PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION RESEARCH (NAMAH-I HIKMAT)
Year:2021 | Volume:19 | Issue:1|Papers Count:12

Simone Weil has considered attention more than any other philosopher and mystic. Her thoughts on attention are not merely cognitive, scientific, or psychological issues, rather, it has direct and far-reaching effects on education, theology, and even politics. She expresses attention as a way of life, both at individual and socio-political levels. According to Simone Weil, although man does not create or make anything by paying attention to it, attention brings life to what is being attended to. Only that man's attention to surrounding matters is a life-giving one which is “pure”. Pure attention is free from any attachments and through which man frees himself from imaginary and illusory matters and achieves the truth. What leads a person to pure attention is “to desire without an object”. On the other hand, Simone Weil refers to the suspension of thought as a state of pure attention, which is to endure void and wait. In Simone Weil's view, pure attention can be considered as love, because just as attention is consenting for anything other than oneself, so love also requires recognizing reality by turning away from oneself. Simone Weil introduces attention-based ethics, and by turning one's attention to God, not only she builds her individual ethics, but also her epistemology and socio-political philosophy. And along with divine grace, she considers attention as an antidote which is necessary for man's salvation.

The well-known contemporary philosopher, Edmund Husserl, relying on the intentionality of consciousness, introduced a new method of transcendental phenomenology in Western philosophy. According to this method, contrary to empiricists, truth is not rooted in sensory experiences of the physical world, nor arises from metaphysical elements, but is something that is subject to consciousness and is considered to belong to it. In this process, the physical world is suspended, and what remains is the deliberate and ideal knowledge and experience of the nature of things. Hence, the world as it appears on consciousness will be the standard of truth. In his view, the only way for philosophy to become a sound science and, consequently, to get rid of the crisis of the contemporary world and to achieve the desired life-world is to use the method of the transcendental phenomenology. Husserl did not address the question of the meaning of life directly, but portrayed a new perspective on the life-world. According to this new approach, which will be analyzed in the present study, living as it appears to us and having direct intuition of it, is a transcendental truth that on the basis of rationality can open a new horizon for us.

Linda Zagzebski’s reading of virtue epistemology is consisted of several elements. In her synthetic theory, if not eclectic, there are many defects. In this research, after providing a very short explanation of the core of the theory, four defects are introduced. The virtue and belief obtained throughout the path pictured by Zagzebski are not the required and adequate conditions to achieve knowledge; the difference between the natural and acquired virtue and their role in attaining virtue are not clearly elaborated and there is room for further debate; the position of agent and believer –as the possessor of knowledge- in her theory is questionable from mere naturalistic and reliablistic viewpoint, and there is a different way of elaborating on virtues and vices from experimental sciences viewpoint and the test-based philosophy perspective. Eventually, the position of the motivation to attain knowledge and the impulses that lead to knowledge are questionable.

Greater Good Theodicies are among the main responses to the problem of evil. These theodicies look for a greater good that can explain the consistency of the existence of evils and the existence of the omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good God. After reviewing some versions of this kind of theodicy and the conditions they aim to meet, a fundamental objection is discussed - the moral objection. According to the objection, the greater good theodicies in principle violate some moral principles, such as the Kantian principle of mere means or the Pauline principle. In response, the defender of the theodicies might argue that there are counter-examples to such moral principles. It is argued that although these counter-examples make room for a possible defense of the greater good theodicies, the mere fact that it might be at times morally permissible for human beings to violate those moral principles is not enough to claim that the same is true in the case of God. However, first, still there might be other ways for the defender to defend the greater good theodicies against the moral objections. Second, it is important to pay proper attention to the significance of greater good theodicies beyond the sphere of theology - that is, their importance to religious studies and their moral significance.

The issue of faith and its compatibility or incompatibility with reason as well as the justification of religious beliefs based on rationality has long been considered as one of the most challenging issues in the philosophy of religion. Many philosophers and thinkers have examined this ambiguous issue and criticized each other's views. Soren Kierkegaard, a prominent Danish religious thinker known as the father of existentialism, is one of the most important theorists of the relationship between faith and reason. He considers the rationalization of faith to be contradictory. He believes that the realm of faith is separate from the realm of reason, and that faith has primacy over reason. According to him, faith is a subjective truth and a kind of passion, and the reason that seeks for objective truths can never comprehend subjective truths. This article consists of five sections. In Section (1) we examine the intellectual and philosophical foundations of Kierkegaard’s position. In Section (2) we describe Kierkegaard’s theory of the nature of faith, and in Section (3) we explore his theory about the relationship between reason and faith. In Section (4) we will introduce the notion of blissful human and the transcendental manifestation of existence from Kierkegaard's point of view.  Finally, in Section (5), we will conclude and summarize the obtained points and results.

The present study seeks to answer the question "Is it possible to know the divine essence in the system of Fakhr-e-Razi thought?" Organized and the most important results are: Fakhr-e-Razi, after denying the possibility of conceptual and formal knowledge of the Almighty God, by raising the issue of the possibility of seeing, seeks a new cognitive system, according to which one can achieve the knowledge of the divine essence. In the first step, he proves the possibility of knowing the essence with eight reasons. Although there are criticisms of his reasons and some of which are analyzed with prejudice and subjectively, but in general, the possibility of knowing by Fakhr seems acceptable. There is evidence that Fakhr-e-Razi, in his later works, preferred the mystical method and in the second step, took the mystical method and after stating the eight reasons, offers the four stages of seeking, purifying, observing one's non-existence, and annihilation as solutions for attaining the essence and acquiring knowlege about it.

Paying attention to the early views on the definition of knowledge, Mulla Sadra offers an existential definition based on his existential foundations that are the turning point in the epistemology of transcendent wisdom. In this view, knowledge is a kind of existence of one thing for another. This definition and its consequence have led to a new explanation by Mulla Sadra about divine knowledge. This explanation has a terrific contribution to shaping the epistemological geometry of divine knowledge in Islamic philosophy. These are some of the angles of this geometry: non - redundancy of divine knowledge to God's essence; the intuitiveness of divine knowledge; the denial of any forms in divine knowledge; the acceptance of God's detailed knowledge of individuals; The immediacy of what God knows; the union of knowledge, knower and the known in God; God's knowledge of Himself, and the identification of His non-detailed knowledge of others with the detailed revealing of others. The study reveals that paying attention to Mulla Sadra's existential explanation of knowledge allows understanding the way of forming his theory, its innovative aspects, and its distinction from others in the field.

I intend to show that the fine-tuning argument is not a theistic one, and is therefore not desirable for the theist. I will argue that (1) if the fine-tuning of the cosmos exceeds that which is required for the existence of human beings, it would not be helpful to the believer to prove the existence of God. (2) From the theist’s point of view, there are two objections to the fine-tuning argument: first, the extravagance objection, which states that this argument also includes other improbable events as evidence for the existence of God, though the theist does not mean that. Second, the backfire objection, which states that the advocate of fine-tuning reasoning defeats her/his purpose. Third, the fine-tuning argument assumes that the occurrence of an unlikely event requires a different explanation than the occurrence of probable events, and this is a false presupposition, which leads to the “God of the gaps” objection. The theist independently does not accept this distinction; she/he believes that the explanation of both probable and improbable events equally requires assuming the existence of God. So, since the fine-tuning argument is based on assumptions that are inconsistent with theism, the theist should not find it worrisome that the fine-tuning argument is not a successful one.

To answer the problem of incompatibility between divine providence and creaturely freedom, Molinism suggests the theory of middle knowledge, a theory that claims by assuming God’s knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom, we can resolve the problem without giving up neither divine providence nor creaturely freedom. Through His knowledge of the conditionals and actualizing their antecedents, He knows what creatures will freely do. In this way, God’s foreknowledge and sovereignty can be compatible with creatures’ freedom. The present paper attempts to show that there is a sort of incoherency in Molinism. For, while Molinism presupposes divine immutability thesis, it attributes a will to God that requires moving from possibility to actuality in divine nature. We argue that because counterfactuals of freedom need to be actualized by divine will, claiming God's knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom leads to a rejection of divine immutability thesis which makes Molinism incoherent. We conclude that the proposed objection to the theory of God’s middle knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom is a crucial objection regardless of the success of its proponents in answering the objections concerning the truth-makers of such counterfactuals.

In the cognitive science of religion, some, after conducting or examining experiments, believe that all human beings are "intuitive theists" or "Born Believers" and believe in "natural Religion." According to these thinkers, our three basic cognitive mechanisms, i.e. Theory of Mind (TOM), Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), and Teleological Bias (TB), have been emerged and sustained as a result of evolution. Therefore, the cognitive structure of all of us human beings at birth is such that it provides the basis for religiosity. One of the challenges to this theory at first glance is that if theism is intuitive, then why do so many people believe in atheism? In this paper, we intend to explain the theory of intuitive theism in the cognitive sciences of religion and then defend it against the many forms of atheism. We answer that there are many types of atheism: "cognitive atheism," "motivational atheism," "cultural atheism," and "analytical atheism."  Theism and atheism can coincide in all these categories except the first. In other words, with this analysis of the cognitive sciences of religion, the same large number of atheists can be considered intuitive theists, even if they do not pay attention or accept. Thus, despite the increasing number of atheists, intuitive theism as a theory in the cognitive sciences of religion can still be defended.

There have been many epistemological challenges about the justification of belief in God over the past three centuries, so that some, such as Plantinga, have merely proposed warranted belief rather than justifying an argument in this regard and showed the belief in God's existence as a basic belief. But millions of people, regardless of these challenges, believe in God's existence as justified for themselves without being a fideist. Where does this justification come from? Can their justification be explained epistemologically? In this paper, while explaining the new currents of social epistemology and "testimony", the importance of epistemology based on trusted hearings is shown and then it is argued that our trusted hearings about the existence of God and his attributes and those of the prophets, and that it is based on God's confession and his explanation of himself, can be the best justification for our beliefs. Finally, the question of how God's testimony to his existence and attributes, which has come to us through the prophets, can be one of the best epistemological justifications for believing in the existence and attributes of God? And what advantages can this type of religious epistemology have over evidevtialism or various forms of arguing for the existence of God and his attributes?

Biologically, one of the most important and distinguishing features of human beings compared to early mammals is culture, which includes political and social institutions, religious and moral traditions. According to bio-genetic studies, religions as a universal culture have a high degree of heritability; Thus, the characteristic of religiosity is inherited from the middle-aged generation by the younger generation. David Wilson, an American biologist, sees religion as a "multilevel adaptation" and product of cultural evolution, shaped by participation and solidarity between groups, and what has led to the survival of religions throughout history and their diversity in different cultures. The direction of solidarity of religious groups is based on practical realism. In Wilson's view, there is no point in arguing for the true reality of religious propositions, and what matters only is the usefulness of the propositions. This kind of explanation of the causes of the emergence and survival of religions throughout human history, epistemologically poses many challenges that are particularly significant in propositional religions and attributed to divine revelation. In this article, Wilson's views are expressed in detail and criticized, and it will be argued that the formation of religious knowledge in a believer can not be explained only by a utilitarian-oriented view based on evolutionary explanations and the role of other epistemological, religious, rational, and emotional components should not be ignored.