A well-known objection to divine will/divine command moral theories is that they commit us to the view that God’s will is arbitrary. I argue that several versions of divine will/divine command moral theories, including two of Robert Adams’s versions of the DCT and my own divine preference theory, can be successfully defended against this objection. I argue that, even if God’s preferences are so...

In Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation, William Abraham offers a rich, subtle defense of an epistemology of divine revelation. In this paper, I focus on a cluster of metaepistemological claims made by Abraham. Specifically, I argue that Abraham’s remarks about epistemic fit and the epistemic standards we bring to bear in making evaluations of divine revelation claims commit him to a spe...

Horrendous evil describes the anthropological view of excessive evils which devastate and dehumanise both victim and perpetrator, casting doubt as to whether life is worth living. Divine exultation and divine agony are viewed from the perspective of divinity, whose initial creation brought God pleasure and its fall an offence so deep that, though he considered its total destruction, God instead...

In 1867 William Farr published his report into the cholera epidemic which, in 1866, had killed over five thousand people living in the Whitechapel area of East London. It was the last of the four epidemics which ravaged the capital in the mid-nineteenth century [1]. Farr, after an early career writing for The Lancet under its founding editor Thomas Wakley, had been appointed ‘compiler of abstra...

We examined experiencing divine love as an indicator of affective spiritual growth in a prospective cohort of 200 patients surviving cardiac surgery. These patients previously completed two-wave preoperative interviews when standardized cardiac surgery data were also collected. The information included left ventricular ejection fraction, New York Heart Association Classification, baseline healt...

s for the Annual Meeting are planned to go into the June issue and will be organized by Program Chair Elwin Stewart. We hope to post the abstracts on the MSA Home Page. Wes on the MSA Home Page. We are looking for a volunteer to edit the new "Dialogue" section in Inoculumcontact Ellen Farr (or any MSA Officer) if you are interested. Controversial exchanges, when they arise for possible publicat...

In a longitudinal study the relevance of the detection of low avidity antibodies to double stranded DNA (dsDNA) as measured by the polyethylene glycol (PEG) assay in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) was evaluated. It was found that 35 patients positive in the PEG assay only--that is, having only low avidity anti-dsDNA in their circulation, had a mild course of their SLE with abs...

Thirty-four antinuclear antibody (ANA) positive systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) sera were tested for antibodies to double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) simultaneously using Farr, haemagglutination, Crithidia luciliae (CL) kinetoplast fluorescence and human metaphase chromosome fluorescence assays. Significant correlation (p less than 0 x 05) was found between the Farr and CL assays, with the two fluo...

The handiwork and the glory of God displayed by the heavens and the firmament have been called General Divine Revelation. In this category one may also include the constitution of human personality, for man himself is a creation of God and in some sense bears the marks of his Creator. This “light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and pow...