur’an portrays sin as opposition to Allah rooted in human pride.
According to Christian tradition, there is a distinction to be drawn between actual sin and original sin. The scriptural warrant for the doctrine of original sin is found in the Epistles of Paul, and the interpretation of Paul worked out by Augustine in the course of his controversy with the Pelagians has been enormously influential in Western Christianity. On the Augustinian view, which was developed by Anselm and other medieval thinkers with considerable philosophical sophistication, the Fall of Adam and Eve had catastrophic consequences for their descendants. All the progeny of the first humans, except for Jesus and his mother, inherit from them guilt for their first sin, and so all but two humans are born bearing a burden of guilt. The Augustinian doctrine of original sin is morally problematic just because it attributes innate guilt to humans. It was criticized by John Locke and Immanuel Kant.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1881–1955)
Authors: Yandell Keith E. 
Published: September 2018

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin taught that the evolutionary process is governed by a ‘law of complexification’ which dictates that inorganic matter will reach ever more complex forms, resulting in inorganic matter being followed by organic matter and organic matter being followed by conscious life forms. Viewed by observers, humans are material systems within a larger physical system. Viewed introspectively, a human being is a self-conscious creature possessed of freedom and rationality, with the capacity for action and inquiry. Each element in the world has some form of this dual ‘exterior’ aspect and ‘interior’ aspect, though consciousness arises only late in the evolutionary history. Teilhard de Chardin saw neither reason to doubt that matter can give rise to mind, nor any basis for reducing mind to matter. The prospects for humanity are gratifying, as evolution, following the law of complexification with the cooperation of human choice, moves to an Omega point at which Christ’s fullness will include as his ‘body’ a unified humanity that is at peace.
Scientific critics of Teilhard de Chardin’s theory have charged that his optimism involves extrapolation far beyond what the present evidence warrants. Theological critics have argued that he does not sufficiently consider the degree of evil in the world; optimism can only be justified if we assume that evil can be redeemed by transcendent divine action, because immanent evolutionary processes may not suffice.
Tillich, Paul (1886–1965)
Authors: Hammond Guyton B. 
Published: September 2018

Tillich was one of the most influential Christian theologians of the twentieth century. Notable for his effort to translate the language of the Western religious tradition into terms comprehensible to modernity, he drew upon various secular philosophies, including Marxism, existentialism and psychoanalysis, as well as literature and the arts. In his view, these contemporary secular expressions contain the questions which theology must address. He was sometimes criticized for losing one or another aspect of Christian orthodoxy, but more often praised for making it possible to be both Christian and modern. He fled Germany in 1933, in the early days of Nazism. As an expatriated German who became an American citizen, Tillich came to understand his life as one standing ‘on the boundary’. He saw himself as an interpreter, occupying the boundary between the Old World and the New, between philosophy and theology, between religious orthodoxy and humanistic secularity, and between university and church.
Tillich was an intellectual who achieved widespread popular acclaim. Even though his lectures and publications were strewn with allusions to obscure thinkers, he gained a substantial following and was frequently quoted in the popular press. His courses were immensely popular, and his sermons – delivered mostly in college chapels – met with great public approbation.
Two of Tillich’s themes stand out as most influential. First was his advocacy of a broadened category of the religious. By defining religion as a person’s ‘ultimate concern’, he was able to maintain that virtually everyone has some religious commitment. Through this conceptualization it became possible to view such twentieth-century ideologies as Nazism and Communism – as well as Americanism – as in significant respects religious perspectives. This broadened definition of religion gained wide acceptance, with sociopolitical and even judicial implications. (The US Supreme Court’s definition of conscientious objection was influenced by Tillich’s formulation.) Second, Tillich’s persistent claim that all language about God is symbolic had great impact. Objecting to views of religious language as merely symbolic, he contended that efforts to be literal in one’s talk of God are seriously deficient. By the same token, he argued that the mythic quality of religious narratives cannot be removed without detriment. Finding much American religion strongly literalistic, Tillich persistently argued the contrary view.
Trinity
Authors: van Inwagen Peter 
Published: September 2018

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a central and essential element of Christian theology. The part of the doctrine that is of special concern in the present entry may be stated in these words: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each God; they are distinct from one another; and yet (in the words of the Athanasian Creed), ‘they are not three Gods, but there is one God’. This is not to be explained by saying that ‘the Father’, ‘the Son’ and ‘the Holy Spirit’ are three names that are applied to the one God in various circumstances; nor is it to be explained by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are parts or aspects of God (like the leaves of a shamrock or the faces of a cube). In the words of St Augustine:
Thus there are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and each is God and at the same time all are one God; and each of them is a full substance, and at the same time all are one substance. The Father is neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit; the Son is neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. But the Father is the Father uniquely; the Son is the Son uniquely; and the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit uniquely.
(De doctrina christiana I, 5, 5)
The doctrine of the Trinity seems on the face of it to be logically incoherent. It seems to imply that identity is not transitive – for the Father is identical with God, the Son is identical with God, and the Father is not identical with the Son. There have been two recent attempts by philosophers to defend the logical coherency of the doctrine. Richard Swinburne has suggested that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be thought of as numerically distinct Gods, and he has argued that, properly understood, this suggestion is consistent with historical orthodoxy. Peter Geach and various others have suggested that a coherent statement of the doctrine is possible on the assumption that identity is ‘always relative to a sortal term’. Swinburne’s formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is certainly free from logical incoherency, but it is debatable whether it is consistent with historical orthodoxy. As to ‘relative identity’ formulations of the doctrine, not all philosophers would agree that the idea that identity is always relative to a sortal term is even intelligible.
Theosophy
Authors: Wakoff Michael B. 
Published: September 2018

Etymologically, ‘theosophy’ means wisdom concerning God or divine things, from the Greek ‘theos’ (God) and ‘sophia’ (wisdom). Seventeenth-century philosophers and speculative mystics used ‘theosophy’ to refer to a knowledge of nature based on mystical, symbolical or intuitive knowledge of the divine nature and its manifestations. It referred also to an analogical knowledge of God’s nature obtained by deciphering correspondences between the macrocosm and God.
In the late nineteenth century, ‘theosophy’ became associated with the doctrines of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the popular Theosophical Society. She drew on Buddhist and Hindu philosophy and fragments from the Western esoteric tradition, especially Neoplatonism. She espoused an absolutist metaphysics in which there is a single, ultimate, eternal principle which remains unchanged and undiminished, despite manifesting itself partially in the periodic emanation and reabsorption of universes. Her cosmology included a spiritual account of the evolution of material bodies, which serve as the necessary vehicles by which individuals gradually perfect themselves through cyclic rebirth.
Religion, philosophy of
Authors: Stump Eleonore , Rea Mike 
Published: September 2018

Philosophy of religion comprises philosophical reflection on a wide range of religious and religiously significant phenomena: religious belief, doctrine and practice in general; the phenomenology and cognitive significance of religious experience; the authority and reliability of religious testimony; the significance of religious diversity and disagreement; the relationship between religion (or God, or the gods) and morality; the doctrines, practices and modes of cognition distinctive to particular religious traditions; and so on. It is as old as philosophy itself and has been a standard part of Western philosophy in every period (see Religion, history of philosophy of). Since the latter half of the twentieth century, there has been a great growth of interest in it, and the range of topics that philosophers of religion have considered has expanded considerably.
Philosophy of religion is sometimes divided into philosophy of religion proper and philosophical theology. This distinction reflects the unease of an earlier period in analytic philosophy, during which philosophers felt that reflection on religion was philosophically respectable only if it abstracted away from particular religions, focusing on doctrines and problems shared in common by multiple religious traditions. But most philosophers now feel free to examine philosophically any aspect of religion, including the doctrines and practices peculiar to individual religions. Not only are the doctrines and practices of particular religions philosophically interesting in their own right, but also they often raise questions that are helpful for issues in other areas of philosophy. Reflection on the Christian notion of sanctification, for example, sheds light on certain contemporary debates over the nature of freedom of the will (see Sanctification). Likewise, reflection on Buddhist expressions of gratitude toward those who do one harm, or toward those whom one benefits, has been taken to shed light on the proper analysis of gratitude.
As a result of the blurring of boundaries between philosophy of religion proper and philosophical theology, philosophy of religion has in recent years taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary character, with work in philosophy of religion engaging to a much greater degree with relevant work in systematic theology, historical theology and cognate areas in the study of other religions. Within the analytic tradition of philosophy, this interdisciplinary shift is perhaps most visible in the rise of ‘analytic theology’ (see Analytic theology).