Is Theism Essential to Religion?

Is Religion Essential? Beliefs about Religious Categories

The purpose of the present study was to assess whether presumed variations in people’s values towards intergroup mobility modulate their essentialist beliefs about the groups. Our target population was orthodox Jews, who, on the one hand, value in-group preservation regarding religious affiliation (Jewish or Christian), but on the other, value uni-directional integration regarding religiosity (...

Theism and Dialetheism

The divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence have faced objections to their very consistency. Such objections rely on reasoning parallel to the semantic paradoxes such as the Liar or the set-theoretic paradoxes like Russell’s paradox. With the advent of paraconsistent logics, dialetheism— the view that some contradictions are true — became a major player in the search for a solution to ...

Theism & Mathematical Realism

Historically, most mathematicians have believed that mathematical truths such as "2+5=7" exist independently of human minds, being universally and eternally true. Mathematicians believe they are discovering properties of, say, prime numbers, rather than merely inventing them. This view of mathematics dates back to Pythagoras (500 BC) and Plato (400 BC). It is often called “Platonism”. In order ...

Theism and Physical Cosmology1

Scientific and Philosophical Challenges to Theism *

Modern science developed within a culture of Judeo-Christian theism, and science and theism have generally supported each other. However, there are certainly areas in both science and religion that puzzle me. Here I outline some puzzles that have arisen for me concerning everlasting life, human free will, divine free will, the simplicity and probability of God, the problem of evil, and the conv...