OBJECTIVE To track within-individual change during late life in the sense of personal control and God-mediated control (the belief that one can work collaboratively with God to achieve one's goals and exercise control over life events) and to evaluate the hypothesis that this element of religion is related to declining personal control. METHOD A longitudinal survey representative of older Whi...

A Christian liberal arts education seeks to explore several fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human? For what purpose did God create us? How do we develop to our full human potential? What sets us free, liberates us, to be all that God intends us to be? In Genesis, we learn that to be human is to be created in the image of God; to bear the image of God. To be human is to rule over ...

And how this book will influence you to do better future? It will relate to how the readers will get the lessons that are coming. As known, commonly many people will believe that reading can be an entrance to enter the new perception. The perception will influence how you step you life. Even that is difficult enough; people with high sprit may not feel bored or give up realizing that concept. I...

Historically, the development of God concepts in human cognition has been explained anthropomorphically. In other words, for children especially, God is a big, superhuman who lives in the sky. Recent empirical research on the development of these concepts may suggest an alternative hypothesis. In this paper, we review this research and outline the "preparedness hypothesis," which suggests that ...

In this article I argue that the effects of sin for our cognition of God primarily consist in a lack of knowledge by acquaintance of God and the relevant ensuing propositional knowledge. In the course of my argument, I make several conceptual distinctions and offer analyses of 1 Cor 13:9–12 and Rom 1:18–23. As it turns out, we have ample reason to think that sin has had and still has profound c...

As an extension of a concept known as tawheed,* nothing lies outside of The Jurisdiction of Divine Intervention; nor is God the deist’s watchmaker, winding up reality and watching various Newtonian-like mechanized processes play themselves out. Once this latter deist notion is embraced, and given a particular subtle type of human propensity for self-exaltation (a type which is by definition not...

If God did not exist – people would invent one! The development of human civilization requires mechanisms promoting cooperation and social order. One of these mechanisms is based on the idea that everything we do is seen and judged by God – bad deeds will be punished, while good ones will be rewarded. The Information Age has now fueled the dream that God-like omniscience and omnipotence can be ...

Philosophers and theologians have advanced a variety of arguments for God’s existence. Th e arguments vary along a number of dimensions. Some are a priori; some are a posteriori. Some depend on a particular defi nition of God; others are more general. But they have features in common. Th ey are independent of any particular religious tradition, depending on nothing more than a generally classic...

Is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity consistent with a very strong version of the thesis of divine simplicity? Yes, so long as the simple divine nature is a relational nature, a nature that could be characterized in terms of such relations as knowing and loving. This divine nature functions simultaneously as agent, patient, and action: as knower, known and knowledge, and lover, beloved, and...