Unknowable worlds: solving the problem of natural evil

2005 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANK J. MURPHY

This paper draws attention to the way free choice participates in the occurrence of what is usually called natural evil. While earthquakes are natural phenomena, they injure only those who have chosen to live in places where they occur. But if God could not foresee these choices, then God could not foresee much about the amount and distribution of natural evil. Combining a libertarian notion of freedom with a denial of middle knowledge allows God to be much less implicated in the occurrence of natural evil. This gives some of the familiar theistic replies to the problem, such as Hick's soul-making theodicy, enhanced plausibility.

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 421-440
Author(s):  
Enrique Javier Vercher García

El presente artículo plantea la existencia y analiza la categoría de humanicidad, entendida como el modo en que las lenguas naturales clasifican y expresan la realidad externa en dos grandes ámbitos: el ámbito humano (aquel que el hablante entiende como perteneciente a la sociedad humana, a la esfera de la vida, costumbres, rituales, civilización y cultura específicamente propios del ser humano) y el ámbito natural (la esfera de todo aquello ajeno a la comunidad humana, de lo que está fuera del área de influencia de la civilización humana, es decir, los fenómenos naturales, flora y fauna en su estado salvaje no “domesticado” o no “civilizado”). El campo-semántico funcional de la humanicidadsería el conjunto de recursos de los diferentes niveles lingüísticos (fonético-fonológico, morfológico, sintáctico y léxico) de una lengua dada para configurar los referentes de la realidad y clasificarlos en función de su categoría de humanicidad(ámbito humano vs. ámbito natural). La humanicidad, por tanto, no debe ser confundida con fenómenos bien conocidos como los de animacidad lingüísticao la distinción morfosintáctica entre humano/no humano. This article proposes the existence and analyses the category of humanicity, understood as the way in which natural languages classify and express external reality in two large fields: the human sphere (which the speaker understands as belonging to human society, the area of life, customs, rituals, civilization and culture specific to human beings) and the natural sphere (the sphere of everything outwith the human community, outwith the area of influence of human civilization; that is, natural phenomena, flora and fauna in their wild, “undomesticated” or “uncivilised” state). The functional-semantic field of humanicitywould be the set of resources of the different linguistic levels (phonetic-phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical) of a given language for configuring the reference points of reality and classifying them based on their category of humanicity(human sphere vs natural sphere). Humanicity, must therefore not be confused with well-known phenomena such as linguistic animacyor the morphosyntactic distinction between human/non-human.


2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guido Alliney

Este estudo tem como objeto a recepção da teoria scotista da vontade no início do século 14. Interesse precípuo é o modo como autores, sobretudo franciscanos, a partir das Universidades de Paris e de Oxford, discutiram sobre a possibilidade de uma escolha livre ou de um ato da própria vontade, por parte dos bemaventurados, quando da visão de Deus. Para tanto, pressuposições gerais da teoria scotista da vontade são apresentadas, bem como as inovações dos filósofos influenciados por Scotus. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Teoria scotista da vontade. Visão beatífica. Liberdade. Influência do pensamento scotista no século 14. ABSTRACT This study aims to analyse the reception of Scotus’s theory of will in the beginning of the 14th Century. The main interest is the way some authors, specially Franciscan thinkers, departing from the Universities of Paris and Oxford, discussed about the possibility for the blessed of a free choice or an act of the will itself concerning the vision of God. For this purpose, general pressupositions of Scotus’s theory of will shall be presented, as well as the innovations of those philosophers influenced by Scotus. KEY WORDS – Scotus’s theory of will. Beatific vision. Freedom. Influence os Scotistic thought in the 14th Century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 36-49
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman

Galileo is an iconic founder of modern science, but his career and his contributions were far more complex than his reputation. He, too, championed a scientific method, but his thinking differed greatly from Bacon’s and Descartes’. Galileo’s method was based on Archimedes’ combination of experiment, mathematics, and deduction. This method allowed Galileo to claim certain knowledge of reality derived from mathematical accounts of natural phenomena. But he also claimed certain knowledge of reality derived directly from observation, as in his assertion that the Earth moved around the sun. While Galileo’s predictions were sometimes correct, he had no criterion for distinguishing between correct and incorrect inferences or for connecting his mathematical deductive reasoning about phenomena to the way they really were.


2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. J. MAWSON

In this paper, I consider various arguments to the effect that natural evils are necessary for there to be created agents with free will of the sort that the traditional free-will defence for the problem of moral evil suggests we enjoy – arguments based on the idea that evil-doing requires the doer to use natural means in their agency. I conclude that, despite prima facie plausibility, these arguments do not, in fact, work. I provide my own argument for there being no possible world in which creatures enjoying this sort of freedom exist yet suffer no natural evil, and conclude that the way is thus open for extending the free-will defence to the problem of natural evil.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edcley Silva ◽  
Nivan Ferreira ◽  
Fabio Miranda

Currently, technological advances have revolutionized the way natural phenomena are studied. Natural phenomena can be represented through distributions of geographic data that are a rich source of information and can be explored in different ways. One of them is the representation of uncertainty through the distribution of probability. Modeling the uncertainty of this type of distribution and representing it in geographic visualization is complicated because maps (common types of geographic visualization) need the visual environment to represent geographic space and there are not many ways to represent any other information. One of the ways often used as a solution is statistical summarization such as mean, but summarizing the data alone may can hide the data’s behavior and generates ambiguity. The concealment of the uncertainty of the data in visualization can be justified by the way the uncertainty is represented that may not be understood by the user. Technical proposals have been proposed to represent distributions, but generally they only represent the presence and spread of uncertainty recently others approaches based on probability of proportion of data, animation and interaction have proposed to make quantification of probability, but have not been used or compared formally for geographic data. The objective was qualitatively compare main approaches to visualize probability distributions on a geographical scenario (includes factors such as distance, size and variation), using the recent proposed approaches in the context of abstract data, analytical tasks and user study. The results show which approach has the better performance in the presented cases.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 144-149
Author(s):  
Muborak Khafizovna Khamidova ◽  
Keyword(s):  

The article deals with natural phenomena associated with wind, words that denote the names of disasters , factors of anemonyms, their formation and use in language and speech. In addition, meteonyms denoting the strength, duration and direction of the wind are considered. By the way, some anemonyms and meteonyms used in French and Uzbek languages are shown, and their specific universals are considered.


Author(s):  
Matthew T. Gaetano

In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholic theologians debated how to reconcile God’s predestination and grace with human free choice. The de auxiliis controversy had as its touchstones the works of the Dominican Domingo Báñez and the Jesuit Luis de Molina. Pope Paul V concluded the debates in Rome on these questions, the Congregatio de auxiliis (1597–1607), by prohibiting the accusation of heresy from either side in this quarrel. Dominicans, initially accused of Calvinism, and Jesuits, charged at first with semi-Pelagianism, generally claimed that their conclusions were at least consistent with Thomas Aquinas’ principles. But key notions in this controversy, such as physical predetermination, middle knowledge, and efficacious grace, are not found in Aquinas’ corpus, which encouraged theologians to account for the appearance of novelty. In the aftermath of these debates, Thomism was associated with these soteriological questions, and many Catholic theologians envisioned Thomas Aquinas as Augustine’s faithful disciple.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (XXIII) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
Monika Sadowska

Nowadays the publishing market offers five Polish translations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita, which appeared in the space of almost fifty years. The objective of the article is to concentrate on the way the components of third culture are rendered in the translations mentioned above. The author tries to draw the readers’ attention to the analogies and discrepancies within the translators’ choices. The analysis covers the names of natural phenomena, names of traditional culture phenomena, both material and spiritual, as well as the names of social and political life phenomena.


1986 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-75
Author(s):  
Zaghloul R. El Nejjar

What is Science?In Latin "Scientia" means "knowledge." So science is defined as all theknowledge men have achieved in different places and at all times, arrangedaccording to their subject-matter. This includes knowledge gained throughDivine revelation; or by the way of human thinking and creative intellect,as well as through human legacy and tradition in these two areas. The prevailingdirection, however, tends to limit the term Science to natural and experimentalstudies of all that is within reach of the senses and intellect in this universe(i.e. matter, energy, living beings and natural phenomena). This is usuallycarried out through observation and conclusion or through experimentation,observation and conclusion, in an attempt to discover the characteristics ofmatter, energy and living things, classify all these and discover the laws governingthem. As thus defined, Science also includes deductions, suppositions,hypotheses and theories which are put forward to explain prevailing phenomena.This definition has limited Science to "a branch of study which is concernedeither with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed factssystematically classified and more or less collated by being brought undergeneral laws, and which includes trustworthy methods for the discovery ofnew truth within its own domain."Accodingly, human knowledge has been divided into scientific studies (bothpure and applied), literary and art studies and religious studies (studies offaith). Writers, however, differ much in classifying and chaptering humanknowledge, but the following classification seems appropriate: ...


Author(s):  
Miikka Ruokanen

Why does God’s Spirit grant the gift of faith to some but not to others? Erasmus solved the dilemma by admitting minimal freedom to the human side, a wrong use of free choice is to be blamed. This is the way of maintaining credibility in the justice of God. Luther’s solution to the dilemma was a distinction between the concepts of “the revealed God,” Deus revelatus, and of “the hidden God,” Deus absconditus. On the notitia level, i.e. in regard to knowing who is elected, we are in total darkness; it is a secret of the hidden majesty. We are restricted to the usus level of election, i.e. to revelation which says that God wills everyone to be saved. God’s will does not follow any human logic of justice, God’s will itself is the norm for itself and cannot be subjected to any rule outside itself. Asking why God does what he does is a concern arising from religious pride; the sovereignty of the divine will utterly annihilates speculation about any grounds for bargaining with God. Luther follows the paradigm of “the theology of the cross”: Anyone who has become “desperate about him/herself” is, paradoxically, already in the state of grace. This paradox brings about certainty of salvation: God has taken the question of salvation completely “outside ourselves” into his hands, this results in peace in the scruples of salvation, the believer is liberated from “the pestilence of uncertainty.” Luther prefers the Biblical term “election” to the philosophical concept “predestination.”


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