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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
When God Dies: Deconversion From Theism As Analogous To The Experience Of Death, William David Simpson
When God Dies: Deconversion From Theism As Analogous To The Experience Of Death, William David Simpson
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
In this thesis, I explore the psychological and experiential aspects of the shift from a supernatural theistic worldview (specifically born-again Christianity) to a
philosophically naturalistic and atheistic worldview in the context of the religious
landscape in the U.S. I posit that certain features of this transition, which is known as "deconversion,” can be thought of as potentially analogous, both psychologically and subjectively, to the experience of another's death as an objective environmental change. I provide anthropological and psychological evidence that believers often experience the God of born-again Christianity as an independently existing and active agent in the world. The similarities …
Transubstantiation And Quantum Physics: The Parallels Of Mystery In Religion And Science, Zachary Sexton
Transubstantiation And Quantum Physics: The Parallels Of Mystery In Religion And Science, Zachary Sexton
Spring 2013, Science and Religion
As the study of physics has progressed into the abstract realm of quanta, some have argued that the notion of transubstantiation is an unreasonable understanding of the Eucharist. However, when confronted with the uncertainty that modern physics presents, sharp parallels between this uncertainty and the metaphysical mysteries of transubstantiation. If it is reasonable to accept uncertainty in quantum physics, then it should be reasonable to accept the mysteries within the metaphysical world.
On The Metaphysical Necessity Of Suffering From Natural Evil, Ryan Edward Sullivan
On The Metaphysical Necessity Of Suffering From Natural Evil, Ryan Edward Sullivan
Spring 2013, Science and Religion
Why does God permit suffering in the world? If God is wholly good, omnipotent, and omniscient, why would He not intervene to prevent us from suffering? These are questions that pertain to the problem of evil: how to reconcile the existence of God with the evil occurrences of this world, without sacrificing any of His divine attributes. The most potent version of the problem of evil is a recent formulation known as the evidential argument from evil. The evidential argument states that while the existence of God is not logically incompatible with the fact that there are evil occurrences, there …
The Reality Of Moral Imperatives In Liberal Religion, Howard Lesnick
The Reality Of Moral Imperatives In Liberal Religion, Howard Lesnick
All Faculty Scholarship
This paper uses a classic one-liner attributed to Dostoyoevski’s Ivan Karamozov, "Without God everything is permitted," to explore some differences between what I term traditional and liberal religion. The expansive connotations and implications of Ivan’s words are grounded in the historic association of wrongfulness and punishment, and in a reaction against the late modern challenge to the inexorability of that association, whether in liberal religion or in secular moral thought. The paper argues that, with its full import understood, Ivan’s claim begs critical questions of the meaning and source of compulsion and choice, and of knowledge and belief regarding the …
Philosophy, Religion And The Politics Of Bildung In Hegal And Feuerbach, Todd Gooch
Philosophy, Religion And The Politics Of Bildung In Hegal And Feuerbach, Todd Gooch
Philosophy and Religion Faculty and Staff Research
In 1828 a twenty-four-year-old Ludwig Feuerbach, who had previously spent two years listening to Hegel lecture in Berlin, sent his teacher a copy of his recently completed doctoral dissertation along with what Laurence Dickey has described as a "monumentally important letter" in which he suggested that Hegel might detect in his dissertation "traces of a manner of philosophizing which could be called the actualization and secularization of the idea, the ensarkosis or Incarnation of the pure logos", while at the same time rejecting Hegel's identification of Christianity as the consummate religion.