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Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism have all made statements about menstruation and its negative effect on women, leading to prohibitions about physical intimacy, cooking, attending places of worship, and sometimes requiring women to live separately from men at this time. This article explores these taboos, gives first-hand accounts of these religions' attitudes toward menstruating women, and suggests a course of research that could lead to change.

The average woman will menstruate almost a quarter of her fertile life. Yet there are many religions which, to this day, hold primitive ideas and beliefs regarding this common phenomenon. In this paper we will provide an overview of the views of menstruating women held by five of the world's major religions. It should be emphasized that the formal regulations presented in this paper do not necessarily reflect the actual practices and adherences of these religions. For example, studies have found that, in Modern-Orthodox Judaism, many of the regulations are being broken on a regular basis Guterman, It is no wonder that primitive religions incorporated taboos around the menstrual process.

Without proper understanding of the underlying biological basis, menstruation can look quite threatening. It seems to be a recurrent bleeding, every twenty-eight days, without any apparent wound or injury. Because the cycle mirrors that of the moon, the process appears supernatural. Further confusing is the fact that menstruation occurs exclusively in females, disappears during pregnancy, and stops at middle age Montgomery, Menstrual huts and other taboos were common among primitive cultures in the past. The following are examples of primitive practices still in place today.

The Huaulu of Indonesia, for instance, have a menstrual hut on the edge of village. While Huaulu women must live in these huts during menstruation, they are not confined to them — they can wander through the forest, if they stay away from hunting trails. However, they must refrain from eating game, and they must bathe at special fountains forbidden to men. These rituals are performed to spare the men from harm Hoskins, The Dogon a group of people living in the central plateau region of Mali, south of the Niger bend near the city of Bandiagara in the Mopti region believe that women must stay in a special hut during the course of their menstrual period.

During menstruation, Dogon women get no relief from their usual agricultural labor and spend most of their days working in the fields. However, village streets and family compounds are off-limits. Furthermore, sexual intercourse and cooking for a husband are strictly forbidden Strassmann, In the cultures of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea i.

The Enga, Kaulong, and Sengseng cultures of New Guinea believe that sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman will drain and weaken a man Montgomery, The Jewish code of law, Halakha , details strict rules governing every aspect of the daily lives of Jews, including their sexual lives. Jewish law expressly forbids literally any physical contact between males and females during the days of menstruation and for a week thereafter Eider, ; Keshet-Orr, This includes passing objects between each other, sharing a bed most couples have two separate beds, which can be pulled apart during Niddah , sitting together on the same cushion of a couch, eating directly from the wife's leftovers, smelling her perfume, gazing upon her clothing whether or not it has been worn , or listening to her sing Steinberg, According to stipulated ritual, an Orthodox Jewish wife is responsible for immersing in the Mikvah , the ritual bath, following these 2 weeks.

The source for this law is Leviticus All of the verses explicitly state that one may not have intercourse with the forbidden. Although the laws of family purity are only required with one's own wife, any form of physical contact with pleasurable intent including holding hands, hugging, and kissing is prohibited with any menstrual woman who has not yet immersed in the Mikvah Eider, Since brides will immerse in the Mikvah for the first time before their weddings, all unmarried women are presumed to be in a state of Niddah Eider, Therefore, every woman who has had her first period is not allowed to be touched, according to Jewish law.

Additional restrictions are put on the married woman while she is a Niddah. These taboos include playing games and sports together e. Physical danger and disgust were used as mechanisms to keep compliance to these laws among the Jews in the Middle Ages Steinberg, When a woman was menstruating, she was seen as a physical and spiritual danger to all men. Nahmanides states that her breath is harmful, and her gaze is detrimental.

A woman was instructed not to walk between two men, because, if she did so at the end of her period, she would cause strife between them, and if she passed between them at the beginning of her period, she would cause one of them to die. Additionally, a woman is instructed to be careful when cutting her toenails during her menses, for fear that her toenail clippings would spread infection to anyone who stepped on them Steinberg, Contemporary sources, on the other hand, view menstruation and the laws surrounding it as a blessing.

It is thought that following these laws will cause the husband to view his wife as an equal human being, as opposed to a sexual object Steinberg, Growing up in a U. Orthodox Jewish community is a unique experience. For as long as I can remember, I was taught that girls above the age of twelve i.

Only once engaged was I taught the strict rules that govern the sexual lives of observant Jews. Jewish observance includes observance of the laws of family purity, as detailed above. It was certainly an eye-opening experience to learn about these rules such as restrictions on passing objects between each other, eating directly from one's wife's leftovers, smelling her perfume, etc.

Only at the end of the Niddah period, after the ritual bath, are spouses permitted to touch each other, once again. Learning about these regulations has led to my interest and desire to conduct research in this area. Most Christian denominations do not follow any specific rituals or regulations related to menstruation.

However, Western civilization, predominantly Christian, has a history of menstrual taboos. In early Western cultures, the menstruating woman was believed to be dangerous, and social restrictions were placed upon her. In fact, the British Medical Journal, in , claimed that a menstruating woman would cause bacon to putrefy Whelan, The history of the menstrual taboo has been a major reason in the decision to keep women from positions of authority in Christianity Phipps, ; Ruether, Additionally, there are some Christian denominations, including many authorities of the Orthodox Church, who will not allow women to receive communion during their menstrual period Barnes, n.

Menstruation taboos are also responsible for the belief of many Catholics that a woman should not have intercourse during her monthly period Phipps, Catholic canon law refuses to allow women or girls to be in any semi-sacerdotal roles, such as altar server Ruether, Russian Orthodox Christians believe in menstrual taboos as well. Menstruating women must live secluded in a little hut during this time.

They do not attend church services, cannot have any contact with men, and may not touch raw or fresh food. Menstruating women are also thought to offend and repel fish and game. The air surrounding menstruating women is believed to be especially polluting to young hunters; if a hunter gets close enough to a women to touch, then all animals will be able to see him and he won't be able to hunt them.

A menstruating woman's gaze is even thought to affect the weather negatively Morrow, While Western Christian denominations are less extreme, some relic of negative attitudes toward menstruating women remain. The third author of this article describes her experience with menstruation as follows.

Christian family that was not religious, attending no services until in my adolescence the family discovered Unitarianism. On the other hand, if we do have concepts that describe actual properties of Ultimate Reality, then we are not epistemically blind after all, and therefore we could, theoretically at least, be in a position to make evaluations about different claims that are made about Ultimate Reality from the various religious traditions. Another version of religious pluralism attempts to avoid some of the difficulties of the pluralistic hypothesis.

For the aspectual pluralist, there is an objective Ultimate Reality which can be knowable to us. Unlike the pluralistic hypothesis, and in very non-Kantian fashion, valid descriptions of the noumenal are possible. Peter Byrne argues that each of the different major religious traditions reflects some aspect of the transcendent. Byrne uses the notion of natural kinds in order to clarify his view. Just as the natural kind gold has an unobservable essence as well as observable properties or qualities—being yellow, lustrous, and hard—so too Ultimate Reality has an essence with different experienced manifestations.

Ultimate Reality manifests different aspects of itself in the different religions given their own unique conceptual schemes and practices. One challenge to this form of pluralism is that, since each of the religions is capturing only an aspect of the transcendent, it seems that one would obtain a better understanding of its essence by creating a new syncretistic religion in order to glean a more comprehensive understanding of Ultimate Reality.

Also, since religious adherents are only glimpsing the transcendent through properties which are themselves enculturated within the various traditions, descriptions of Ultimate Reality cannot offer adequate knowledge claims about it. So one is left with at least a mitigated form of religious skepticism. A second way of responding to the conflicting claims of the different traditions is to remain committed to the truth of one set of religious teachings while at the same time agreeing with some of the central concerns raised by pluralism.

Religious relativism provides such a response. For religious relativism, as articulated by Joseph Runzo, the correctness of a religion is relative to the worldview of its community of adherents. On this view, each of the religious traditions are comprised of various experiences and mutually incompatible truth claims, and the traditions are themselves rooted in distinct worldviews that are incompatible with, if not contradictory to, the other worldviews. Runzo maintains that these differing experiences and traditions emerge from the plurality of phenomenal realities experienced by the adherents of the traditions.

Furthermore, there are incompatible yet adequate truth claims that correspond to the various worldviews, and the veracity of a religion is determined by its adequacy to appropriately correspond to the worldview within which it is subsumed. An important difference between the religious relativist and the pluralist is that, for the relativist and not the pluralist, truth itself is understood to be relative.

Relativism may offer a more coherent account of religious conflict than pluralism, but it can be argued that it falls short of the actual beliefs of religious adherents. For most religious adherents, their beliefs are generally understood to be true in an objective sense. This leads to the third, and most commonly held, response to conflicting religious claims. In contrast to pluralism and relativism is a third response to the conflicting truth claims of the religions: The term is used in different ways in religious discourse, but a common element is that the central tenets of one religion are true, and claims which are incompatible with those tenets are false.

Another common and related element is that salvation is found exclusively in one religion. Regarding the truth claim, for example, for a Muslim exclusivist, Allah is the one true God who literally spoke to the prophet Muhammad in space and time. Since that is true, then the Advaita Vedantan claim that Brahman God is nirguna —without attributes—must be false, for these two understandings of Ultimate Reality contradict one another.

The same is the case for all religious exclusivists; since they take their religious claims to be objectively true, the contrary claims of other religions are false. This does not mean that exclusivists are not self-critical of their own beliefs, nor does it rule out the practice of dialoguing with or learning from religious others.

But it does mean that religious differences are real and that there are intractable disagreements among religious traditions. Religious exclusivism of which Alvin Plantinga is one prominent example has been the most widely held position among the adherents of the major world religions. Various responses have been made to exclusivism, including moral objections such as that the exclusivist is arrogant, dishonest, oppressive and intellectual and epistemic objections including claims that the exclusivist holds unjustified or irrational beliefs.

A major theme among philosophers of religion in the West has been that of God, including questions about the nature and existence of God, challenges to the existence of God, language about God, and so on. Within every major religion is a belief about a transcendent reality underlying the natural, physical world. From its beginnings, philosophy of religion has been concerned with reflecting on, as far as possible, how religions might understand Ultimate Reality. How the various religions conceptualize that reality differs, especially between Eastern and Western religions.

In Western religion , primarily the three religions of Abrahamic descent—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—Ultimate Reality is conceived of and described in terms of a personal God who is creator and sustainer of all and perfect in every respect. Many other properties are commonly attributed to God as well, including omniscience, omnipotence, and immutability.

It is not a personal creator God, but an absolute state of being. It cannot be described by a set of attributes, such as omniscience or omnipotence, for it is undifferentiated Absolute Reality. Taoists refer to it as the Tao; Hindus refer to it as Brahman; for Buddhists, the name varies and includes Shunyata and Nirvana.

According to this view, the best one can do from a religious perspective is to have faith that there exists a metaphysically and axiologically ultimate reality and that from this reality an ultimate good can be attained.

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It is generally the case that religious adherents do not hold their religious convictions because of well-articulated reasons or arguments which support those convictions. However, reasons and arguments are sometimes used by believers to defend and advance their positions. Arguments for the existence of God have been utilized in natural theology and theistic apologetics for at least two millennia.

Three which have been prominent historically and still receive special attention in contemporary philosophy of religion discussions are the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments. First developed by Saint Anselm of Canterbury — , ontological arguments take various forms. All of them begin with the concept of God and conclude that God must exist.

Anselm argues that God is a being than which none greater can be conceived. He then asks which is greater: His argument concludes this way:. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

Proslogion , chapter II, Since it would be a contradiction to affirm that the greatest possible being does not exist in reality but only in the mind because existing in reality is greater than existing in the mind , one is logically drawn to the conclusion that God must exist. There have been many objections to this argument. Another important objection offered by Immanuel Kant was that existence is not a real predicate.

Alvin Plantinga, for example, has devised a version of the ontological argument utilizing the semantics of modal logic: Defining a maximally excellent being as one that is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect in every possible world, his argument can be stated this way:. Plantinga does not affirm that the argument provides conclusive proof that God exists, but he does claim that there is nothing irrational in accepting it.

Regarding the latter, Michael Martin — , offers the following reductio:. Given this argument structure, we could also conclude that ghosts, gremlins, and countless other mythical creatures exist as well, which is absurd. Cosmological arguments begin by examining some empirical or metaphysical fact of the universe, from which it then follows that something outside the universe must have caused it to exist. There are different types of cosmological arguments, and its defenders include some of the most prominent thinkers spanning the history of philosophy, including Plato, Aristotle, ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Maimonides, Aquinas, Descartes, and Leibniz.

Three versions of the argument that have received much attention are the Thomistic contingency argument, the Leibnizian sufficient reason argument, and the kalam argument. It is next argued that not all things can be contingent, for if they were there would be nothing to ground their existence. This necessary thing or being is God. Another type of cosmological argument is the Leibnizian sufficient reason argument, so named after the German thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — The argument concludes that the explanation of the universe must lie in a transcendent God since the universe does not have within its own nature the necessity of existence and God does.

Some recent versions of the cosmological argument grant that contingent things exist due to the causal events of other contingent things, but they then go on to inquire why the universe should exist at all when conceivably this could have not been the case. What provides a sufficient reason for the existence of the universe? It cannot be another contingent thing and on into infinity , for to explain the existence of any contingent thing by another contingent thing lacks a sufficient reason why any contingent thing exists. If our universe truly is contingent, the obtaining of certain fundamental facts or other will be unexplained within empirical theory, whatever the topological structure of contingent reality.

An infinite regress of beings in or outside the spatiotemporal universe cannot forestall such a result. If there is to be an ultimate, or complete, explanation, it will have to ground in some way the most fundamental, contingent facts of the universe in a necessary being, something which has the reason for its existence within its own nature.

It bears emphasis that such an unconditional explanation need not in any way compete with conditional, empirical explanations. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that empirical explanations will be subsumed within the larger structure of the complete explanation. Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency. Oxford, Blackwell, , An objection raised against both the Thomistic- and the Leibnizian-type arguments is that they are demanding explanations which are unwarranted.

If for every individual contingent thing in the universe there is an explanation, why does the whole need a further explanation? Furthermore, an explanation must at some point come to an end—a brute fact. So why not end with the universe? Why posit some further transcendent reality? The argument is structured by William Lane Craig, its most ardent proponent in recent times, as follows:.

The dilemmas are obvious. Either the universe had a beginning or it did not. If it did, either that beginning was caused or it was not caused. If it was caused, either the cause was personal or it was impersonal. Based on these dilemmas, the argument can be put in the following logical form:. This version of the cosmological argument was bolstered by work in astrophysics and cosmology in the late twentieth century.

On one interpretation of the standard Big Bang cosmological model, the time-space universe sprang into existence ex nihilo approximately Such a beginning is best explained, argue kalam defenders, by a non-temporal, non-spatial, personal, transcendent cause—namely God. The claim that the universe began to exist is also argued philosophically in at least two ways. First, it is argued that an actual infinite set of events cannot exist, for actual infinities lead to metaphysical absurdities. Since an infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite set of events, such a regress is metaphysically impossible.

So the past cannot be infinite; the universe must have had a temporal beginning. A second approach begins by arguing that an infinite series of events cannot be formed by successive addition one member being added to another. The reason why is that, when adding finite numbers one after the other, the set of numbers will always be finite. The addition of yet another finite number, ad infinitum, will never lead to an actual infinite.

Since the past is a series of temporal events formed by successive addition, the past could not be actually infinite in duration. Nor will the future be so. The universe must have had a beginning. Many objections have been raised against the kalam argument, both scientific and philosophical, including that there are other cosmological models of the universe besides the Big Bang in which the universe is understood to be eternal, such as various multi-verse theories.

Philosophical rebuttals marshaled against the kalam argument include the utilization of set theory and mathematical systems which employ actual infinite sets. Teleological arguments in the East go back as far as C.

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In the West, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics offered arguments for a directing intelligence of the world given the order found within it. There is an assortment of teleological arguments, but a common theme among them is the claim that certain characteristics of the natural world reflect design, purpose, and intelligence.

These features of the natural world are then used as evidence for an intelligent, intentional designer of the world. The teleological argument has been articulated and defended at various times and places throughout history, but its zenith was in the early nineteenth century with perhaps its most ardent defender: In his book, Natural Theology , Paley offers an argument from analogy: Those offered by David Hume — in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion are often taken to be archetype refutations of traditional design arguments.

Among them are that the analogy between the works of nature and human artifacts is not particularly strong; that even if we could infer a grand designer of the universe, this designer turns out to be something less than the God of the theistic religions especially given the great amount of evil in the world ; and that just because a universe has the appearance of design, it does not follow that it is in fact designed; such an event could have occurred through natural, chance events.

A more recent version of the design argument is based on the apparent fine-tuning of the cosmos. Fine-tuning arguments, whose current leading defender is Robin Collins, include the claims that the laws of nature, the constants of physics, and the initial conditions of the universe are finely tuned for conscious life. Consider the following three: While each of the individual calculations of such constants may not be fully accurate, it is argued that the significant number of them, coupled with their independence from one other, provides evidence of their being intentionally established with conscious life in mind.

Objections to fine-tuning arguments are multifarious. According to an anthropic principle objection, if the laws of nature and physical constants would have varied to any significant degree, there would be no conscious observers such as ourselves. Given that such observers do exist, it should not be surprising that the laws and constants are just as they are.

One way of accounting for such observers is the many-worlds hypothesis. In this view, there exist a large number of universes, perhaps an infinite number of them. Most of these universes include life-prohibiting parameters, but at least a minimal number of them would probably include life-permitting ones. It should not be surprising that one of them, ours, for example, is life-permitting. Much of the current fine-tuning discussion turns on the plausibility of the many-worlds hypothesis and the anthropic principle.

There are other versions of the teleological argument that have also been proposed which focus not on fundamental parameters of the cosmos but on different aspects of living organisms—including their emergence, alleged irreducibly complex systems within living organisms, information intrinsic within DNA, and the rise of consciousness—in an attempt to demonstrate intelligent, intentional qualities in the world. If successful, the cosmological argument only provides evidence for a transcendent first cause of the universe, nothing more; at best, the teleological argument provides evidence for a purposive, rational designer of the universe, nothing more; and so on.

Natural theologians maintain, however, that the central aim of these arguments is not to offer full-blown proofs of any particular deity, but rather to provide evidence or warrant for belief in a grand designer, or creator, or moral lawgiver. Some natural theologians argue that it is best to combine the various arguments in order to provide a cumulative case for a broad form of theism. Taken together, these natural theologians argue, the classical arguments offer a picture of a deity not unlike the God of the theistic religious traditions and even if this approach does not prove the existence of any particular deity, it does nonetheless lend support to theism over naturalism which, as used here, is the view that natural entities have only natural causes, and that the world is fully describable by the physical sciences.

Along with arguments for the existence of God, there are also a number of reasons one might have for denying the existence of God. If the burden is on the theist to provide highly convincing evidences or reasons that would warrant his or her believing that God exists, in the absence of such evidences and reasons disbelief is justified. Another reason one might have for not believing that God exists is that science conflicts with theistic beliefs and, given the great success of the scientific enterprise, it should have the last word on the matter. Since science has regularly rebuffed religious claims in the past, we should expect the claims of religion to eventually become extinct.

A third possible reason for denying the existence of God is that the very concept of God is incoherent. And a fourth reason one might have is that the existence of God conflicts with various features of the natural world, such as evil, pain, and suffering. Over the last several hundred years there has been tremendous growth in scientific understanding of the world in such fields as biology, astronomy, physics, and geology.

These advances have had considerable influence on religious belief. When religious texts, such as the Bible, have been in conflict with science, the latter has generally been the winner in the debate ; religious beliefs have commonly given way to the power of the scientific method. It has seemed to some that modern science will be able to explain all of the fundamental questions of life with no remainder.

Given the advances of science and the retreat of religious beliefs, many in the latter half of the twentieth century agreed with the general Freudian view that a new era was on the horizon in which the infantile illusions, or perhaps delusions, of religion would soon go the way of the ancient Greek and Roman gods. With the onset of the twenty-first century, however, a new narrative has emerged. Religion has not fallen into oblivion, as many anticipated; in fact, religious belief is on the rise.

Many factors account for this, including challenges to psychological and sociological theories which hold belief in God to be pathological or neurotic. In recent decades these theories have themselves been challenged by medical and psychological research, being understood by many to be theories designed primarily to destroy belief in God. Another important factor is the increase in the number of believing and outspoken scientists, such as Francis Collins, the director of the human genome project.

But despite this orchestrated opposition arguing the falsity and incoherence of theism, it has proved rather resilient. Indeed, the twenty-first century is reflecting a renewed interest in philosophical theism. Philosophical challenges to theism have also included the claim that the very concept of God makes no sense—that the attributes ascribed to God are logically incoherent either individually or collectively.

There are first-rate philosophers today who argue that theism is coherent and others of equal stature who argue that theism is incoherent. Much of the criticism of the concept of theism has focused on God as understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but it is also relevant to the theistic elements found within Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and certain forms of African and Native American religions.

The question of whether theism is coherent is an important one, for if there is reason to believe that theism is incoherent, theistic belief is in an important sense undermined. The logical consistency of each of the divine attributes of classical theism has been challenged by both adherents and non-adherents of theism.

Consider the divine attribute of omniscience.

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If God knows what you will freely do tomorrow, then it is the case now that you will indeed do that tomorrow. But how can you be free not to do that thing tomorrow if it is true now that you will in fact freely do that thing tomorrow? There is a vast array of replies to this puzzle, but some philosophers conclude that omniscience is incompatible with future free action and that, since there is future free action, God—if God exists—is not omniscient.

Another objection to the coherence of theism has to do with the divine attribute of omnipotence and is referred to as the stone paradox. An omnipotent being, as traditionally understood, is a being who can bring about anything. So, an omnipotent being could create a stone that was too heavy for such a being to lift. But if he could not lift the stone, he would not be omnipotent, and if he could not make such a stone, he would not be omnipotent. Hence, no such being exists. A number of replies have been offered to this puzzle, but some philosophers conclude that the notion of omnipotence as traditionally defined is incoherent and must be redefined if the concept of God is to remain a plausible one.

Arguments for the incoherence of theism have been offered for each of the divine attributes. While there have been many challenges to the classical attributes of God, there are also contemporary philosophers and theologians who have defended each of them as traditionally understood. There is much lively discussion currently underway by those defending both the classical and neo-classical views of God. But not all theistic philosophers and theologians have believed that the truths of religious beliefs can be or even should be demonstrated or rationally justified. Perhaps the most compelling and noteworthy argument against theism is what is referred to as the problem of evil.

Philosophers of the East and the West have long recognized that difficulties arise for one who affirms both the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God and the reality of evil. David Hume, quoting the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus — B. Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Is he able, but not willing? Is he both able and willing? There are different ways the problem of evil can be formulated. One formulation is construed as a logical problem. For the logical problem of evil , it is asserted that the two claims, 1 an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God exists, and 2 evil exists, are logically incompatible.

Since evil ostensibly exists, the argument goes, God understood traditionally as being omnipotent and omnibenevolent must not exist. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the logical argument held sway. But by the end of that century, it was widely acknowledged by philosophers of religion that the logical problem had been rebutted. One reason is that as claims 1 and 2 are not explicitly contradictory, there must be hidden premises or unstated assumptions which make them so. But what might those be?

Given these claims, 1 and 2 would be logically incompatible. However, it turns out that at least a may not be true, even on a classical theistic account. It could be that a world with free agents is more valuable than a world with no free agents. Further, it could be that such free agents cannot be caused or determined to do only what is morally right and good, even by God. If this is so, in order for God to create agents who are capable of moral good, God had to create agents who are capable of moral evil as well. If this is a logical possibility, and it seems to be so, then premise a is not a necessary truth because God cannot create just any world.

In addition, premise b is not necessarily true either. He claimed that the goddess Namagiri helped him to intuit solutions to mathematical problems. Likewise, Jagadish Chandra Bose — , a theoretical physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist, and archaeologist, who worked on radio waves, saw the Hindu idea of unity reflected in the study of nature.

He started the Bose institute in Kolkata in , the earliest interdisciplinary scientific institute in India Subbarayappa Current work in the field of science and religion encompasses a wealth of topics, including free will, ethics, human nature, and consciousness. Contemporary natural theologians discuss fine-tuning, in particular design arguments based on it e.

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Collins , the interpretation of multiverse cosmology, and the significance of the Big Bang. For instance, authors such as Hud Hudson have explored the idea that God has actualized the best of all possible multiverses. Here follows an overview of two topics that generated substantial interest and debate over the past decades: Before scientists developed their views on cosmology and origins of the world, Western cultures already had an elaborate doctrine of creation, based on Biblical texts e.

This doctrine of creation has the following interrelated features: Differently put, God did not need any pre-existing materials to make the world, unlike, e. Rather, God created the world freely. This introduces a radical asymmetry between creator and creature: Third, the doctrine of creation holds that creation is essentially good this is repeatedly affirmed in Genesis 1.

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The world does contain evil, but God does not directly cause this evil to exist. Moreover, God does not merely passively sustain creation, but rather plays an active role in it, using special divine actions e. Fourth, God made provisions for the end of the world, and will create a new heaven and earth, in this way eradicating evil. Related to the doctrine of creation are views on divine action. Theologians commonly draw a distinction between general and special divine action.

Unfortunately, there is no universally accepted definition of these two concepts in the fields of theology or science and religion. One way to distinguish them Wildman Drawing this distinction allows for creatures to be autonomous and indicates that God does not micromanage every detail of creation. Still, the distinction is not always clear-cut, as some phenomena are difficult to classify as either general or special divine action. Alston makes a related distinction between direct and indirect divine acts. God brings about direct acts without the use of natural causes, whereas indirect acts are achieved through natural causes.

Using this distinction, there are four possible kinds of actions that God could do: God could not act in the world at all, God could act only directly, God could act only indirectly, or God could act both directly and indirectly. In the science and religion literature, there are two central questions on creation and divine action. To what extent are the Christian doctrine of creation and traditional views of divine action compatible with science? How can these concepts be understood within a scientific context, e.

Note that the doctrine of creation says nothing about the age of the Earth, nor that it specifies a mode of creation. This allows for a wide range of possible views within science and religion, of which Young Earth Creationism is but one that is consistent with scripture. The theory seems to support creatio ex nihilo as it specifies that the universe originated from an extremely hot and dense state around The net result of scientific findings since the seventeenth century has been that God was increasingly pushed into the margins.

This encroachment of science on the territory of religion happened in two ways: While the doctrine of creation does not contain details of the mode and timing of creation, the Bible was regarded as authoritative. Second, the emerging concept of scientific laws in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physics seemed to leave no room for special divine action.

These two challenges will be discussed below, along with proposed solutions in the contemporary science and religion literature. Christian authors have traditionally used the Bible as a source of historical information. Biblical exegesis of the creation narratives, especially Genesis 1 and 2 and some other scattered passages, such as in the Book of Job , remains fraught with difficulties.

Are these texts to be interpreted in a historical, metaphorical, or poetic fashion, and what are we to make of the fact that the order of creation differs between these accounts Harris ? Although such literalist interpretations of the Biblical creation narratives were not uncommon, and are still used by Young Earth creationists today, theologians before Ussher already offered alternative, non-literalist readings of the biblical materials e. From the seventeenth century onward, the Christian doctrine of creation came under pressure from geology, with findings suggesting that the Earth was significantly older than BCE.

From the eighteenth century on, natural philosophers, such as de Maillet, Lamarck, Chambers, and Darwin, proposed transmutationist what would now be called evolutionary theories, which seem incompatible with scriptural interpretations of the special creation of species. Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett have outlined a divine action spectrum to clarify the distinct positions about creation and divine action in the contemporary science and religion literature.

They discern two dimensions in this spectrum: At one extreme are creationists. Like other theists, they believe God has created the world and its fundamental laws, and that God occasionally performs special divine actions miracles that intervene in the fabric of laws. Creationists deny any role of natural selection in the origin of species. Within creationism, there are Old and Young Earth creationism, with the former accepting geology and rejecting evolutionary biology, and the latter rejecting both. Next to creationism is Intelligent Design, which affirms divine intervention in natural processes.

Intelligent Design creationists e. Like other creationists, they deny a significant role for natural selection in shaping organic complexity and they affirm an interventionist account of divine action. For political reasons they do not label their intelligent designer as God, as they hope to circumvent the constitutional separation of church and state in the US which prohibits teaching religious doctrines in public schools Forrest and Gross Theistic evolutionists hold a non-interventionist approach to divine action: God creates indirectly, through the laws of nature e.

For example, the theologian John Haught regards divine providence as self-giving love, and natural selection and other natural processes as manifestations of this love, as they foster autonomy and independence. While theistic evolutionists allow for special divine action, particularly the miracle of the Incarnation in Christ e. God has laid out the laws of nature and lets it run like clockwork without further interference.

Deism is still a long distance from ontological materialism, the idea that the material world is all there is. Views on divine action were influenced by developments in physics and their philosophical interpretation. In the seventeenth century, natural philosophers, such as Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, developed a mechanistic view of the world as governed by orderly and lawlike processes. Laws, understood as immutable and stable, created difficulties for the concept of special divine action Pannenberg How could God act in a world that was determined by laws?

One way to regard miracles and other forms of special divine action is to see them as actions that somehow suspend or ignore the laws of nature. This concept of divine action is commonly labeled interventionist. Interventionism regards the world as causally deterministic, so God has to create room for special divine actions. By contrast, non-interventionist forms of divine action e. In the seventeenth century, the explanation of the workings of nature in terms of elegant physical laws suggested the ingenuity of a divine designer.

For example, Samuel Clarke cited in Schliesser Another conclusion that the new laws-based physics suggested was that the universe was able to run smoothly without requiring an intervening God. The increasingly deterministic understanding of the universe, ruled by deterministic causal laws as, for example, outlined by Pierre-Simon Laplace — , seemed to leave no room for special divine action, which is a key element of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation.

Newton resisted interpretations like these in an addendum to the Principia in Alston argued, contra authors such as Polkinghorne , that mechanistic, pre-twentieth century physics is compatible with divine action and divine free will. In such a mechanistic world, every event is an indirect divine act. Advances in twentieth-century physics, including the theories of general and special relativity, chaos theory, and quantum theory, overturned the mechanical clockwork view of creation.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, chaos theory and quantum physics have been explored as possible avenues to reinterpret divine action.

One difficulty with this model is that it moves from our knowledge of the world to assumptions about how the world is: Robert Russell proposed that God acts in quantum events. This would allow God to directly act in nature without having to contravene the laws of nature, and is therefore a non-interventionist model. Since, under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are no natural efficient causes at the quantum level, God is not reduced to a natural cause.

Murphy outlined a similar bottom-up model where God acts in the space provided by quantum indeterminacy. After all, it is not even clear whether quantum theory would allow for free human action, let alone divine action, which we do not know much about Jaeger a.

Next to this, William Carroll , building on Thomistic philosophy, argues that authors such as Murphy and Polkinghorne are making a category mistake: God is not a cause in a way creatures are causes, competing with natural causes, and God does not need indeterminacy in order to act in the world. Rather, as primary cause God supports and grounds secondary causes. While this solution is compatible with determinism indeed, on this view, the precise details of physics do not matter much , it blurs the distinction between general and special divine action.

Moreover, the Incarnation suggests that the idea of God as a cause among natural causes is not an alien idea in theology, and that God at least sometimes acts as a natural cause Sollereder There has been a debate on the question to what extent randomness is a genuine feature of creation, and how divine action and chance interrelate. Chance and stochasticity are important features of evolutionary theory the non-random retention of random variations.

In a famous thought experiment, Gould imagined that we could rewind the tape of life back to the time of the Burgess Shale million years ago ; the chance we would end up with anything like the present-day life forms is vanishingly small. However, Simon Conway Morris has argued species very similar to the ones we know now including human-like intelligent species would evolve under a broad range of conditions. Under a theist interpretation, randomness could either be a merely apparent aspect of creation, or a genuine feature.

Plantinga suggests that randomness is a physicalist interpretation of the evidence. God may have guided every mutation along the evolutionary process. In this way, God could. By contrast, some authors see stochasticity as a genuine design feature, and not just as a physicalist gloss. Their challenge is to explain how divine providence is compatible with genuine randomness.

Under a deistic view, one could simply say that God started the universe off and did not interfere with how it went, but that option is not open to the theist, and most authors in the field of science and religion are theists, rather than deists. Elizabeth Johnson , using a Thomistic view of divine action, argues that divine providence and true randomness are compatible: God gives creatures true causal powers, thus making creation more excellent than if they lacked such powers, and random occurrences are also secondary causes; chance is a form of divine creativity that creates novelty, variety, and freedom.

One implication of this view is that God may be a risk taker—although, if God has a providential plan for possible outcomes, there is unpredictability but not risk. Johnson uses metaphors of risk taking that, on the whole, leave the creator in a position of control creation, then, is like jazz improvisation , but it is, to her, a risk nonetheless. Why would God take risks? There are several solutions to this question. The free will theodicy says that a creation that exhibits stochasticity can be truly free and autonomous:.

Authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation. Such freedom is best supplied by the open contingency of evolution, and not by strings of divine direction attached to every living creature. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have similar creation stories, which ultimately go back to the first book of the Hebrew Bible Genesis. According to Genesis, humans are the result of a special act of creation. Genesis 1 offers an account of the creation of the world in six days, with the creation of human beings on the sixth day. Islam has a creation narrative similar to Genesis 2, with Adam being fashioned out of clay.

These handcrafted humans are regarded as the ancestors of all living humans today. Humans occupy a privileged position in these creation accounts. In Christianity, Judaism, and some strands of Islam, humans are created in the image of God imago Dei. There are at least three different ways in which image-bearing is understood Cortez According to the functionalist account, humans are in the image of God by virtue of things they do, such as having dominion over nature.

The structuralist account emphasizes characteristics that humans uniquely possess, such as reason. The relational interpretation sees the image as a special relationship between God and humanity. Humans also occupy a special place in creation as a result of the fall. By eating from the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil they fell from this state, and death, manual labor, as well as pain in childbirth were introduced.

The Augustinian interpretation of original sin also emphasizes the distorting effects of sin on our reasoning capacities the so-called noetic effects of sin. As a result of sin, our original perceptual and reasoning capacities have been marred. Whereas Augustine believed that the prelapsarian state was one of perfection, Irenaeus second century saw Adam and Eve prior to the fall as innocent, like children still in development.

Scientific findings and theories relevant to human origins come from a range of disciplines, in particular geology, paleoanthropology the study of ancestral hominins, using fossils and other evidence , archaeology, and evolutionary biology. These findings challenge traditional religious accounts of humanity, including the special creation of humanity, the imago Dei , the historical Adam and Eve, and original sin.

In natural philosophy, the dethroning of humanity from its position as a specially created species predates Darwin and can already be found in early transmutationist publications. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed chimpanzees as the ancestors to humans in his Philosophie Zoologique He proposed that the first organisms arose through spontaneous generation, and that all subsequent organisms evolved from them. He argued that humans have a single evolutionary origin: Darwin was initially reluctant to publish on human origins.

In the twentieth century, paleoanthropologists debated whether humans separated from the other great apes at the time wrongly classified into the paraphyletic group Pongidae long ago, about 15 million years ago, or relatively recently, about 5 million years ago. Molecular clocks—first immune responses e.

The discovery of many hominin fossils, including Ardipithecus ramidus 4. These finds are now also supplemented by detailed analysis of ancient DNA extracted from fossil remains, bringing to light a previously unknown species of hominin the Denisovans who lived in Siberia up to about 40, years ago. Taken together, this evidence indicates that humans did not evolve in a simple linear fashion, but that human evolution resembles an intricate branching tree with many dead ends, in line with the evolution of other species. In the light of these scientific findings, contemporary science and religion authors have reconsidered the questions of human uniqueness and imago Dei , the Incarnation, and the historicity of original sin.

Some authors have attempted to reinterpret human uniqueness as a number of species-specific cognitive and behavioral adaptations. For example, van Huyssteen considers the ability of humans to engage in cultural and symbolic behavior, which became prevalent in the Upper Paleolithic, as a key feature of uniquely human behavior.

Other theologians have opted to broaden the notion of imago Dei. Given what we know about the capacities for morality and reason in non-human animals, Celia Deane-Drummond and Oliver Putz reject an ontological distinction between humans and non-human animals, and argue for a reconceptualization of the imago Dei to include at least some nonhuman animals.

Joshua Moritz raises the question of whether extinct hominin species, such as Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis , which co-existed with Homo sapiens for some part of prehistory, partook in the divine image. There is also discussion of how we can understand the Incarnation the belief that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, became incarnate with the evidence we have of human evolution.

For instance, Peacocke regarded Jesus as the point where humanity is perfect for the first time. Teilhard de Chardin had a teleological, progressivist interpretation of evolution, according to which Christ is the progression and culmination of what evolution has been working toward even though the historical Jesus lived years ago. According to Teilhard, evil is still horrible but no longer incomprehensible; it becomes a natural feature of creation—since God chose evolution as his mode of creation, evil arises as an inevitable byproduct.

Deane-Drummond , however, points out that this interpretation is problematic: Teilhard worked within a Spencerian progressivist model of evolution, and he was anthropocentric, seeing humanity as the culmination of evolution. Current evolutionary theory has repudiated the Spencerian progressivist view, and adheres to a stricter Darwinian model.

Deane-Drummond, who regards human morality as lying on a continuum with the social behavior of other animals, conceptualizes the fall as a mythical, rather than a historical event. She regards Christ as incarnate wisdom, situated in a theodrama that plays against the backdrop of an evolving creation.

As a human being, Christ is connected to the rest of creation, as we all are, through common descent. By saving us, he saves the whole of creation. Debates on the fall and the historical Adam have centered on how these narratives can be understood in the light of contemporary science.

On the face of it, limitations of our cognitive capacities can be naturalistically explained as a result of biological constraints, so there seems little explanatory gain to appeal to the narrative of the fall. Some have attempted to interpret the concepts of sin and fall in ways that are compatible with paleoanthropology. Peter van Inwagen , for example, holds that God could have providentially guided hominin evolution until there was a tightly-knit community of primates, endowed with reason, language, and free will, and this community was in close union with God.

At some point in history, these hominins somehow abused their free will to distance themselves from God. For van Inwagen, the fall was a fall from perfection, following the Augustinian tradition. John Schneider , on the other hand, argues that there is no genetic or paleoanthropological evidence for such a community of superhuman beings. Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt favor an Irenaean, rather than an Augustinian interpretation of the fall narrative, which does not involve a historical Adam, and emphasizes original innocence as the state that humans had prior to sinning.

This final section will look at two examples of work in science and religion that have received attention in the recent literature, and that probably will be important in the coming years: Other areas of increasing interest include the theistic multiverse, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism. Even before Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection, Victorian authors fretted over the implications of evolutionary theory for morality and religion. Evolutionary theorists from Darwin onward argued that human morality is continuous with social behaviors in nonhuman animals, and that we can explain moral sentiments as the result of natural selection.

This capacity has evolutionary precursors in the ability of nonhuman animals to empathize, cooperate, reconcile, and engage in fair play e. Since we can explain ethical beliefs and behaviors as a result of their long-term fitness consequences, we do not need to invoke ethical realism as an explanation. Some ask whether evolutionary challenges to moral beliefs apply in an analogous way to religious beliefs see Bergmann and Kain , especially part III.

Others have examined whether evolutionary ethics makes appeals to God in ethical matters redundant. John Hare , for example, has argued that this is not the case, because evolutionary ethics can only explain why we do things that ultimately benefit us, even if indirectly e.

According to Hare , evolutionary ethics does not explain our sense of moral obligation that goes beyond biological self-interest, as evolutionary theory predicts that we would always rank biological self-interest over moral obligations. Therefore, theism provides a more coherent explanation of why we feel we have to follow up on moral obligations. Intriguingly, theologians and scientists have begun to collaborate in the field of evolutionary ethics. For example, the theologian Sarah Coakley has cooperated with the mathematician and biologist Martin Nowak to understand altruism and game theory in a broader theological and scientific context Nowak and Coakley The cognitive science of religion examines the cognitive basis of religious beliefs.

Recent work in the field of science and religion has examined the implications of this research for the justification of religious beliefs. De Cruz and De Smedt propose that arguments in natural theology are also influenced by evolved cognitive dispositions. For example, the design argument may derive its intuitive appeal from an evolved, early-developed propensity in humans to ascribe purpose and design to objects in their environment.