Journal Of Religious Thought
Year:2005 | Volume:- | Issue:16|Papers Count:7

By increasing human knowledge during the history of thought, philosophical and theological approaches to the knowledge of God have been changed largely. We can find a lot of arguments for existence of God in both Christian and Islamic theologies. In recent ages there have been a lot of discussions among the theologians of these two traditions on subjects such as: the possibility of argument for God's existence, the best argument for the existence of God, the critiques of the arguments and their replies, the new formulations of the traditional arguments and etc. In this article some of these subjects are compared in Islamic and Christian traditions. Then inspired from a Qur'anic verse, a new argument for God's existence is suggested. This is an argument for the existence of God from the function of our soul in the field of hopefulness. By hopefulness we mean all wishes, desires, hopes and other attributes of the soul in hoping the good future.

Prepositional knowledge has three necessary and sufficient components: justification, truth and belief. On this view, prepositional knowledge is, by definition (analysis) of knowledge. There are different kinds of theories of justification. One of them is coherence, according to which, a belief is justified if, and only if, it hast reciprocal relations to a system of beliefs. The theory employs the metaphor of a spider web: each intersection in the web has reciprocal relations to the others.There are four kinds of theories of coherence: necessary implication, consistency, explanation and beating or neutralizing.This article discuss critically the different kinds of theories of coherence and shows none of them is sufficient in explaining justification.

In this article the Gnostic thoughts and teachings on Soteriology have been surveyed based on Nag Hammadi library, the oldest and the most authentic Gnostic work. It has been shown that this doctrine of salvation is the result of belief in the duality of matter and spirit. The spirit is a divine substance which has become separated from its origin in the material world. And because of this separation it has become ignorant. Its salvation will be possible through its knowledge of itself and of God. This is an intuitive knowledge which can be acquired through a divine saviour, who is a prophet from the world or the light.

Passing from the modernism conditions to the postmodernism situations has become a subject of discussions and debates. The aim of this paper is firstly to give a definition of postmodernism, and secondly to show that postmodernism is not a new view compared to modernism, but it is the natural result of modernism and represents the same idea in a more clear way. Postmodernism tries to show shortcomings of modernism but it does not represent an alternative idea.

After many journeys and having visited people of different cities, Sa'di looked at social manners of his time with a deep understanding and discussed the relationship of government and the people. He believes that the subjects are the moral and material background of the government. People satisfy the economic needs of the government by paying taxes and tributes; they put their youth at the service of the government to strengthen the army of the sultan. According to Sa'di the intelligentsia present their thoughts and feelings to the government to save it from falling into disrepute. Sa'di's writings are based on Qur'anic themes, one can compare his views with the religious as well as social and political teachings of Nahj al- Balagha.

The only real being is God; and the other things are his manifestation and self disclosure. They are not independent beings and their beings are nothing but relationships. Because of God's infinity, his self disclosure is not repeated in two different moments. So this is a basis for the Ibn Arabai's theory of the Perpetual Creating and Sadra's Substantial Motion theory. In this paper these two theories are compares to each other in their methods, domains, subjects and the results. Their similarities and differences in the mentioned fields are shown.