scholarly journals Theodicy and Ultimate Reality and Meaning. Existence of Evil in the World Modifies the Idea of God

1991 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-127
Author(s):  
George B. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
Idea Of God

scholarly journals COVID: GOD’S GREAT BLESSINGS

2020 ◽  
pp. 220-232
Author(s):  
Osmar Pogoy Labajo
Keyword(s):  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Deep Surface ◽  
The World

Why are people worried and afraid of COVID? Why does the world consider this pandemic as a devastating crisis? Sad to say, the deep surface of its ultimate reality is not clearly seen by the reflective naked eyes by many.

Moral Values as Religious Absolutes

1992 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 145-160
Author(s):  
James P. Mackey
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
True Proposition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Centrifugal Forces ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Idea Of God

Those who have had the benefit of a reasonably lengthy familiarity with the philosophy of religion, and more particularly with the God question, may be so kind to a speaker long in exile from philosophy and only recently returned, as to subscribe, initially at least, to the following rather enormous generalization: meaning and truth, which to most propositions are the twin forces by which they are maintained, turn out in the case of claims about God, to be the centrifugal forces by which they disintegrate. In simpler language, the greater the amount of intelligible meaning that can be given to the idea of God, the less grounds there would appear to be for assuming let alone asserting, that God exists, at least as a being distinguishable from all the things in this empirical world which are the source of the range of meanings available to us; on the other hand, the more we insist that God exists, a being over and above the things that make up this empirical world (the more we take the proposition ‘God exists’ to be a true proposition in this particular transcendent sense, for the adjective ‘transcendent’ has many uses) the less the amount of commonly available meaning we appear to be able to apply to God. Or, to put this in a manner which might obviate an obvious objection to it; either everything we know is tout ensemble, God, and then nothing in the world that we know is distinctively divine; or else nothing in this world is God, and then nothing that we appear to be able to know is God. That same formulation will work, it should be noted, even if we substitute for ‘things in the world’, ‘an aspect or aspects of things in the world’.

God, Indian conceptions of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibajiban Bhattacharyya
Keyword(s):  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Advaita Vedanta ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Summum Bonum ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

In the Ṛg Veda, the oldest text in India, many gods and goddesses are mentioned by name; most of them appear to be deifications of natural powers, such as fire, water, rivers, wind, the sun, dusk and dawn. The Mīmāṃsā school started by Jaimini (c.ad 50) adopts a nominalistic interpretation of the Vedas. There are words like ‘Indra’, ‘Varuṇa’, and so on, which are names of gods, but there is no god over and above the names. God is the sacred word (mantra) which has the potency to produce magical results. The Yoga system of Patañjali (c.ad 300) postulates God as a soul different from individual souls in that God does not have any blemishes and is eternally free. The ultimate aim of life is not to realize God, but to realize the nature of one’s own soul. God-realization may help some individuals to attain self-realization, but it is not compulsory to believe in God to attain the summum bonum of human life. Śaṅkara (c.ad 780), who propounded the Advaita Vedānta school of Indian philosophy, agrees that God-realization is not the ultimate aim of human life. Plurality, and therefore this world, are mere appearances, and God, as the creator of the world, is himself relative to the concept of the world. Rāmānuja (traditionally 1016–1137), the propounder of the Viśiṣṭādvaita school, holds God to be ultimate reality, and God-realization to be the ultimate goal of human life. The way to realize God is through total self-surrender to God. Nyāya theory also postulates one God who is an infinite soul, a Person with omniscience and omnipresence as his attributes. God is the creator of language, the author of the sacred Vedas, and the first teacher of all the arts and crafts.

PHASE VOLUME OF THE PERCEPTION TO REALITY: DETERMINANTS AND FACILITIES OF THE EXPRESSION

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-98
Author(s):  
Andrey Bragin
Keyword(s):  
Social Evolution ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Phase Volume ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World

The article is devoted to problem of revision of the borders of the range (the phase volume) and adequacy of the perception of the world in speaker long disheveled locks of universe-social evolution of the man. It is shown that in man’s perception volume is conditioned by the physiological organization as well as by its place in the cosmos and the Earth biosphere. The accent is made on discovery determinant conditioning given range of the perception and facility of the expression available perception to information. It is revealed that the modeling of reality becomes more abstract and clear, but less concrete, adequate to the «ultimate reality» with its blurred forms.

The Early Moderns

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Clatterbaugh
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanations ◽  
Efficient Cause ◽  
The World ◽  
Four Causes ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Idea Of God

The early moderns confronted an abundance of causes and types of causal explanations. From Aristotle through the Scholastics they had inherited the doctrine of the four causes, that is, depending upon context the material, formal, final, or efficient cause provides the proper explanation or answer to a ‘Why?’ question. From the Christianization of Aristotle's Unmoved Mover they had inherited the idea of God as creator of the universe. And to the creator role had been added the idea of providence whereby God in some sense ‘manages’ the world of mundane events. Aquinas had actually identified God as the efficient cause of all things.

The Female Pole of the Godhead in Tantrism and the Prakrti of Sāmkhya

Numen ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Jacobsen
Keyword(s):  
Female Identity ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe dualism of the consciousness principle (puruṣa) and the material principle (Prakrti) in the Sāmkhya and Pātañjala-Sāmkhya (Yoga) traditions of religious thought has often been thought of as a dualism of a male and a female principle. Contrary to what is often assumed however the material principle of Sāmkhya and Pātañjala-Sāmkhya does not possess a female identity. This paper argues that the identification of the Sāmkhya and Pātañjala-Sāmkhya Prakrti with a female principle among scholars is due to a very selective use of evidence and too much dependence on later sources, especially the Tantric religious systems in which the female-male polarity was utilized for the interpretation of the ultimate reality, the structure of the world and the means to attain liberation. The way the Tantric religions utilized the Sāmkhya dualism of Prakrti and puruṣa to illustrate the female-male polarity of ultimate reality illustrates the manner in which the Tantric religions reinterpreted elements of earlier systems of religious thought and transformed them according to their own purpose and the process of borrowing and synthesizing of what had come before them typical of the Hindu religious traditions.

McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis (1866–1925)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Essential Element ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Independent Account

McTaggart was one of the last of the ‘British Idealists’, the group of British philosophers, such as B. Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley, who took their inspiration from Hegel. In his early writings from the 1890s, McTaggart gave a critical exposition of themes from Hegel’s logic before advancing his own distinctive idealist positions concerning time, the mind, and reality in general. But in his writings from 1910 he developed an independent account of the structure of existence from which he then argued for the same idealist positions as before. The thesis for which McTaggart is now most famous is that of the unreality of time; what is even more difficult to come to terms with is his thesis that the ultimate reality of the world comprises a community of selves wholly constituted by their loving perceptions of each other. This thesis is a manifestation of a mysticism that is an essential element in McTaggart’s philosophy; yet this mysticism is combined with a rationalist determination, reminiscent of Spinoza, to vindicate mystical insights by the light of pure reason alone.

Metalepsis and Metaphysics

Metalepsis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Duncan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Time Change ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Major Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Point Of Reference ◽  
Ancient Texts

This chapter examines the narratological concept of metalepsis in relation to metaphysical texts, investigating how competing metaphysical assumptions affect the ways in which metalepsis is thought to operate in relation to empirical experience. It takes as a major point of reference Christopher Nolan’s 2010 movie Inception, in which three distinct narrative levels are troped as dreams within dreams. The film’s closing scene raises and leaves unanswered the question whether the level inhabited at that point by the central character is his ‘reality’ (as he believes) or whether he is still within a dream. For many people who inhabit the world of empirical experience, that world is not ultimate ‘reality’, which lies at one level removed. As examples of this attitude in texts concerned with metaphysics, the chapter explores Fate in Virgil’s Aeneid and the apostrophized God in Augustine’s Confessions before focusing on the Platonic appeal to the world of the Forms. In the emergence of a ‘classical’ metaphysics of an ultimate reality lying beyond time, change, and narrative, however, the key ancient figure is Parmenides; but ancient texts that embrace those very features, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, already point to the ‘counter-classical’ metaphysics which has come to the fore in the wake of Heidegger’s Being and Time and has recently achieved remarkable prominence. The conclusion of the chapter explores how, within such a ‘counter-classical’ metaphysics, the narrative frames by which we order and project our empirical experience break in on each other as they establish what we accept as our ‘reality’.

The Importance of Being God-Less: The Unintended Universe and China’s Spiritual Legacy

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 686-708
Author(s):  
Brook Ziporyn
Keyword(s):  
Modern China ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
The World ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
Spiritual Legacy ◽  
Idea Of God

The idea of a nous as arche, of a single purposive rational mind that creates the world or otherwise accounts for the world being as it is, has dominated most Western thought in one form or another since it was proposed by Plato, quoting Socrates, quoting Anaxagoras, in the Phaedo, particularly in the form given it in monotheist religions and theologies and, less explicitly but still powerfully, in their secular aftermaths. Each of the dominant traditions in pre-modern China is however “God-less” in the sense of lacking just this conception. This article takes a look at the forms of God-less religiousness developed in these traditions, as a way of recovering some of the ethical and epistemological alternatives obscured by the idea of God idea in monotheistic cultures.

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