Theosophia Islamica

The Quranic teachings concerning humanities and social sciences have their own applications and significance. In fact, The Qur’an as a divine, revealed and comprehensive book has unique teachings for providing human mundane and spiritual happiness through giving applied and social teachings which are immortal, universal and global. It gives us many transcendent teachings regarding our understanding of ourselves, God, the world, the Day of Judgment and other social facts, and by introducing social laws, shape our social behavior and thinking. The Qur’an shows us the universal laws of happiness and adversity, the result of justice and oppression, developments and decline, victory and fall, and the result of social dealings. In addition, it helps us to recognize the mechanism of social events and the cause of social developments. By rethinking the Quranic teaching pertaining to the social life of human being, in this research, I try to show the importance of social aspects of the Qur’anic teachings and their importance and functions in human’s social life, hence we infer some social laws of the Qur’an which help us in developing social sciences and humanities. In fact, this research indicates the importance of understanding and using social teachings of the Qur’an in human life and related sciences in order to help social researchers to use them in their social investigations.

According to The Phenomenology of Spirit , the religion and philosophy are considered as important stages of the history of consciousness, and the absolute spirit is to become self-conscious of itself, as spirit, in the process of genesis of these two stages. The central issue of the present article is answering the following questions: “What relationship does Hegel establish between delicacies of religion and philosophy?” “Are religion and philosophy considered, in his thought, as double truths for each of which separate realms exist or these two are different stages of one single truth that express the spirit’s self-consciousness of itself in two stages?” To answer these questions, the writer attempts to show, through a descriptive-analytical method, how Hegel offers a theoretical explanation for substituting the image of national and ethnic religion for its traditional image by making the absolute affair to the ethnic spirit. Besides, it shows how Hegel – unlike the transcendental philosophy and exalted philosophy – on the one hand turns God and absolute spirit from non-understandable ideas to cognitive and conceptual ones, and on the other hand, removes – in this way – the duality of the realm between religion and philosophy and establishes an internal relationship between them. Through creating a dialectic relationship between religion and philosophy, he finds the possibility to remove the contrast between the myth and the realm of systematic knowledge. And by making it close to the framework of system of knowledge, he introduces the myth not in contrast to rational knowledge, but as the outset of the way whose truth the rational knowledge is going to explain.

The scientific theology is a new branch of contemporary Christian theology that defends the rationality and believability of theology by resorting to science. Nancy Murphy is one of the theologians pioneering in this arena. She has made great efforts to this end and it is advisable to get benefits from the results of such studies. The main issue in this article is to find out the features of the scientific theology in Murphy’s view and the critiques one can pose on it. To answer, using a descriptive-analytical method, we will first explain Murphy’s approach and, then, evaluate it. By referring to Murphy’s works, it is revealed that in offering her model of scientific theology, she has made use of hypothetical-deductive method of science and Lakatos’ scientific research program, placing theology in the hierarchy of other sciences. While enjoying some strong points, Murphy’s model suffers from serious weaknesses. Some of them are as follows: placing fundamental Christian beliefs in opposition to suppositional theories and hypotheses, temporary nature of theology due to its reliance on transient methods of science, not offering any reason for using science, relying on philosophy of science instead of science itself, and not following a certain rule of theology implementation of Lakatos’ scientific research program.

William Craig has sought to defend theism by participating in numerous debates. In a debate with the American philosopher Sinnott Armstrong, which is also published in a book entitled "God", Craig in his first reason tries to prove the existence of God by denying "real infinity" and relying on the concept of beginning and "the need of every beginning for a cause". On the other hand, he takes Big Bang as a witness to his claim, but Armstrong rejects Craig's argument by referring to the existence of real infinity in the outside world and the existence of scientific evidence to negate the implication of the Big Bang on the beginning of the world. Based on this, when it is not possible to properly use experimental evidence as a proof of theological reasoning, such methods can put the belief in God in crisis. Therefore, lack of establishing the correct interaction between theology and science can be considered one of the most important weaknesses of Craig's argument on the existence of God. Finally, by introducing a scientific model, it is possible to provide a solution to establish a correlation between science and theology in such a way that theological evidence matches with experimental evidence and external truth, and no contradiction threatens the belief in God.

The contemporary world observes an increasing leaning from the thinkers in various intellectual and cultural spheres towards an approach to reality, interpreting reality as something in relationship to human beings and his goals and purposes, not independent of them. Richard Rorty is among the adherents of such a thought. The present article uses an analytical-critical method to show how Rorty has defended this view and to evaluate his view. According to the present study, it is clarified that Rorty adduces the features he considers for language to negate the possibility of accessing pure and naked reality; thus, he considers the available reality as made by ourselves in cooperation with others, which has a quite lingual structure. In my view, however, despite the fact that believing in lingual structure of reality places us in a better situation for defending concepts such as activity, freedom, self-consciousness, ownership, thinking and genuine life, Rorty’s emphasis on solidarity, instead of objectivity and truth, entails a dominion of culture over the rational sciences. Consequently, we observe a leaning towards the principality of ‘will’ (including both individual and social) according to which, philosophy turns into something a posteriori and relied on will.

In Rescher’s view, the cognitive rationality is using dialectic arguments for managing the acceptance of various beliefs and answering the individual’s questions in the best way – an approach that can entail access to rational propositions and true knowledge. While believing in the limitation of rational faculties, Rescher maintains that the intelligence endowed in human being in an evolutional way prepares the ground for his access to the authentic knowledge. The cognitive importance of the criterion of investigating the value of knowledge suggests the existence of an effective factor that can help us in qualitative and quantitative promotion of and deepening our essential information. Skepticism rejects the possibility of accessing authentic information and puts a seemingly strong obstacle on the way to implementing and realizing the goals of argument, and maintains that cognitive rationality is never possible. Rescher considers justification of skepticism based on the wrong assumption that the rational justification of a belief is restricted to the deductive reasoning founded on pre-justified propositions. However, in addition to this, we have the method of hypothetical justification that skeptics ignore.