(April 7, 2016 at 1:40 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:(April 6, 2016 at 2:29 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: Never seen a good coherent definition or an explanation of how its supposed to operate.I would suggest that you haven't really dipped your feet into the more profound theological works. Spinoza put forth a very good summary of Pantheism. Whitehead fairly represents Panentheism. Plotinus is a good start for the "God of the Philosophers" also called classical monotheism. Thomas Aquinas goes into considerable depth developing the Christian God. So unless you were hoping for a two sentence dictionary entry, I really cannot understand how anyone can consider these various conceptions of God ill-defined. As for incoherent, I think that demonstrating that Spinoza, for one, is incoherent would be a herculean task, imo, and a critique of Aquinas deserves a more comprehensive treatment than most here are willing to give.
I've seen them and they remain ill defined and sometimes contradictory.
Spinoza for example equated all nature with god and deprived god of the attributes of intelligence, feeling and purpose this to me makes the god part irrelevant. See how ill defined god is here, it is hard for me to understand how you can see this as a good description of god, particularly when you ascribe all the things to god that Spinoza specifically eliminates.
Quote:"Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law...." Thus, Spinoza's cool, indifferent God is the antithesis to the concept of an anthropomorphic, fatherly God who cares about humanityhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza
You can fix ignorance, you can't fix stupid.
Tinkety Tonk and down with the Nazis.