نشریه پژوهش های مابعدالطبیعی
سال دوم شماره 1 (بهار و تابستان 1394)

Miracle has been known from a long time ago as an independent or cumulative evidence that religions have used for justification of their claims. But its epistemological and historical value and validity for believing in the prophets claims, specially their fundamental claim for the existence of God, has always been the root of dispute between science and religion and believers and non-believers. It is important for us in this article that we try to clarify if science can provide sufficient explanation for miracles that see them as violation of the law of nature? And can we reasonably accept the claim of religions that miracles have come from God and have evidential and epistemological value?
In this article, we want to consider the positive and negative answers to these questions focusing on the comments of Swinburne and Morgan Luck and some of their difficulties. Finally, we will conclude that miracles are cumulative evidence for the rationality of religious beliefs and claims.

In recent years, many theologians have tried to solve the problem of conflict between science and religion. Alvin Plantinga is a well-known American Calvinist philosopher who proposed the conflict between science and naturalism as a solution to this problem. He mainly tries to evaluate the seemingly conflict examples, and meanwhile he partly criticize the foundations of the contemporary cosmology, epistemology and scientific methodology in order to solve the challenge. The conflict assumption, according to Plantinga, comes from the wrong interpretations of science, its naturalistic methodology and the exaggerated pictures of the historical conflict examples. Indeed, he claims that there is no real conflict between religion and science, and the seemingly conflict between them is superficial, i.e., there is no factual inconsistency between religion and science, but the real conflict is between science and naturalism.

Etienne Gilson is a french philosopher and historian of philosophy and a famous theorizer in the neo - thomist tradition of 20th century philosophy. He believes that Aquinas is the only thinker in the western philosophy who has accepted the principality of existence and rejected the principality of quiddity. Undoubtedly, Aquinas absolutely preferred the act of existence to the essence. However, can we accept that Aquinas really has granted the principality of existence? Do Aquinas and Mulla Sadra have the same views of the existence-quiddity conceptual distinction? Or have not, as Gilson thinks so. More importantly, if Gilson is not right in his interpretation of Aquinas assertion of the principality of existence, then we can not accept that western philosopher have considered the problem of the principality of existence and the principality of quiddity.

The relationship between reason and faith is one of the important issue in the philosophy of religion and the new theology that many theologians and philosophers have theorized on it. Contemporary analytic philosopher Richard Swinburne is one of the evidentialist theorizers that claims religious beliefs have rational reasons. Using the essentially scientific inductive method, he tries rationally to justify faith. He thinks the strength of the rational beliefs depends on the strength of their positive evidence. Therefore, rational faith, for him, is the faith with specific evidence that has the highest degree of probability.

R. M. Hare has mentioned two new innovative methods in utilitarianism: two-level utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism. Two-level utilitarianism terminates the conflict between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism, and also reconciles deontologism with utilitarianism. For him, preference utilitarianism requires two-level utilitarianism. In preference utilitarianism, the mental and personal preferences of moral agent is a criterion of goodness and utility. Hare thinks moral agent reconciles contrary preferences by imagination. Thus, moral agent when encounters contrary preferences he impersonates others and compares their preferences with her/his preference and finally tends to the stronger preference.

According to Rooty's version of the tradition of western philosophy, truth, namely, the correspondence between mental beliefs and objective facts , is the main subject of the history of philosophy ; so on this point of view, " truth was detectable, not constructible." However, Rorty says, since we have no way of describing facts but to use language, truth cannot be separated from our practical usage of language for articulating our claims. Because sentences might not exist outside of the mind. Therefor,"truth is constructible, not detectable". Although Rorty rejects the traditional meanings of truth an objectivity, our assumption is that he partly falls right into the realism and objectivism trap, and again truth in the forms of other conceptions appears in his philosophy.

This article investigates the consistency between decree, destiny, constitution, and free will from Allame Tabatabai point of view. He believes every worldly thing has a precedent in the previous worlds (imaginal world or destiny, intellectual world or decree) as its cause and coexistent. Everyone's constitution is his/her very unworldly causal ontological status that is co-existent wit her/him and is his/her intrinsic motivation in every work. Tabataba's two answers to the problem of consistency are based on the distinction between the numerical and non-numerical absolute Unity. According to the first answer, constitution only will give rise to a tendency, but does not erase free will. According to the second answer, the problem will be solved. This distinction can be a foundation for solving the seemingly conflict between quranic verses or religious traditions in many theological problems.