فصلنامه فلسفه دین
سال هجدهم شماره 4 (پیاپی 53، زمستان 1400)

This article is an effort to reread the role of innate disposition in proving the existence of God in two different intellectual contexts and to represent their common and different aspects in the foundational discussions of theology in order to find a robust basis to achieve an assuring knowledge of divine propositions. This comparative study adopted a descriptive-analytical research method to attain this goal. The innateness of the knowledge about God and the demonstration of His existence along with the use of introspection in knowing God are the main common aspects between the viewpoints of Sadra and Descartes, while the difference in the type and referent of the innate knowledge and the difference in the median of the innateness arguments are the main differences of the two attitudes. The existence of difference in the philosophical system and epistemic foundations – including the Sadra’s existential originality, his belief in the direct knowledge, and his use of the revelation and mystic insight in addition to intellect – on the one hand and the essential principality and inattention to the direct knowledge and the use of pure intellect or intellectual insight by Descartes on the other hand have led to the contrast between Sadra’s mystic viewpoint to the Sublime Source and Descartes’ philosophical viewpoint and purely mathematical scale in the domain of theological discussions. Nonetheless, the similarity of some principles have led them to common and similar opinions about the possibility of knowing the Essence and the arguments about proving the essence of God based on innate knowledge.

The need to offer a hermeneutic theory about the interpretation of the sacred scriptures is of great importance. In response to the inappropriate interpretations of the Bible, Baruch Spinoza, the Jewish theologian and philosopher, tried to give in a hermeneutic theory. In this article, first his hermeneutic theory is explained based on the role of the four main components of author, interpreter, text, and method and with reference to the works of Spinoza. Then, pointing out the difficulties of Spinoza’s theory from his own viewpoint, his theory is compared to the traditional, modern, and postmodern approaches of hermeneutics. In this evaluation, although Spinoza’s hermeneutic theory is classified as a traditional hermeneutic theory, it is shown that he has moved away from the traditional readings before him and has paved the way for the modern hermeneutic to some extent. Spinoza’s attention to the effect of the interpreter’s awareness of the context, beliefs, and the viewpoints of the authors of the Bible in the process of interpretation is among the positive points of his theory. However, some components of his theory such as the attribution of non-realism to the Biblical text, the recommendation to remove the viewpoints and beliefs of the interpreter, the sufficiency of understanding the Bible based on its epistemic principle, and the ignorance of many Biblical teachings cannot be defended.

This article set out to answer the question that how people’s belief in the life after death can be explained based on cognitive sciences and if such an explanation is in favor of the religious belief in the life after death or not. The “dead mouse experiment” and the “hero Richard experiment” are among the most important experiments recorded to confirm human belief in the duality of mind and body and the survival of the mind after the death of the body. The “theory of mind” is a theory that was proposed in the general cognitive sciences to explain some types of human learning and cognition. This theory came to be used by later cognitive scientists to explain the widespread belief of the humans in the duality of mind and body and the life after death. In this article, I have extracted and classified the pillars that form the theory of mind to explain the belief in the afterlife, including offline theory of mind, the need to the deads’ monitoring and judgment, limitations in simulating death, and physical perception and, consequently, the spatial understanding of death and life after death. The other theories of the cognitive science of religion that compete with the theory of mind are also mentioned in my article, such as cultural theory, essentialism theory, terror management theory, and the combined theory. Finally, based on these achievements of the cognitive sciences of religion in explaining the religious belief in the life after death, I present an argument using inference to the best explanation method or argument by comparative confirmation method, which shows that the possibility of an individual with a naturalist worldview to believe in the life after death is much lower than the possibility of an individual with a super-naturalist worldview to believe in it.

Prophethood and divine revelation are among the most important pillars of divine religions and the key path to the delivery of the divine messages and wants to the human. In traditional theology, arguments have been put forth for the necessity of prophethood and divine revelation. However, in addition to the external anti-revelation arguments, some big opponents have raised over time against prophethood and revelation within the religious traditions to the point that this rejection of prophethood has come to be interpreted by some as “atheism.” The cornerstone of this movement is the consideration of the human wisdom as the highest source of perception. The adherent of this stance believe that the output of the prophets’ for the human is either congruent with intellect or is against it. If the former is the case, then revelation is a repetition of the intellectual findings of the human and so is absurd, and if the latter is true, then revelation is anti-intellectual and so is unacceptable. The authoritativeness of prophethood relies on answering this two-sided argument. The most important direction to adopt in answering this argument is that when we examine phenomena using intellect, in addition to intellect-verifiable and anti-intellect issues, there are intellect-evading phenomena as well. This is particularly true for the religious context and the focal topic of this article, i.e., the acceptance of the existence of God. Therefore, it can be maintained that the human has no way other than divine revelation to understand suchlike issues. Moreover, the inability of the human to perceive some details of religious rules and propositions through intellect, the confirmation of the intellectual judgment by the divine revelation, and the changes of intellect over time and in various locations – which lead to noticeable changes in the intellectual findings – are among the reasons for the authoritativeness of epistemic sources other than intellect in the domain of God’s legislative will.

The core of Jaspers’ philosophical thought is the human existence, particularly reflected in the term Existenz. All other philosophical thoughts of him are related to this axial concept. Jaspers’ concept of Existenz expresses a non-experimental, non-concrete reality of the real individual and personality that can go beyond the objective time. This article investigates Jaspers’ perception of death. Using the thematic analysis method, the article tries to clarify his stance to death and the deathlessness of the Existenz and to give in a better understanding of the human existence in this world. From Jaspers’ viewpoint, the reality of biologic death is related to Dasein, while the borderline position of death – that might lead to the realization of the real self of the individual – is related to Existenz. He tries to show that although the human is a mortal creature, he has a transcendental dimension, too, and cannot be reduced to a mere physical creature in the world. Trying to explain the transcendental aspect of the human, Jaspers deems Existenz as immortal and unlimited. From the viewpoint of Jaspers, the immortality of Existenz does not mean the continuation of life in another realm after death; rather, the person can experience the immortality feeling in an existential moment while he is alive. According to this viewpoint, this immortal moment is timeless, i.e., the past, present, and future relations are not present in it (the way we perceive them); rather, they are perceived simultaneously in that timeless moment.

In their examination of the miraculousness of the Qur’ān, scholars and thinkers have been paying a special attention to its expression and style for a long time. Numerous studies have been carried out in this regard in which the divinity of the source of this unique Scripture is evidently revealed. As one of the most essential methods of expression used by the noble Qur’ān, ‘udūl (conversion) means changing the linguistic context and the speech style. This concept has various types that have been classified by rhetoric scholars. These include switching from truth to metaphor; from close, easy propositions to distant, complex ones; and from one verb/noun form to another verb/noun form. Various purposes have also been suggested for these various types of conversions. Similarly, linguists emphasize the secondary purposes of linguistic techniques. Roman Jacobsen, the famous Russian linguist, calls the secondary purposes as linguistic functions. He considers six roles for language, namely phatic, emotive, aesthetic/poetic, conative, metalingual, and referential. The study at hand aimed to analyze the purposes of converting nouns and verbs to each other in the noble Qur’ān based on Jacobsen’s functionalist theory and to look at the miraculousness of the Qur’ān from this viewpoint. This examination showed that conversion in every verse of the Qur’ān causes the addressee to make mental exploration and reflection, one which is among the main purposes of the sublime God in the noble Qur’ān. The findings show that the implication of noun on the affirmation and that of the verb on renewal and contingency have had the largest representation in these verses. On the other hand, in some verses, in addition to semantic implication, the observation of the distance between the verses has also been taken into consideration. The six functions of language sometimes overlap, while in other cases the conversion leads to overemphasis on one of the functions. These findings all indicate the expressive miraculousness of the noble Qur’ān and prove the divine source of this heavenly Scripture.