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Enduring Problems in Philosophy
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Sidis Coruscatis
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Okay, despite what I've said, I'm going in here with the assumption that this is addressed in the scripture which may contradict some of the premises. Also some of these ideas are tenuous but I want to get it off all the same.
Does a strict definition concerning the divinity of Christ exist? If He was born of human flesh the implication is that He was capable of sin, yet he remained sinless which evinces His divinity, and in those actions He redeemed humanity. The important question here is: did He redeem man because of His divinity, or did He gain divinity through the act of redemption? Can something be redeemed if it doesn't possess the same quality which has been condemned?
We were made in the image of God, but this is no longer the case. If we inherited a divine aspect upon our creation, it was separated from us in the Fall. Now remember that God is outside of time; what if Jesus regained his divinity through His love and was consequently born as the true Son of God? I hear what you're saying @Ren about the distinction of earthly and divine love, but is it necessarily inconceivable that such an individual who is capable of supreme love cannot emerge among us? If there is no possibility to regain our divinity within us, then no amount of propitiation or atonement can ever matter. We were simply predestined to futility for eternity. In a way, this affirms atheism, because all moral telos on our part is rendered absurd in a Sisyphean depiction in the eyes of God. We are forever divided and faith becomes epistemically inconsequential.
If there is a dormant seed of divine potential in us however, it also bears significance in relation to the second coming of Christ. I know there are many interpretation of how this is supposed to come about, but what if it refers to the possibility of Christendom reoccurring in time? Can we say there have not been such occurrences?
"Judge Thyself who was right- Thou or he who questioned Thee then? Remember the first question; its meaning, in other words, was this: "Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread- for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest Thou withdraw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread." But Thou wouldst not deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that freedom worth if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that man lives not by bread alone. But dost Thou know that for the sake of that earthly bread the spirit of the earth will rise up against Thee and will strive with Thee and overcome Thee, and all will follow him, crying, "Who can compare with this beast? He has given us fire from heaven!" Dost Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger? "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!" that's what they'll write on the banner, which they will raise against Thee, and with which they will destroy Thy temple. Where Thy temple stood will rise a new building; the terrible tower of Babel will be built again, and though, like the one of old, it will not be finished, yet Thou mightest have prevented that new tower and have cut short the sufferings of men for a thousand years; for they will come back to us after a thousand years of agony with their tower. They will seek us again, hidden underground in the catacombs, for we shall be again persecuted and tortured. They will find us and cry to us, "Feed us, for those who have promised us fire from heaven haven't given it!" And then we shall finish building their tower, for he finishes the building who feeds them. And we alone shall feed them in Thy name, declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man? And if for the sake of the bread of Heaven thousands shall follow Thee, what is to become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures who will not have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the great and strong? No, we care for the weak too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them- so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.
- Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky
Does a strict definition concerning the divinity of Christ exist? If He was born of human flesh the implication is that He was capable of sin, yet he remained sinless which evinces His divinity, and in those actions He redeemed humanity. The important question here is: did He redeem man because of His divinity, or did He gain divinity through the act of redemption? Can something be redeemed if it doesn't possess the same quality which has been condemned?
We were made in the image of God, but this is no longer the case. If we inherited a divine aspect upon our creation, it was separated from us in the Fall. Now remember that God is outside of time; what if Jesus regained his divinity through His love and was consequently born as the true Son of God? I hear what you're saying @Ren about the distinction of earthly and divine love, but is it necessarily inconceivable that such an individual who is capable of supreme love cannot emerge among us? If there is no possibility to regain our divinity within us, then no amount of propitiation or atonement can ever matter. We were simply predestined to futility for eternity. In a way, this affirms atheism, because all moral telos on our part is rendered absurd in a Sisyphean depiction in the eyes of God. We are forever divided and faith becomes epistemically inconsequential.
If there is a dormant seed of divine potential in us however, it also bears significance in relation to the second coming of Christ. I know there are many interpretation of how this is supposed to come about, but what if it refers to the possibility of Christendom reoccurring in time? Can we say there have not been such occurrences?
"Judge Thyself who was right- Thou or he who questioned Thee then? Remember the first question; its meaning, in other words, was this: "Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread- for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest Thou withdraw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread." But Thou wouldst not deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that freedom worth if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that man lives not by bread alone. But dost Thou know that for the sake of that earthly bread the spirit of the earth will rise up against Thee and will strive with Thee and overcome Thee, and all will follow him, crying, "Who can compare with this beast? He has given us fire from heaven!" Dost Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger? "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!" that's what they'll write on the banner, which they will raise against Thee, and with which they will destroy Thy temple. Where Thy temple stood will rise a new building; the terrible tower of Babel will be built again, and though, like the one of old, it will not be finished, yet Thou mightest have prevented that new tower and have cut short the sufferings of men for a thousand years; for they will come back to us after a thousand years of agony with their tower. They will seek us again, hidden underground in the catacombs, for we shall be again persecuted and tortured. They will find us and cry to us, "Feed us, for those who have promised us fire from heaven haven't given it!" And then we shall finish building their tower, for he finishes the building who feeds them. And we alone shall feed them in Thy name, declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man? And if for the sake of the bread of Heaven thousands shall follow Thee, what is to become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures who will not have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the great and strong? No, we care for the weak too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them- so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.
- Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky
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As uncomfortable as it is for me to say yes so simply, but yes. It's the only probable logic I can hold for sins to be logically forgiveable. There are things that make this uncomfortable and one is that it renders God as twice the divinity of quite polar natures and thereby making it seem polytheistic. Such was the depiction of the Manicheans, I assume (I assume because I'm a dweeb in that department), and Augustinians make a solid point. But here's my case. Consider God a glass full of water. Please allow me to simplify the totality of existence as one glass full of water afloat in an environment with no other significant matter but just the glass full of water. Strictly for purposes of depiction, let's render the rest of where the glass of water is situated to be meaningless.
Now let's proceed and consider that God's omnipresence and omnipotence is also for now of the glass of water. Say in the vacuum, we spill out all of the water, but since it is a vacuum with no rules of gravity and time yet, the water will of course have nowhere to go to but somehow around the glass and swirling. Say we attribute goodness to the water and evil to the empty glass (evil as deprived of all good), can we still categorically say that the empty glass was not categorically of God or is God? Let's say we break the glass into a million pieces and then it begins to swirl with the water, has God been totally destroyed at that?
Which brings me to the point of Divinity. A divine God must be exempt of such destruction regardless of the transfigurations. If not, then where is the divinity? And if it was as cut throat as wet and dry being two very different elements and that it is what good and evil should be, isn't that too somewhat polytheistic? Opposing energies and opposing states require two different entities with possibly equal power. Wouldn't true divinity encompass it all?
Please don't get me wrong, I am not evil but I need to understand why it would be forgiveable to be evil. All around and within us, a paradox exists. Does the opposing pull between light and darkness within us make us categorically unforgivable by God's standards if God is only understanding of that which is good? I have a hard time accepting this. God is loving and God is good so then no, right? God will of course forgive us, but logically why would such divine being do that if such divine being didn't know that we were of his make regardless, anyway?*
I see that my argument in a way invalidates the pull towards good. At this it becomes essential to discuss Satan. By the symbolism of Lucifer the fallen angel, the scripture at the minimum speaks of what it is like to move against the direction of Love. The scripture also described this as suffering of profound magnitudes. If we take this to our everyday living, bad or potentially evil decisions do take us to states of suffering at times and at times it is merely circumstantial--- as in given to us due to the totalling consequences of the complexities of the universe. But the gift as Christ has taught is there in the choice to move towards the light and love and there is where I value Christianity because what Jesus truly did was show the way to a state that a loving God must prefer for all of us, which is light and goodness.
Say we go back to the analogy of the glass of water that was once full and now empty and now a swirl of floating glass and water each trying to find its patterns and gravity around each other. Suppose we were to exist among this swirl, wouldn't we go for water to quest our thirsts and not towards the shards of glass? But even then glass shards are not categorically not God, right? If so, it would weaken God's divinity.
I think Christ is a beacon as he always says in the scripture. We are all suffering and Christianity is mainly saying love as Christ does and your life will get better but it's actually truly very complicated because even if we follow this by choice, the paradoxes of good and evil still remain within us and for that, I value Christ's suffering because even if he suffered magnanimously, he remained to profess love. Where I am constantly lost is in navigating the implications of such love in everyday life but of course that's a totally different discussion.
I realize I am getting ahead of God's divinity here, so this is a crack in the argument
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Hehehe. Thank you Sandie!hit the save button often on longer posts, or when you toggle between screens, @mintoots , it will save you from going cocos for cocoa crunch
Sidis Coruscatis
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So you're saying that because evil exists in our universe it must have been imparted by God, meaning that evil must exist within Him as a logical possibility even though it's not ever actualized. That does seem plausible. It would also serve to elucidate the consubstantiality of Jesus and God, at least in my conception, though I'm not sure it would affirm it by itself.
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Yes, but even then there are mysteries because why is God advocating love through Christ? And why are we more capable of evil than Christ and God is? Possibly because we're not divine, but can still aspire to be divine. When I was much younger, I always believed that when we've achieved the most divine state we can ever achieve, our lives will end and we will become closer to the divine, hence death and heaven. But that this process is sometimes pre empted by murders and such unacceptable deaths.
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I've caught up with this now
. I can see where you are coming from, but I have a lot of problems with that point of view, personally. I don't have your detailed analysis of the biblical texts of course, but one major concern I have is that God is One:Mark 12:29 Now one of the scribes had come up and heard their debate. Noticing how well Jesus had answered them, he asked Him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus replied, “This is the most important: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’…
There is also this quote which supports it
John 14:9 Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
Because of the semantics, we maybe very easily slip into thinking of God as splitting into two or three, each with their own personality and (sort of) independence, when in fact each is really fully the One as well, otherwise we lie outside what Jesus said above. I'm pretty skeptical about thinking of the references to God in the Old Testament being about the Father, as is understood from the New Testament. Those references were to God as the One of Deuteronomy, not to one of the two or three persons we recognise from the New Testament - and there is no reason to assign those references to any one of these persons rather than another.
I'm rather leery about assigning a 'nature' to God personally - the idea of Jesus having two natures seems to me the best we can do to express what He is, but it's really inadequate and has led to all kinds of controversy and discord down the ages about what it means. By all means we can say that He was fully human, and as a human, out of love for us He took on himself the guilt of humanity that sundered us from God. I'm happy to accept that He is also fully God, and because time isn't an issue for me then He is equally present as God simultaneously with being present as man.
But your work on these issues is very deep o2b, and my opinions are far less deeply analysed and processed than yours, so there's a lot to reflect on.
It seems to me that the key to this is to consider what the role of evil is within creation. Our world is dynamic and ever-changing, and the energy for these dynamics comes from a large range of different polarities. It's hard to see how humans could actually exist as human without a polarity between good and evil, because from this comes the freedom of choice that is God's great gift to us. Even before the Fall there was such a choice in the Eden myth.
The existence of evil does not mean that God is evil though - it just means that within him is the capability of creating worlds and creatures that can manifest evil. In fact this is a very great gift, because he delegates to us, and all other intelligent beings, the capability of acting and creating independently of him and his intent. This would not be possible without the existence of evil.
Now the linguistics can be a trap here, because the dichotomy between good and evil is not in my opinion like that between positive and negative electric charge, but more like that between hot and cold. That's because cold is simply a state of lower energy than hot - in other words, cold is an absence of heat and I'm with Augustine and @Ren on this, that evil is an absence of good, rather than a qualitatively polar opposite. The tension between good and evil serves just as well as a source of energy though, in the same way that hot and cold do.
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Yes, linguistics may be a problem here and I think in broad strokes, we're onto a similar thought. I'm trying to say whether good or evil, hot or cold, it's all God but that between good and evil energies, through Christ, God has expressed a path towards Love, which is goodness.
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Yes, what you said came across in that way, in your idea of the glass of water. I guess the main difference is that the glass is God’s creative force rather than Himself in what I’m saying.
Sidis Coruscatis
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I agree and such was my premise too. Which is why I don't see any contradiction here - besides not being entirely congruent with the image of Min's analogy - if contradiction was your intent. If we recognize supreme good within God then we can only do so by implicitly asserting the substance of its polarity - but not necessarily its existence.
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I can see that point and that's indeed something to reflect upon. It is in line with my question as to why Love and why good? From the way the universe was created, there's an implied but rather obvious inclination towards growth, beauty, loveliness, which are all good. So why? This is not to say that the "opposites" such as anger, etc. are not equally substantial, of course, as the glass remains valuable to me all the same. But why did God see it to be critically important to send Christ and to pronounce love as the way? Is it because it is how God would rather be seen or is it because love is who God truly is? To me it is difficult to categorically accept this as the truth but I do as a choice because my nature thrives in it (as selfish as that may sound). I mean that I am far more peaceful when in pursuit of Love and goodness. I think that it is the gift of a loving God who is all knowing of all sorts of opposing energies that are among us. Like a loving father that offers something good to a child to protect the child from the destruction that a father knows. At that, Love through Christ and free will are priceless gifts by a loving father God. All I can attest to it for my faith is that it feels good and it is freeing. I think that's very human of me. To repay the gift, I strive to keep at the path although my strife is poor.
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I think this highlights very powerfully how complex it is to try and understand God, because how we approach it depends on where we are looking from. @Ren ‘s thread is a philosophical rather than a religious one, so it’s focused on intellectual analysis and understanding - a discussion that anyone could participate in regardless of their actual beliefs.
It makes a big difference to how we approach this if we are actually seeking to experience and respond to the love of God, and are committed to following that path in how we orient our lives. It becomes a personal relationship where spiritual experience and love are more important than understanding. That means we are tolerant of mystery and are willing to go along with it in a way that cannot satisfy others who do not share the same path. It’s not just Christianity that is like this, but so are all the major spiritual perspectives in their deepest reaches.
So, for instance, when you look at the story of Christ, and ask why was the cross necessary, there is no satisfactory answer. It is a stumbling block to the intellect still, as St Paul says. But when as a person of faith you look with your heart at the Gospel story and what it achieved, taken as a whole over the 2,000 years since then, it feels exquisitely right. Just as Christ said, a seed has to die in order for the tree to grow. That’s not to say people haven’t messed it up in many ways in each generation, but that’s what people do with most things lol.
Ren
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I think your analogy leads you to make a category mistake (between properties and parts).
You can say that God has different properties, such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc. But as far as I understand, God is One, so to say that God has different parts is wrong. Taken too literally, the analogy with the glass of water seems to wrongly suggest that He does have parts, since a glass of water, unlike God, is not a perfect unity. Water can spill out, the glass can be empty, the glass can break into a million pieces, and so on.
But it is not possible for God to 'spill out', to be emptied, or to break into a million pieces. Because if that were the case, He would not be a perfect unity. He would not be One.
So when you ascribe a property to God, you always ascribe it to the whole—that is, to the Oneness. If you say that God is good, you cannot at the same time say that God is evil. This would be like saying, not that in the full glass of water there is also an empty glass (the category mistake derived from your analogy, implying that God has parts) but that it is is both empty and full, which is a contradiction.
The contrast with a human being, who is terrestrial and does have parts, will illustrate further. Let's take my example. I am right-handed, so my left hand (a part of me) is way more clumsy than my right hand (another part of me). Certain spatial parts of me are clumsy, others are not. Now, since I live in time, I also have temporal parts. The person I am today might do good things, tomorrow I might do evil things. In this sense you could say that there are both good and evil in me, both clumsiness and agility in me, etc. When the finitude of time and space is added to the equation, perfect unity is impossible, so properties can be ascribed of parts, either spatial or temporal.
With God it is different. God has no parts. So if God is good, He cannot be evil. He cannot be good at one moment and evil the next, since He has no temporal parts. He cannot be good in one region of His being and evil in another region, since He has no spatial parts. The possibility of evil arises only with the corruption of the terrestrial body. Only in the terrestrial body can there be a privation of good (evil).
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Hmm, how so? And how do we really know that it's different?
I'm not convinced because it may render God as an isolated unidimensional entity, which I think is a bit too limiting of God's divinity. Further, this definition of our parts as though it were pieces of a puzzle put together could be misleading because we are far more complex than the composition of our body parts and organs. Take the heart for example, it is composed of atoms and quantum physics and realms of energy that are deeply confined within even just its aorta. Each stem cell possibly lodged in some part of the heart can even possibly be activated by some weird environmental kink or some adjustment in our mind. The mystery in that alone is endless. So to simplify the parts is not all that convincing.
More than that, the visualization of the glass was more for purposes of illustration so it's a bit presumptive to get trapped in its confines but essentially to me God is both the glass and the water, always taken as a whole and one. I know no parts for sure-- if I did that would defile God's divinity-- but I am convinced that God is not unidimensional and these shades of gray between good and evil are merely my suppositions. I am also convinced that the properties of God applies constantly and that the very omni-ness of it all is inherently encompassing of far more than a simplified one-ness.
Hehe. What do you think? This is all getting so thonk so...
Ren
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If God is beyond space and time, it's probably more limiting to attribute any dimensions to Him. I certainly didn't mean to claim that He was unidimensional.
My impression is that you don't seem convinced by the idea that God is actually beyond space and time.
Ren
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