Lots of interesting questions!
Now, I could dispute this. I can imagine a being that is legitimately divine, yet cannot bring about everything that is logically possible. In fact, this is what I do in fact believe and is part of my answer to the problem of evil.
That is indeed a possible response to the problem of evil, but it is essentially accepting that the argument works. That is, it is to accept that in fact you can't have a being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect while suffering also exists. Now "omnipotent" has been defined in various ways, but the standard definition is that an omnipotent being is one that can do anything that can be done; that is, one that can bring about any logically possible situation.
Some people have gone beyond this and suggested that God can do even the logically impossible. Descartes is normally attributed with this belief, and sometimes Peter Damien is, though wrongly in my opinion.
Now in more recent years some theologians have gone the other way and suggested that God can't do absolutely anything after all. He's the most powerful being in the universe, but he doesn't possess power so great that we can't imagine a more powerful one. This view is associated with Process Theology, a movement that was terribly in vogue in the 1970s but is much less so now. On that view, God exists inside time (literally, as a process, rather than as an entity) and has limited power and knowledge. This idea is supposed to be more in keeping with the Bible, especially the Old Testament, where God seems to change his mind, not know certain things, suffer, etc. Charles Hartshorne was probably the most well-known theologian of this group. The problem, of course, is that it's hard to see what's so divine about this sort of God. Anselm of Canterbury defined God as "that than which no greater can be conceived", but it seems easy to imagine a greater being than Hartshorne's God - such as Aquinas' God.
Okay, my question:
I note that you're writing a thesis on the thoughts and works of an individual. Do you find it strange that we're devoting so many man-years to deducing what an ancient person meant when he wrote what he wrote? I'm not talking about studying his writings in order to add to them (this beautiful ability is what allows us to advance as a species), but studying into the man himself.
If I were to guess; I would think that more man-years have been devoted to deducing the man's thoughts than the man actually lived. In the sum of things, isn't it inefficient to do it this way?
Does that question really make sense? To me, it makes sense to learn what the man's contribution was, and then add to it. It doesn't make sense to spend more research-time on his life than he actually spent on it himself. It's not like he's a super-human, and we can only hope to appreciate all the wisdom he gave us with years of study; he's merely a man, and so we should be able to glean wisdom from him faster than he was able to give it.
Did he alter society so much that it's worth examining him in such great detail?
Well, Leibniz wasn't ancient, in fact, but modern. He only lived seventy years and it's true that they are
still editing and publishing his works, because he wrote such a staggeringly vast amount and left most of it unpublished or unfinished. But your question is really asking what the purpose of scholarship is. On the one hand I think knowledge is worth pursuing for its own sake. It's worth asking what Leibniz thought about certain things because that is, in itself, truth that is worth uncovering. And on the other, of course, Leibniz was an astonishingly clever person who generally had something worth saying on most matters, so it is worth knowing what it was. To be honest, in his case I think he did seem to spout wisdom far more quickly than anyone else could take it in (perhaps one reason why he wasn't very personally popular!).
Really, though, the purpose of establishing what figures of the past said and thought isn't the intrinsic worth of their views - it's because that's how we understand history and piece it together. Now you could ask why that's worthwhile, but that takes us into a different field altogether.
I would like some proof backing these things you just said. The main problem with the Septuaguit is the fact that they are written in Greek when clearly the OT was either written in Hebrew or Aramaic. And this brings me to the Apocrypha, because if they are to be part of the Jewish cannon, then why do we not see any Hebrew or Aramiac originals?
The early church certainly didn't think it was a
problem that the Septuagint was written in Greek. They thought that God inspired the translators, rather than the authors of the texts they were translating. There was a legend that seventy scholars worked on the translation, each one completely independently. When their work was compared, they had, amazingly, all produced exactly the same translation - proving that they were miraculously inspired. (The name "Septuagint" comes from the belief that there were seventy translators.)
I believe that the deuterocanonical books do exist in Hebrew and Aramaic. However, as I said before, they were not part of the Jewish canon established at Jamnia, which is why Luther and co left them out of their canon. Although it's worth pointing out that Luther determined his canon theologically as well as historically. He thought that any book that contradicted his doctrine of salvation by faith alone should not be in the Bible. So he left out James.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but isn't the primary definition of a cult any sort of strong and organized religious following? I know nowadays there is the added assumption that a cult is crazy or strange, but I thought this wasn't always the case. (Kind of like how 'queer' has a different definition now...)
I think that a cult is defined as a religious group where people are encouraged (or even forced) to abandon their old lives and never see their families or friends again. Highly charismatic leadership and a personality cult are often involved in this. So the early church would not come under that sort of category.
aneeshm said:
Here's a nice chain of questions which my knowledge of Hindu philosophy suggested to me (in what way it was suggested would take too long to explain, so I'd skip that right now, unless you want to know more):
What is the exceptional thing in a Prophet (I refer to the Prophetic tradition of the Jews, the Old Testament, and of its culmination in Jesus)?
Is the nature of his consciousness "different" from others? Is he "created" different, somehow something more than just human?
If not (that is, if there is no difference between a Prophet and an ordinary man except that the Prophet is "chosen"), then why is a particular soul chosen for Prophethood? Is it (the choosing) random?
If it is random, isn't that just plain unfair (that some souls get a "Hotline to Heaven", whereas others have to be content with receiving orders from the guy with the phone)? Isn't it unfair to everyone else that they have to rely on faith, whereas the Prophets have (personal) proof?
Isn't it ironic that the only people who don't actually need faith, that same faith which is praised to the skies by the message these same people bring, who are completely convinced of the existence and attributes of God because of personal experience, are the Prophets themselves? They are given the "rational" proof of God, thus negating the necessity of faith, but they expect everyone else to take everything they say on faith.
Would God choose the faithless as his Messengers? Would God create a system in which his Messengers have to be without faith due to the nature of the Prophetic tradition itself?
It's hard for me to answer this as I don't believe in any of it! From an Old Testament point of view, though, a prophet is someone who speaks the will of God. Note that a prophet needn't necessarily speak the truth. For example, Jonah told the people of Nineveh that Nineveh would be destroyed, but it wasn't. And according to 1 Kings 22, God can actually make his prophets lie. The problem you raise of why God would reveal himself to some people but not to others is really part of the problem of grace, which is one of the biggest problems in the history of Christian theology. Why does God save some people and not others? (Of course, many Christians have believed that God saves everyone, but they are historically in a minority.) You can say that God isn't obliged to save anyone (or reveal himself to anyone), so if he does save some people but not others he's going beyond the call of duty and it's unfair to complain that he doesn't do more. I think that's a poor response, because if God is perfectly good you'd think he would save everyone or reveal himself to everyone regardless of what is obliged to do. In the end it all comes down to ineffability.
Murky said:
Do modern scholars sometimes become disillusioned to the religion by unraveling the true history of it?
I have no doubt that they do! But church history isn't all bad, you know. Religion has done lots of good as well as bad, and an awful lot of it isn't well known since it's so fashionable these days to criticise organised religion mercilessly.
Veritass said:
Perhaps #7 is incorrect: perhaps such a world does exist, but it doesn't happen to be this one. #4 seems to imply that God would only want such a world, but what if God would create this possibility plus many others?
Good point! All right then, we can simply rephrase the argument:
(1) If God exists, God can bring about any logically possible situation.
(2) A situation where there exists no world where free creatures do anything other than good deeds is logically possible.
(3) If God exists, God can bring it about that no world exists where free creatures do anything other than good deeds. (From 1 and 2.)
(4) If God exists, God does not want a world where free creatures do anything other than good deeds.
(5) If God wants to bring about a situation, and he can bring it about, he does bring it about.
(6) If God exists, a world does not exist where free creatures do anything other than good deeds. (From 3, 4, and 5.)
(7) Such a world does exist.
(8) God does not exist. (From 6 and 7.)