RE: One God versus many
November 29, 2021 at 9:46 pm
(This post was last modified: November 29, 2021 at 9:47 pm by Belacqua.)
(November 29, 2021 at 7:48 pm)T.J. Wrote: I always found it a little interesting that, to my knowledge anyway, the only religions that cite to there being only one god is Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All the others to my knowledge cite there being multiple gods all with different purposes. I wonder what came to the authors of the above mention religions to decide it made more sense for one god to exist instead of many?
Discuss.
Maybe a key word here would be "henotheism." Coined by Schelling in the 19th century, it refers to a belief that there is one God that is greatest, over all, but that lower-level gods may also exist.
There is a theory that the Jews were originally henotheists, and thought that the other gods (of Canaan, for example) were real but weaker than their god. It's interesting to read the Jewish scriptures with this in mind -- some of what we take to be monotheistic language may actually fit with henotheism equally well.
There were two centers of thought which posited that there must be a single creator God. This God is said to be unlike Zeus or Odin, etc., because it is not just a powerful human-like character with special abilities. In both ancient Greece, and in the schools of Indian thought which were labeled "Hindu," people after much argument concluded that there must be a non-material source for the material world. This source is the Ground of Being -- is being itself -- but is not a physical being. It cannot be one of many.
The Greeks had different names for this, including The One. In Hinduism it's Brahman. In Buddhism it's the Not-Two (but this part of Buddhism evolved from Indian thought.)
The important thing is that in both traditions, God is not the angry patriarchal sky-daddy which we all love to hate. It is the Ground of Being, the Form of the Good, the Unmoving Mover. By definition, there can only be one of these. Because if God is existence itself, then no other thing can exist separately. All existence is in God (or Brahman, or the Not-Two).
A lot of Christians were comfortable that there would be higher-level beings between humans and God, though they didn't call these "gods." They were angels, geniuses, or daemons (and the word daemons didn't start out with a bad nuance.) For some reason when we translate the Hindu pantheon into English, we call their intermediate-level beings "gods," but I don't know enough about the original languages to know if that's a good translation. But Krishna and all those guys also exist thanks to, and as a subdivision of, Brahman.
This theology is at the heart of modern Christianity and Hinduism.
