Chapter

How Could God Incarnate be Recognized?

January 1993

DOI:10.1007/978-1-349-13098-6_6

In book: God in One Person (pp.72-81)

Authors:

Although contrasting sharply with the last topic in length of required treatment, the question of how an incarnate being could be recognized is by no means unimportant, and especially so, if, as considered in Chapter 4, the primary reason for becoming incarnate is to disclose truth through personality, or else to identify with man in his hour of need. Equally, if it is the case, not only that an incarnation is crucial to man’s salvation in general, but that each individual’s response to that incarnation is crucial to his or her personal salvation, then once more the question of identifying the God-man assumes supreme significance, it being intolerable that something allegedly essential to our eternal well-being should be obscure or hidden, a sort of messianic secret to be discerned only by those with special insight. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to claim that the logic of God incarnate must include his ready identification by man.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus

Article

Sep 1968

The Doctrine of the Trinity

Jan 1943
25

Leonard Hodgson
L Hodgson

See also Geza Vermes

Jan 1983
19

G Vermes

On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power in

Jan 1956
53

G E Lessing
GE Lessing

Article

FOL: A Proof Checker for First-order Logic

September 1974

This manual describes the use of the interactive proof checker FOL. FOL implements a version of the system of natural deduction described by Prawitz, augmented in the following ways: (1) it is a many-sorted first-order logic and a partial order over sorts may be declared: this reduces the size of formulas; (2) purely propositional deductions can be made in a single step; (3) the truth values of ... [Show full abstract] assertions involving numerical and LISP constants can be derived by computation; (4) there is a limited ability to make metamathematical arguments; and (5) there are many operational conveniences. The goal of FOL is to use formal proof techniques as practical tools for checking proofs in pure mathematics and proofs of the correctness of programs. It is also intended to be used as a research tool in modelling common-sense reasoning in the representation theory of artificial intelligence.

Article

Causality Then and Now: A1 Ghaziili and Quantum Theory

January 1970

Karen Harding

Ate appearances deceiving? Do objects behave the way they do be- cause God wills it? Ate objects impetmanent and do they only exist be- cause they ate continuously created by God? According to a1 Ghazlli, the answers to all of these questions ate yes. Objects that appear to be permanent are not. Those relationships commonly tefemed to as causal are a result of God's habits rather than because one ... [Show full abstract] event inevitably leads to another. God creates everything in the universe continuously; if He ceased to create it, it would no longer exist. These ideas seem oddly naive and unscientific to people living in the twentieth century. They seem at odds with the common conception of the physical world. Common sense says that the universe is made of teal objects that persist in time. Furthermore, the behavior of these objects is reasonable, logical, and predictable. The belief that the univetse is under- standable via logic and reason harkens back to Newton's mechanical view of the universe and has provided one of the basic underpinnings of science for centuries. Although most people believe that the world is ac- cutately described by this sort of mechanical model, the appropriateness of such a model has been called into question by recent scientific advances, and in particular, by quantum theory. This theory implies that the physical world is actually very different from what a mechanical model would pdct. Quantum theory seeks to explain the nature of physical entities and the way that they interact. It atose in the early part of the twentieth cen- tury in response to new scientific data that could not be incorporated suc- cessfully into the ptevailing mechanical view of the universe. Due largely

Article

Full-text available

On the Behavioral Equivalence Between k-data Structures

March 2008 · The Computer Journal

M. A. Martins

Throughout this paper we consider data structures as sorted algebras endowed with a designated subset of their visible part, which represents the set of truth values. The originality of our approach is the application of the standard abstract algebraic logic theory of deductive systems to the hidden heterogeneous case. We generalize the well-known equivalence relation between finite automata, ... [Show full abstract] which relies on the Nerode equivalence relation between states, to k-data structures. This is obtained via the Leibniz congruence, which can be viewed as a generalization of the Nerode equivalence in automata theory.

Chapter

Global Empiricism

January 1989

Geoffrey Scarre

Bertrand Russell once defined empiricism as the doctrine that ‘all our knowledge is derived from experience’ (Russell (1911), p. 41). Yet not all thinkers who can reasonably be placed in the empiricist camp have held a view as bold as this. David Hume, for instance — though Russell cites him as a typical empiricist — asserted that propositions expressing ‘relations of ideas’ are not known through ... [Show full abstract] experience, but are rather ‘intuitively or demonstratively certain.’ ‘That the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the square of the two sides,’ wrote Hume in the First Enquiry, ‘is a proposition which expresses a relation between these figures.’ Such propositions of the mathematical sciences ‘are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe’ (Hume (1902), p. 25). What Russell was describing was a position which can more accurately be termed ‘global empiricism,’ which denies that any knowledge has a non-empirical, a priori basis.1 Empiricism of this most radical kind denies that even logical and mathematical knowledge is a priori in nature; as Crispin Wright has put it, the ‘central motif’ of global empiricism combines a general scepticism concerning a priori knowledge and necessity with a desire to allow that logic and mathematics deal in truths of some sort which we are capable of knowing in an ordinary sense — this last phrase meaning by experience (Wright, p. 321).

Article

Full-text available

A Computation-Efficient Group Key Distribution Protocol Based on a New Secret Sharing Scheme

May 2019 · Information

With the development of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile terminals are widely used in various applications under multicast scenarios. However, due to the limited computation resources of mobile terminals, reducing the computation cost of members in group key distribution processes of dynamic groups has become an important issue. In this paper, we propose a computation-efficient group ... [Show full abstract] key distribution (CEGKD) protocol. First, an improved secret sharing scheme is proposed to construct faster encryption and decryption algorithms. Second, the tree structure of logical key hierarchy (LKH) is employed to implement a simple and effective key-numbering method. Theoretical analysis is given to prove that the proposed protocol meets forward security and backward security. In addition, the experiment results show that the computation cost of CEGKD on the member side is reduced by more than 85% compared with that of the LKH scheme.

Article

The medieval theory of the sign and its relationship to "The Book of Margery Kempe", "Sir Gawain and...

January 1970

Kathryn Cushman Hall

The study of signs has an ancient past and a continuing history throughout the medieval period. Both Augustine and Aquinas, for example, believed that signs were visible manifestations of invisible truths which were finally linked to God. With Ockham we clearly see another concern: signs are a logical shorthand whose meaning is based on man's interaction with temporal and mundane things.While ... [Show full abstract] Chapter One of the dissertation traces such a development in the medieval concept of the sign, the other chapters explore its impact in three pieces of late fourteenth-century literature. Chapter Two examines The Book of Margery Kempe, suggesting that the whiteness of Margery's dress functions as a sign for certain traditional medieval values. Margery's use of white violates society's understanding of its meaning, revealing that her society expected signs to function as visible indicators of invisible qualities.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, discussed in Chapter Three, is also concerned with signification. Gawain's pentangle, for example, implies an Augustinian and Thomistic understanding of signification. His sash, on the other hand, has its meaning rooted in the varying experience that individuals have of Gawain's adventure at the Green Chapel, suggesting an Ockhamistic perception of signification. Chapter Four analyzes Piers Plowman, a poem also concerned with signs and their function. Will's search for a stable framework which would allow him a sure interpretation of the signs that crowd his dream is continuous and almost always inadequate; instead, a term's meaning shifts according to Will's experience, suggesting that he too occupies an Ockhamistic world of incertitude.

Article

God, evil and probability

January 1989 · Sophia

Bruce Langtry

Keith Chrzan is correct in thinking that something has gone wrong with Alvin Plantinga's arguments in Chapter IX, Section II of The Nature of Necessity. ~ But Chrzan is too severe when he says that P[antinga's arguments 'fail miserably', and Chrzan's own analysis of what has gone wrong is itself confused. It is worth setting the matter straight. Plantinga has been considering the problem of evil ... [Show full abstract] as an argument against the truth of theism. In previous sections of Chapter IX, he has attacked the claim that the existence of evil, or the existence of a very great amount of evil, is logically inconsistent with the existence of God. The existence of evil does not provide a deductively valid argument against the existence of God. But of course there are strong arguments which are not deductively valid. Does the existence of evil provide a strong argument of some other kind against the existence of God? In Section II of Chapter IX, Plantinga considers a second question: Is the existence of God improbable with respect to the totality of what we know? Here Plantinga is employing a concept of epistemic probability which involves, amongst other things, conformity to the formal calculus of probability. In subsequent publications he has argued against this procedure. 2 Nevertheless, even if we accept Plantinga's later criticisms, Section II will continue to have some polemical value, directed against opponents who still couch their objections to the existence of God in the form of statements of epistemic probability. Much of Section II is taken up with a third question: Is the existence of God improbable with respect to the great amount of evil that we find? That is, would 'God exists' be less probable than 'God does not exist', with respect to what we know, if the only contingent truth we knew that was relevant to whether God exists was that there is a great amount of evil in the world? Why is this third question important? Consider the propositions 'Elephants exist' and 'There is a great amount of iron ore in the world'. I find it hard to assess the probability

Chapter

Full-text available

The Logic of Fuzzy Set Theory: A Historical Approach

October 2014

Siegfried Gottwald

Actually it is a well accepted fact that fuzzy set theory, as a mathematical theory of a sort of generalized sets, has a natural relationship to particular kinds of non-classical logics of comparable truth degrees, called mathematical fuzzy logics. The chapter discusses aspects of the historical development of the relationship of fuzzy sets with formal logics suitable for a natural presentation ... [Show full abstract] of fuzzy set theory. It also sketches the core mathematical ideas behind mathematical fuzzy logics, explains the key rôle played by Petr Hájek in this development, presents some of the basic results for these logics, and offers some indications for ongoing developments in the field.

Article

Full-text available

Descartes, el atomista veleidoso, o los invisibles siempre llaman dos veces

January 2007 · ENDOXA

Carlos Solís

Resumen Descartes' God put some rein to his omnipotentia absoluta (able to make a square circle), and ordained it to our particular world. Being a nice guy unwilling to cheat US, sowed our minds with the right logic and ¡deas. Burt Descartes' key identification of matter and extensión did not work, and he was bound to accept something obscure and confuse: corpuscles without three dimensions and ... [Show full abstract] a size that no number can express. God omnipotentia could créate that, but in so doing he was deceiving and spoiiing the clear-and-distinct criterion.

Article

Catholic and Apostolic

November 1985 · Scottish Journal of Theology

Nicholas Denyer

Whatever else Christianity may be, the agapeistic way of life, a personal relationship with Jesus, or whatever, it is also a matter of holding certain things to be true. Of recent times that has been denied by some whose job it is to think about these things. For there are theologians who, though apparently convinced by logical positivism that the traditional formulations of Christian belief do ... [Show full abstract] not express truths, wish nevertheless to retain the name of Christian. Positivism however in any case never had much more than fashion to recommend it; and it was already ceasing to be fashionable among philosophers as it started to be fashionable among theologians. To conjoin furthermore an acceptance of positivism with a wish to be called Christian strikes me at least as mere perversity.

Article

Myth, intermediacy, and transcendence in paul ricoeur's concept of fallibility

January 2010

Corneliu Simut

This article presents Ricoeur's attempt to pass from a theoretical understanding of human fallibility to a more pragmatic approach which is supposed to explain the reality of man's capacity to choose evil. Man is fallible because he lives as a finite being in contrast with the infinitude of God. As God's infinitude and ontology cannot be grasped by man, it seems more logical to discuss the ... [Show full abstract] existence of man's fallibility as intermediacy between various levels of human finitude rather than making reference to God's infinitude. Thus, the infinitude of god should actually be conceived in terms of man's finitude, which also leads to the dramatic redefinition of the idea of transcendence. Ricoeur can work with the concept of transcendence for as long as transcendence points to human realities, which can be properly assessed and comprehended only by philosophy. Religion and theology cannot explain man's reality as a fallible being in a global way; this is why, resorting to philosophy should fix this problem because, in Ricoeur, it is only philosophy which can understand the complexity of the human being in its swinging between finitude and infinitude.

Article

The “Pythagorean theorem” and Chinese mathematics. Liu Hui’s commentary on the Gou-theorem in chapte...

January 1992

Joseph Dauben

The following is a preliminary and relatively brief, exploratory discussion of the nature of early Chinese mathematics, especially geometry, considered largely in terms of one specific example: the Pythagorean Theorem, known in its Chinese version as the Gou-Gu theorem. In addition to drawing some fundamental comparisons with western traditions, especially with Greek mathematics, some general ... [Show full abstract] observations are also made concerning the character and development of early Chinese mathematics. Above all, why did Chinese mathematics develop as it did, as far as it did, but never in the abstract, axiomatic way that it did in Greece? Many scholars have suggested that answers to these kinds of questions are to be found in social and cultural factors in China. Some favor the sociological approach, emphasizing for example that the Chinese were by nature primarily concerned with practical problems and their solutions, and therefore had no interest in developing a highly theoretical mathematics. Others have stressed philosophical factors, taking another widely-held view that Confucianism placed no value on theoretical knowledge, which in turn worked against the development of abstract mathematics of the Greek sort. While both of these views contain elements of truth, and certainly play a role in understanding why the Chinese did not develop a more abstract, deductive sort of mathematics along Greek lines, a different approach is offered here. To the extent that knowledge is transmitted and recorded in language, oral and written, logical and linguistic factors cannot help but have played a part in accounting for the development of Chinese mathematics.