belief in the lofty positions and excellences of the shi’īte imams (a.s.) and having faith in their miraculous acts and dominion over the world affairs underlies the authentic doctrine of unconditional guardianship (wilāya al-takwīnī). when the imams’ devotees try to maintain a demigod status for the imams in line with this – possibly loving and devotional – belief beyond the conventional limit...

Abstract How does God ordain creaturely evil while preserving their freedom? In this article, I compare Calvin’s views on God’s relationship to with those of the English Reformed. survey from his commentaries and Institutes, arguing that they share several salient features However, also note Reformed more readily use language “contingency” “divine permission” respect evil; difference is reflect...

In this paper I argue that J. L. Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness Argument is committed to a problematic implication that is weakened by research in cognitive psychology on affective forecasting. Schellenberg’s notion of a nonresistant nonbeliever logically implies that for any such person, it is true that she would form the proper belief in God if provided with what he calls “probabilifying” e...

Orthodoxy, and other so-called world religions that were complicit with colonialist expansion and its repression of the “other peoples” (indigenous), their rites and beliefs. For centuries, colonial societies have denied that indigenous peoples had “religions” at all; as the great photographer of Native North American cultures Edward S. Curtis stated, “There seems to be a broadly prevalent idea...

Divine view is to production and industrialization a part of the process of economic development. The divine rules of governance become Ibadah (form of worship), hence industrialization within the divine ambit is also an Ibadah. Divine messages, therefore, stresses both the moral quality and skills in the production of goods. People are getting benefits from industry from different ways, someti...

muslim scholars and islamic official institutions consider human cloning as opposing religious doctrine, and forbidden. their ideas are based upon some theological and juridical arguments, including: posing a challenge to the creative power of god, breaking the tradition of marriage, breaking the tradition of diversity in creatures or species, making changes in divine creatures, game with creat...

More than 700 years ago, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote an epic poem about a man's journey through the afterworlds of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. In his Divine Comedy, he catalogued the vices and virtues of people who had passed into those spiritual domains, in part to provide a valuable insight to us, the living. Dante described hell as a very unhappy and inhospitable place that had differe...

According to the much-discussed argument from divine hiddenness, God’s existence is disconfirmed by the fact that not everyone believes in God. The argument has provoked an impressive range of theistic replies, but none has overcome – or, I suggest, could overcome – the challenge posed by the uneven distribution of theistic belief around the world, a phenomenon for which naturalistic explanatio...

I begin by noting that several theologians and others object to special divine action (divine intervention and action beyond conservation and creation) on the grounds that it is incompatible with science. These theologians are thinking of classical Newtonian science; I argue that in fact classical science is in no way incompatible with special divine action, including miracle. What is incompati...