Sentences with phrase «god as a phenomenon»

Thus one may speak of God as a phenomenon by selecting a phenomenon or experience and capitalizing it; thus God is Power, Love, Spirit, Goodness, the Drift - of - history.

Not exact matches

This points out that everything that you explained as being only aplicable to god, which is an explanation given because no other explanation is seen, saying this is amazing so god did it, is nowhere near close to looking at these phenomena, observing and collecting the data on it and saying this is our best understanding of it to date.

Why is it god, as opposed to simply a biochemical / hormonal phenomenon that bestows an evolutionary advantage in living beings, since it ensures protection of one's own genes?

My understanding, as well as from what I've read about my church, is that God is the guiding force behind such phenomenons we learn about when we practice and study science to understand the natural world.

Unfortunately for your side, there are countless examples throughout history where believers in supernatural beings such as god and evil spirits attributed various phenomenon to them, only to have science later debunk those explanations.

If one is persuaded that Whitehead's account is indeed the most penetrating that now exists, that it does justice to the complexity of the phenomena of science and of history alike, then the fact that it too leads, almost in spite of the author's apparent intention, to a doctrine of God as the source and ground of order is an important further confirmation of the inescapability for speculative reason of some kind of belief in God.

This can be said in spite of the fact that it must also be said that secularism is a very widespread phenomenon of our culture, and secularism means conformity to the world, the organization of life as if God did not exist.

Belief in the existence of a personal God has declined as men have found the influence of mutually relative natural agencies, — environment, natural selection, organic composition, conditioned functional reaction etc., able to account for natural phenomena that before were related to more general causes or even to the First Cause.

This to a certain degree non-official activity of the Church in the human beings of the Church under grace is an historical manifestation of the eschatological unconquerable grace which God has linked inseparably with the historical phenomenon of the Church as the primal sacrament of grace.

The Christian indeed has always recognised the immediate primacy of secondary causes in the bringing about of natural phenomena, but as serial causes have been traced further back, and their astonishing inter-dependence demonstrated, the scientist has tended to proclaim either a mathematical universe in which theses secondary causes may be identified with some primary basic formula, or equation, synonymous in definition with a physical ultimate, a universe inwhich God has no place; or else he has preferred to identify intellect with matter itself and has come to accept that idealistic cosmic pantheism which is almost as common a philosophy today as evolutionary materialism.

For this reason we can not use the gospel and our theology as defensive weapons in the fight between the religious and the non-religious; rather they are to be used, without prejudice, to discuss with the non-religious the phenomenon and problems of religion and the everlasting love of God.

Love then, between a man and a woman, is a mimetic phenomenon in that it reflects God's reconciliation to man and nature; «For love does not exist where two beings are in need of each other but where each could exist independently, such as in the case with God who is already in and of Himself - suapte natura - the being God (der Seyende): here then each could be for itself without considering it an act of privation to be for itself, even though it will not want to...»

That claim, if looked at very carefully is very dangerous and feeds the God - as - Remote - Control phenomena that David so aptly criticised today.

So for example, in my case and that of other persons whose minds dissociate when we engage in intense / deep spiritual practices like intense / deep prayer, meditation, fasting etc and we hear voices, hallucinate, see visions, experience thought insertions, automatic channelling just like a spirit medium as well as other psychic phenomena (clairvoyance etc), and the mind dissociation makes some persons mentally and emotionally unstable; our minds enter an altered state of consciousness just like those of the Buddhist monks but in our case the altered state of our brains results in psychotic and psychic symptoms being induced (interestingly, some persons who are ignorant of how the human brain functions chalk up these experiences to demonic attack)......... are these psychotic, psychic experiences which persons like myself experience a gift from God as well?

All these scriptures / Biblical teachings created a problem for me as over the years when I would experience psychotic symptoms and psychic phenomena as a result of intense / deep prayer and meditation, I actually thought that God was trying to show me a sign or tell me something or he was leading me in a particular direction.

Where the paradigm which shapes man's vision of God has the effect of reducing the actualities of the world to a status of unreality, their participation in the being of God implies their dissolution as concrete phenomena.

His judgment seems to be that, even though some kind of faith or intuition is a formal requisite for critical reflection on the nature of God, the specific content or character that faith has as a concrete, historically conditioned phenomenon does not materially affect the reasoning process which is both possible and appropriate in such reflection.

We define religious experience as a confrontation by man with Ultimate Reality — for no finite or relative phenomenon is worthy of adoration, only God is.

Also, if you believe in the Bible, then you should know that false condemnation and the spreading of false prophecies (attributing storms and natural phenomenon to God's «wrath») puts you in the same line of sinners as heretics, murders, thieves and rapists.

Recourse to God as an explanation of a phenomenon experienced is not a method employed by the natural sciences.

A page on cognitive mechanisms of the brain explains them all as hallucinations, and «that is really all that needs to be said about personal «experiences» of gods or other religious phenomena,» he airily concludes.

If, on the other hand, they choose to postulate the existence of God in order to account for these phenomena, as Kant and Hegel did, and as Krüger has recently done, I would contend that it is really God they are talking about, not, however, in the mythological sense, but in the Greek sense of the Arché.

Unlike the pagan religions of classical antiquity, e.g. ancient Egypt and the Far East, Christianity does not seek to explain the physical phenomena of the material world as a dramatic struggle between warring gods and goddesses, i.e. μυθος (myth).

To understand Jesus as the eschatological phenomenon (that is, as the Savior through whom God delivers the world by passing judgment on it and granting the future as a gift to those who believe on him), all that is necessary is to proclaim that he has come, and that is what St. John does so clearly.

In mythology — e.g. in the legends about the gods — we constantly meet such unobservable phenomena as will, wrath, fear, etc..

The basic realities they conceptualized in order to explain the phenomena and natural events of their world they spoke of as gods and spirits.

Though in one sense belief in God is the necessary presupposition of belief in miracles, it is not belief in God as an explanation of the phenomena of the world (for the world always hides God, if He does not will to reveal Himself by miracle), but belief as the obedience which is ready to perceive the claim of God upon man in all situations.

Inquiry is governed, not, as in the «Athens» type, by an interest thereby indirectly to come to know God, but by an interest to discover as directly as possible the truth about the origin, effects, and essential nature of «Christian» phenomena.

For Jesus applied the idea of law neither to God nor to the world, and his concept of causality is not abstract but concrete, referring a specific phenomenon to a specific cause, as daily experience taught him.

God's Word as revealing action is just as dynamic a phenomenon in the formation and witness of the Bible as it is in the formation and witness of a sermon.

In reality, Greek thought always regards God in the last analysis as a part of the world or as identical with the world, even when, or rather especially when, He is held to be the origin and formative cosmic principle which lies beyond the world of phenomena For here, too, God and the world form a unity within the grasp of thought; the meaning of the world becomes clear in the idea of God.

That God's love, manifest in diverse ways throughout the duration of the universe, might come to a full and unsurpassable self - expression in an individual human being who lived and died in the Middle East almost two thousand years ago does not seem incongruous with what we now understand about the nature of an evolving universe, especially if we regard religion as a phenomenon emergent from the universe rather than just something done on the earth by cosmically homeless human subjects.

Perceiving as we do the same natural phenomena, we could all probably infer the same or similar attributes as does Cardinal Newman and ascribe them to this God that our imaginations can not encompass.

A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were only half - metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart — the sky — sphere, the ocean - sphere, the earth - sphere, and the like; just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.

god is just a made up human phenomena just as much as what Perry may have in his head.

(4) In the absence of an explanation why God does not use more coercive power and is not more effective in his persuasion we may as reasonably conclude that there is a great evil persuasive power behind phenomena in the world as that there is a great power persuading toward the good.

The image of God as a supernatural being, who from time to time intervenes in the affairs of the natural world in clearly recognizable ways, and who can suspend or reverse the usual behavior of natural phenomena, if He so wishes, in order to perform His will, is one which has become less and less tenable as the new world has emerged.

Apparently both the participants and the observers explained the phenomenon as a temporary seizure by «the Spirit of God.»

Now that kind of thinking about God which looks for evidence of His activity in phenomena which have no natural explanation is often referred to as a belief in the «God of the gaps».

With the approach of Updike's 50th birthday, and with the publication of this his 25th book, it is time to offer an assessment of his work as a whole: to trace his natively Lutheran vision of life as cast by God into an indissoluble ambiguity, to examine his treatment of death and sex as the two phenomena wherein the human contradiction is most sharply focused, to set this new novel in relation to the earlier «Rabbit» books, and to determine what is religiously troubling and compelling about Updike's art.

Both in The Phenomenon of Man and in The Divine Milieu, Teilhard indicated his conviction that the «end» for which man is intended — and not only man in the racial sense but each man specifically — was a relationship with God, conceived as the Omega - point or the goal and end of the creative process as well as the transcendent origin and initiator of that process.

Part of me wants to dismiss the phenomenon as little more than the human tendency to project our image upon God and read into things.

As a deist I can accept a creator, whether a god or natural phenomenon, I do not know.

If then the activity of God is not visible or open to proof like worldly entities, if the event of redemption is not an ascertainable process, if, we may add, the Spirit granted to the believer is not a phenomenon susceptible to worldly apprehension, if we can not speak of these things without speaking of our own existence, it follows that faith is a new understanding of existence, and that the activity of God vouchsafes to us a new understanding of self, as Luther said: «et ita Deus per suum exire nos facit ad nos ipsos introire, et per sui cognitionem infert nobis et nostri cognitionem».

On the other hand, if the action of God is not to be conceived as a worldly phenomenon capable of being apprehended apart from its existential reference, it can only be spoken of by speaking simultaneously of myself as the person who is existentially concerned.

This phenomenon, I suggest, may be consciously felt as God's initiative.

The love of God is not a phenomenon whose apprehension leaves a man the same as he was before.

A sign from god as some will claim or just another natural phenomena?

To be consonant with the Word of God, philosophy needs first of all to recover its sapiential dimension as a search for... the ultimate framework of the unity of human knowledge and action, leading them to converge towards a final goal and meaning (para. 81)... to verify the human capacity... to come to a knowledge which can reach objective truth (para. 82)... Hence we face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent.

«Unlike many scholars of his generation who considered emotion to emanate from the soul and expression a gift from God, Darwin viewed expressions as evolutionary phenomena,» Prodger writes.