The question “Why is there anything at all rather than absolutely nothing?” was not a question medieval Arabic-speaking philosophers were prone to raise, at least not in this exact wording. Instead, they were more concerned with the related question, “Why is there a world rather than no world at all?” or more exactly, “Why does the world have the particular features that it has?” Certainly in t...

BACKGROUND The topos of the Compassionate God is a dominant motive of the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is relevant for nursing because it asks the nurse to imitate God so as to become God-like. Also, to think that God suffers with the suffering believers is thought to give comfort to them. Because in the western world the topos of the Compassionate God represents the basis of the ethics ...

allameh tabatabaei has proposed the last and the shortest formulation of the “seddiqin argument” of which javadi amoli believes it provides no philosophical presuppositions and therefore can be the first question in islamic philosophy. the claim has yielded controversies pro and con. in the papers written on the subject matter, the claim has been criticized in particular and not in general. i t...

The free will defense attempts to show that the existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of evil, and it received its most sophisticated development in the work of Alvin Plantinga (1974). Many philosophers believe that Plantinga’s free will defense conclusively demonstrates the logical compatibility of God and evil. Philosophers such as W. Alston, R. Adams, and W. Rowe have w...

Although religiousness is tied to coping, little work examines the role of specific religious beliefs in the coping process. Applying the transactional model of coping, positivity of God image and vertical religious focus were assessed in a national sample of 103 parents of children with disabilities. Controlling for general religiousness, these specific beliefs were correlated with parents’ ap...

1 The Dilemma of the Theistic Platonist Theists generally hold that God is the creator of all there is distinct from himself. Traditionally, the scope of God's creative activity has extended across two disjoint realms: the physical, whose chief exemplars are ordinary middle-size objects, and the mental or spiritual, encompassing such things as angels and souls. Now, many theists are also platon...

BACKGROUND It is well known how often psychiatric patients report religious experiences. These are especially frequent in schizophrenic and epileptic patients as the subject of their delusions. The question we pose is: are there differences between this kind of religious experiences and those we find in religious texts or in the mythological tradition? RESULTS An overview on famous mythologic...