فصلنامه قبسات
پیاپی 62 (زمستان 1390)

How can we define and describe God and his perfect attributes? Can human being comprehend the meaning of the attributes assigned to God just like he comprehends the meaning of the attributes assigned to himself such as existence, knowledge and power? This article will try to answer these questions and will investigate and analyze six theories in this regard (univocality and equivocality, indescribability, meaninglessness, theology of negation, analogy); criticizing these theories, the author's hypothesis (univocality) will be defended.

In the famous narration of selselat-o-zahab, narrated from Imam Reza directed to the city of Neishaboor, believing the unity of God is produced as a shelter against the Divine punishment; yet it has some conditions. The essential condition to enter this shelter is to accept velayah; without accepting velayah, it is not possible for human to enter the haven of monotheism.This article will try to consider the relation between unity of God and velayah, and the position of velayah as a strong shelter against the Divine punishment with a mystical-theological approach; and will try to deeply understand this narration. This article will show how believing in velayah is an essential condition to become monotheist.

One of first philosophers who deeply and comprehensively considered the issue of good and God and their relation is Plato. According to his philosophy, the principle of good is an existential reality and is not a mere ethical issue. Plato's view regarding God and the principle of good and the ambiguities of the two will be investigated in this article and finally the relation between the two will be explained according to Plato's philosophy.Unlike the famous claim which says Plato believes God, which is the same as the principle of good, as the designer and not the creator, this article will prove, based on some evidences documented by Plato's treatises, that God as the designer is the same as God as the creator; because he has created the ideas, which are considered eternal, from nothingness and he is in fact identical with the principle of good.

The existence of Satan is confirmed by the Divine religions especially Islam. Quran has mentioned the existence of Satan in many chapters: "then We said to the angels,'Prostrate before Adam.' So they [all] prostrated, but not Iblis: he was not among those who prostrated" (verse 11, chapter Araf). Quran then considers Satan as an obvious enemy for human being and explains that his main function is to tempt and mislead human. On the other hand, the world of existence has the most excellent order according to religious and philosophical bases, especially the transcendental theosophy. Considering the plenty of deficiencies and evil in the world, including the Satan, the following question has always been present in the minds of philosophers and other scholars: is the present order of the world the most excellent order or not?In the first glance it seems that in the best system and order there should be no deficiency and evil. Then this question comes to mind: why is there an existent, named Satan, in the present world whose function is to mislead human being? Molla Sadra believes, based on his philosophical system of the transcendental theosophy, that the origin of the world of existence is the Divine system which thus has the best form possible. Then answering the mentioned question, he says the existence of Satan is good; he explains various benefits for his existence which only God is aware of all of them. Finally the necessity of existence of Satan in the most excellent order is explained. The perspective of Molla Sadra is explained based on his books in this article, especially 'Asfar Al-arbaeh', 'Mafatih Al-Ghaib', 'Tafsir Al-Quran Al-karim'.

To rescue Christianity from the reproofs of the intellectuals, some Christian scholars, especially Schleiermacher, have posed the idea of religious experience as the essence of religion in the recent decades. Schleiermacher believes the essence of religion and piety is a kind of religious experience and it is not the rational and ethical knowledge. After explaining this discussion and mentioning the preliminary points and the background of appearance of religious empiricism, the author, in this article, has investigated and criticized the idea of empiricists regarding the essence of religion.

Molla Sadra and Descartes are two contemporary philosophers who emphasize on the fact that soul and body are substances and believe that human being is constituted from both substances – yet one is abstract and the other is materialistic. But the way they distinguish between the soul and the body makes their ideas converse. Descartes believes soul and body are intrinsically different and Molla Sadra believes their difference is not intrinsic – unlike the difference between other beings in the universe - rather they are different in their degrees; he believes that the soul and the body are both a degree of one another. Comparing the two perspectives, the author has named Descarte's view regarding the duality of soul and body 'intrinsic duality' and Molla Sadra's view in this regard 'graded duality'. Finally the author concludes that according to Molla Sadra's view, the duality of the soul and the body as pictured by Descartes is conceptual and hypostatized not real and external.

The purpose of this article is to prove the necessity of morality in the process of producing science based on Islam's ethical principles. The method of this research is to perform a comparative analysis of the theories of philosophers of science and the contemporary scholars of ethics in this subject, especially the Western scholars and Islamic sources. Our contemporary scholars obligate the producers of science and the scientific community to respect ethics; their reason is the principles which are not only accepted in Islamic ethics, rather they are considered the basic principles of the religion of Islam and Islamic ethics. The necessity of preserving rights and science is the most important principle used by the scholars in this regard which has a firm position in Islamic ethics as well. After a comparative analysis of these two principles in this article, a new principle titled 'the necessity of preserving soul' is presented which is specifically the result of an Islamic approach to ethics. The result of this research is: 'the necessity of morality in the production of science is provable and defendable on the basis of Islam's ethical principles'.