Talk:Theism
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[edit] Theism: solely explicit?
I'm trying to put together an illustration explaining the relationships between the various positions regarding religion and theism, but I've hit a stumbling block.
Is all theism explicit, or can it also be implicit?
Can it be present without a conscious decision to hold a theistic belief? Or is that possible, but not the same as the belief being implicit? -FrostyBytes 09:47, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
- A somewhat late response... I'm quite sure implicit theism is a view; you can look at the sources cited at Argument from nonbelief#Reasonable nonbelief: lack of evidence. And I know there are people who believe that we are born with an intuitive belief in God that can only be veiled by our own pride and so on. But the last question is more difficult, I don't have a source explicitly calling this "implicit theism". --Merzul 13:19, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Anybody here?
This is a start-class top-importance article, and compared to the atheism article it isn't doing very well. I'm going to be editing this article, I have read and archived the discussion; but I'm hoping I will have people here to discuss things with. The first plan is to just add sources for the current material. --Merzul 17:13, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
OK. Here is a question. Why does the Theism article refer to "the belief in the existence of one or more Gods or deities" -- as I understanding, theism refers to belief in God, pantheism is that the Universe == God, and polytheism is that there are many gods. Ergo, there should be a distinction between theism and polytheism, and theism should simply say "the belief in the existance of God". I recognize that the existing definition is quoted on the web, but it isn't really correct -- that is why the term polytheism exists.
Now it can be argued I am sure that monotheism is the word opposed to polytheism but from the Greek, "theo" refers to god or divine -- singular; and "ism" originally referred to the action of forming nouns from verbs; now it refers to a doctrine or theory. So theism means a "doctrine of God" (singular). This leads to the modern usage of "belief in God". (As adding the "a" prefix leads to no belief in God or "without God".) SunSw0rd 19:08, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
- Well it seems actually that most dictionaries prefer your definition of theism. Simon Blackburn has some amusing definitions in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy:
- theism Belief in the existence of God. Theism is also a morbid condition brought on by excessive tea-drinking, but this is a different sense of the word, or an instance of homonymy. See also deism, monotheism, polytheism, and different topics within the philosophy of religion.
- monotheism Belief in one God. It is not always easy to count gods. See polytheism.
- This Wikipedia article has made the whole issue very simple, by defining theism as "at least one god". But it might be that the issue is more complicated, especially with God in Hinduism. It seems having at least some concept of God with a capital 'G' is quite central to theism. --Merzul 20:00, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
