The association of twins with health-giving powers is widespread in mythology, folklore, and religion. The Ashvins of the Rig-Veda, the classical Dioscuri, and the early Christian saints Cosmos and Damian are among the many examples of twins divinely empowered in the area of health and fertility. A characteristic set of attributes of twins recurs in different mythologies of wide distribution. I...

Can humans acquire knowledge of ultimate reality, even significant or comprehensive knowledge? I argue that for all we know we can, and that is so whether ultimate reality is divine or non-divine. My strategy involves arguing that we are ignorant, in the sense of lacking public or shared knowledge, about which possibilities, if any, obtain for humans to acquire knowledge of ultimate reality. Th...

Forthcoming chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought 2 Where do spontaneous thoughts come from? It may be surprising that the seemingly straightforward answers " from the mind " or " from the brain " are in fact an incredibly recent, modern understanding of the origins of spontaneous thought. For nearly all of human history, our thoughts – especially the most sudden, insightful, an...

This article explores the state of the art in theories of special divine action by means of a study of the Divine Action Project (DAP) co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley. The basic aim is to introduce the DAP and to summarize its results, especially as these were compiled in the final “capstone” meeting of the DAP, and drawin...

e nature of divine eternality is obscure in both historical andmodern discussions. In a way its obscurity is no surprise, given that the nature of time is so mysterious. But the obscurity is still notable relative to the other traditional divine attributes, which are comparatively much better understood. Our perplexities regarding eternality are compounded, I will argue here, by a failure to re...

A class of signaling games is studied in which a unique Universally Divine equilibrium outcome exists. We identify a monotonicity property under which a variation of Universal Divinity is generically equivalent to strategic stability. Further assumptions guarantee the existence of a unique Universally Divine outcome. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: 021, 022, 026. ‘r 1990 ...