RE: "How God got started", how god belief + basic reason + writing -> modern humans?
October 9, 2017 at 1:30 pm
(This post was last modified: October 9, 2017 at 1:36 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
This article is so bad, it isn’t even wrong. It’s hard to critique because it’s all over the place. His arguments hinge on very slim evidence. For example, he dramatically overstates the influence of Thales, especially since so little is known about him. Everything we know comes from fragments of fragments of later philosophers writing about him. He was by far less influential than Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus. And to characterize Hellenistic philosophy as entirely secular, in the sense of being wholly naturalistic, is a gross overstatement. If anything it started to converge on a kind of mysticism that culminated in the third century with Plotinus. Next, the list scholars he references is unbalanced – Dennett, Pagels, Ehrman, etc.
The essay begins by comparing the “faith” based Abrahamic religions with the development of ancient Greek philosophy. The author seems intent of showing the gradual invention of God, whereas most theologians would recognize progressive revelation.
The author presents us with a thought problem: what if all knowledge of religion, including all sacred tests, disappeared. His theory is that because of a natural “mental faculty of faith,” religion would reappear, but probably in some polytheistic or animist form. My guess is that he would be right. Not only that but in complete agreement with Aquinas who at the very beginning of the “Summa” asks whether it is possible to have knowledge of Divine Truth apart from revelation. He of course concludes that it would not. So at this point, I agree with the author on the form a naturally developing religion would take – still not at all in conflict with the idea of progressive revelation.
I do however, take issue when he starts to compare and contrast the parallel traditions of Hellenistic philosophy and Oriental religion and asserts that they cannot be reconciled into a “tidy” theology. Except that it can. For example, Aquinas is called the “Angelic Doctor” precisely because of his elaborate angelology, retaining the notion of a heavenly host, without abandoning the Greek “God of Classical Theism” of Necessary Being, etc.
The author states that in the time of Abraham, God was understood not as the sole divine entity; but rather, one of many divine entities, albeit the most powerful. That much is true; however, the author’s belief that late monotheism collapsed all spiritual reality into a single divine entity is simply not true. To this day, all three major forms of monotheism retain belief in, not only a heavenly host, but also malevolent spiritual entities. Then he backpedals later to say that the independent “old gods” were rolled into the heavenly host under Christianity. Again this is not true. The Pantheon was built around the idea that the sum total of all the gods represented a single spiritual reality. This same idea can be found in the Lotus Sutra and I don’t think anyone is going to say that Buddhism was a reaction to Christianity.
I could go on. From that point on the author is spinning wildly out of control building speculations on top of speculations based on his faulty premises. It was starting to make my head hurt.
On a personal note, I really do not understand this obsession with showing that faith and reason are not compatible. Nevertheless, Whateverist, if there is some particular point within the article you find interesting, I would be happy to drill down on it.
The essay begins by comparing the “faith” based Abrahamic religions with the development of ancient Greek philosophy. The author seems intent of showing the gradual invention of God, whereas most theologians would recognize progressive revelation.
The author presents us with a thought problem: what if all knowledge of religion, including all sacred tests, disappeared. His theory is that because of a natural “mental faculty of faith,” religion would reappear, but probably in some polytheistic or animist form. My guess is that he would be right. Not only that but in complete agreement with Aquinas who at the very beginning of the “Summa” asks whether it is possible to have knowledge of Divine Truth apart from revelation. He of course concludes that it would not. So at this point, I agree with the author on the form a naturally developing religion would take – still not at all in conflict with the idea of progressive revelation.
I do however, take issue when he starts to compare and contrast the parallel traditions of Hellenistic philosophy and Oriental religion and asserts that they cannot be reconciled into a “tidy” theology. Except that it can. For example, Aquinas is called the “Angelic Doctor” precisely because of his elaborate angelology, retaining the notion of a heavenly host, without abandoning the Greek “God of Classical Theism” of Necessary Being, etc.
The author states that in the time of Abraham, God was understood not as the sole divine entity; but rather, one of many divine entities, albeit the most powerful. That much is true; however, the author’s belief that late monotheism collapsed all spiritual reality into a single divine entity is simply not true. To this day, all three major forms of monotheism retain belief in, not only a heavenly host, but also malevolent spiritual entities. Then he backpedals later to say that the independent “old gods” were rolled into the heavenly host under Christianity. Again this is not true. The Pantheon was built around the idea that the sum total of all the gods represented a single spiritual reality. This same idea can be found in the Lotus Sutra and I don’t think anyone is going to say that Buddhism was a reaction to Christianity.
I could go on. From that point on the author is spinning wildly out of control building speculations on top of speculations based on his faulty premises. It was starting to make my head hurt.
On a personal note, I really do not understand this obsession with showing that faith and reason are not compatible. Nevertheless, Whateverist, if there is some particular point within the article you find interesting, I would be happy to drill down on it.
