2. Why believe in God?

Author(s):  
John Bowker
Keyword(s):  
The Many ◽  

‘Why believe in God?’ provides some examples of the many different answers that have been given to that question. Change and reliability in understanding God and the universe are considered. There are many hypotheses about God and many different characterisations of God in the different religions, even among those that are based on what is believed to be Revelation—as, for example, in Bible, Quran or Veda. What is important for many believers is the consequence of God in life and in experience. What that experience means and how it is related to recent research in the neurosciences is then explored.

Author(s):  
Azamat Abdoullaev

The world or reality is the totality of things diversified into a multitude of collections of subworlds with the characteristic constraints and boundaries; all determined by the fundamental causal laws. Accordingly, the logic of reality is ultimately one; for there cannot be many logics of the universe. Although many personal perspectives allowed, and particular truths, special things and meanings, the global logic of reality is a single universal consistent system relied on a set of ontological classes and relationships, fundamental rules and laws. The universe is a deep, dark secret, mysterious and mystifying to human minds. And the fundamental challenge to the human mind is to provide a comprehensive account and model that explains in noncryprical terms how this unbounded environment changes and how its basic constituents causally related, and so forth. And this is all the legal responsibility of the UFO as a causal dynamic ontology, formulating the causal rules of world behavior as fundamental laws by establishing underlying regularities, uniformities, invariants, and correlations. So guiding science and technology, the task of dynamic ontology is to give us the overall structures, uniformities, patterns, laws, constraints, and invariants within which the many changes in the world take place, finding out what it is outside and inside, defining the natures and essences common to the denumerable multitude of individuals, by classifying the whole universe of things into the prime categories, classes, kinds and relationships.


Author(s):  
Rhodri Lewis

This chapter assesses Hamlet's reason and his accomplishments as a philosopher. It outlines the rudiments of philosophy as the early moderns understood it, before establishing a dialogue between these models of philosophy and the text of Hamlet. In and through the figure of Hamlet, William Shakespeare exposes not only the limitations of humanist philosophy but the inadequacy of most attempts to supplant it at the cusp of the seventeenth century. The chapter then examines Hamlet's efforts to understand the nature of the universe to which he belongs, the status of humankind within it, and the nature of being. After probing Hamlet's deliberations on vengeance, it follows his turn towards questions of religion and of theology, and especially towards those of providence. One of the many remarkable features of Hamlet's attachment to providence is that he takes it not to be the harmonious but largely inscrutable force through which the universe was created and now operates, but as something to be invoked and appropriated in service of his moral deliberations.


Author(s):  
Vincent Geoghegan

Bloch was one of the most innovative Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. His metaphysical and ontological concerns, combined with a self-conscious utopianism, distanced him from much mainstream Marxist thought. He was sympathetic to the classical philosophical search for fundamental categories, but distinguished earlier static, fixed and closed systems from his own open system, in which he characterized the universe as a changing and unfinished process. Furthermore, his distinctive materialism entailed the rejection of a radical separation of the human and the natural, unlike much twentieth-century Western Marxism. His validation of utopianism was grounded in a distinctive epistemology centred on the processes whereby ‘new’ material emerges in consciousness. The resulting social theory was sensitive to the many and varied ways in which the utopian impulse emerges, as, for example, in its analysis of the utopian dimension in religion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 ◽  
pp. 391-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Fromang ◽  
G. Lesur

The radial transport of angular momentum in accretion disk is a fundamental process in the universe. It governs the dynamical evolution of accretion disks and has implications for various issues ranging from the formation of planets to the growth of supermassive black holes. While the importance of magnetic fields for this problem has long been demonstrated, the existence of a source of transport solely hydrodynamical in nature has proven more difficult to establish and to quantify. In recent years, a combination of results coming from experiments, theoretical work and numerical simulations has dramatically improved our understanding of hydrodynamically mediated angular momentum transport in accretion disk. Here, based on these recent developments, we review the hydrodynamical processes that might contribute to transporting angular momentum radially in accretion disks and highlight the many questions that are still to be answered.


1980 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 699-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neta A. Bahcall

AbstractClusters and groups of galaxies contain the majority of galaxies in the universe. The rich clusters, while less numerous than the many poor groups, are the densest and largest systems known, and can be easily recognized and studied even at relatively large distances. Their study is important for understanding the formation and evolution of clusters and galaxies, and for a determination of the large-scale structure in the universe.


1869 ◽  
Vol 15 (70) ◽  
pp. 169-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Maudsley

Few are the readers, and we cannot boast to be of those few, who have been at the pains to toil through the many and voluminous writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Indeed, it would not be far from the truth to say that there are very few persons who have thought it worth their while to study him at all seriously; he is commonly accounted a madman, who has had the singular fortune to persuade certain credulous persons that he was a seer. Nevertheless, whether lunatic or prophet, his character and his writings merit a serious and unbiased study. Madness, which makes its mark upon the world, and counts in its train many presumably sane people who see in it the highest wisdom, cannot justly be put aside contemptuously as undeserving a moment's grave thought. After all, there is no accident in madness; causality, not casualty, governs its appearance in the universe; and it is very far from being a good and sufficient practice to simply mark its phenomena, and straightway to pass on as if they belonged, not to an order, but to a disorder of events that called for no explanation. It is certain that there is in Swedenborg's revelations of the spiritual world a mass of absurdities sufficient to warrant the worst suspicions of his mental sanity; but, at the same time, it is not less certain that there are scattered in his writings conceptions of the highest philosophic reach, while throughout them is sensible an exalted tone of calm moral feeling which rises in many places to a real moral grandeur. These are the qualities which have gained him his best disciples, and they are qualites too uncommon in the world to be lightly despised, in whatever company they may be exhibited. I proceed then to give some account of Swedenborg, not purposing to make any review of his multitudinous publications, or any criticism of the doctrines announced in them with a matchless self-sufficiency; the immediate design being rather to present, by the help mainly of Mr. White's book, a sketch of the life and character of the man, and thus to obtain, and to endeavour to convey, some definite notion of what he was, what he did, and what should be concluded of him.*


2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (S289) ◽  
pp. 351-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard de Grijs

AbstractKnowing the distance of an astrophysical object is key to understanding it. However, at present, comparisons of theory and observations are hampered by precision (or lack thereof) in distance measurements or estimates. Putting the many recent results and new developments into the broader context of the physics driving cosmic distance determination is the next logical step, which will benefit from the combined efforts of theorists, observers and modellers working on a large variety of spatial scales, and spanning a wide range of expertise. IAU Symposium 289 addressed the physics underlying methods of distance determination across the Universe, exploring the various approaches employed to define the milestones along the road. The meeting provided an exciting snapshot of the field of distance measurement, offering not only up-to-date results and a cutting-edge account of recent progress, but also full discussion of the pitfalls encountered and the uncertainties that remain. One of the meeting's main aims was to provide a roadmap for future efforts in this field, both theoretically and observationally.


REVISTARQUIS ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniele Pisani

Resumen En oposición a la tendencia de considerar el dibujo arquitectónico como una simple fuente de información sobre el proyecto, o limitarse a contemplar su eventual belleza, este ensayo pretende analizar un boceto en su especificidad. Para hacer este tipo de experimento, el texto utiliza uno de los muchos bocetos realizados por Paulo Mendes da Rocha durante la preparación del proyecto para el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad de Sao Paulo (1974-1975). El objetivo no es aislar artificialmente un dibujo entre los muchos otros que le dan una autonomía que no le es propia, sino adoptar un nuevo punto de vista, a través del análisis de un diseño dentro del universo de diseño específico del arquitecto brasileño.Abstract Against the tendency to consider the drawing in architecture as a simple source of information about the project, or simply to contemplate its potential beauty, this essay aims to analyse one it in its specificity. To carry out this experiment, the text uses one of the many sketches made by Paulo Mendes da Rocha during the preparation of the project for the Museum of Contemporary Art from University of São Paulo (1974-1975). The aim is not to artificially isolate one drawing among the many, giving it an autonomy that it does not possess, but to adopt a new point of view on the universe of the Brazilian architect.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
I Komang Yuni Arta

<em>Humans are one of the tangible proofs of existence in the universe whose life holds many mysteries that are  very interesting objects of curiosity. Human life which is a perfect relation   of two dimensions of life, is called sekala or material world and niskala or transcendent world becomes a space of inquiry to create a balanced life physically and spiritually. The many problems experienced by humans make meditation a very powerful technique in understanding human life materially and spiritually. In various scientific studies it has been found that meditation can help a person to revitalize his life both biologically and mentally. This practice becomes moderate between a person’s mind and body, which when a person’s mind is in a positive or negative state, will directly affect its biological aspects. Meditation in this case acts as a mind body medicine that creates a placebo effect that is able to provide a variety of positive effects on a person’s life through mechanisms that will change his perception and beliefs. Therefore, meditation as mind body medicine is a very important practice to be carried out to create a healthy mind, mental and physical for a healthy and harmonious life.</em>


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