Ok, but if we assumed that they knew what they were doing, shouldn't they still do it? Jesus' purpose on the earth was to get crucified, so wouldn't it be a bad thing not to put him on the cross? So the ignorance wouldn't be alleviating thing in this case, but rather the only thing that makes the crucifixion a sin. That's why it seemed to me there would be plenty of speculation on the meaning of these words.
Yes, people have pondered about puzzles like this throughout history. The most well-known example is the medieval notion of the "happy sin": if Adam hadn't sinned, Christ would not have come, so it's a good thing that Adam sinned.
I'm not sure what solutions people have proposed to the puzzle you raise, but there are several routes one could take. One is to deny that Jesus' purpose was to get crucified; perhaps he could have saved everyone without it. As I've said before, the Orthodox Church generally holds that it was the incarnation that saves people rather than the crucifixion. Alternatively, one could say that it was a good thing that Christ died, but still hold that it would have been sinful for anyone knowingly to bring it about, if one held that the morality or immorality of an act has nothing to do with its consequences. A deontologist might say, for example, that lying is always wrong, and you shouldn't do it even if telling a certain lie would save many lives. So they could plausibly hold that executing an innocent man is wrong even if by doing so you would bring about the salvation of the world.
Yes, but some parts, like when Jesus is on the cross, seem to portray him as only human. The phrases "forgive them, for they know not what they are doing" and "my god, why have you forsaken me?" seem to suggest this.
I don't think that the "forgive them" saying suggests that Jesus is merely human, only that it is wrong to crucify him. The "forsaken" saying is of course a quote from Psalm 22, and so one could interpret it as Jesus drawing attention to the supposed prophecies about him in that psalm. Another interpretation I've heard conservative evangelicals give is that because Jesus was taking upon himself the sin of the world at that point, the Father really did forsake him, because Jesus had literally become sin. I don't think that's a very theological robust view for a variety of reasons.
But a more general explanation which many Christians would give is that Jesus'
human mind didn't know that he was divine, or at least doubted it, and that in his human mind he really did feel despair or unwillingness to die. But this is compatible with his actually being divine, because his divine mind did not feel these things.
So I guess my question isn't probably worth of much consideration after all. Thanks for the answer though.
Any question is worth consideration! Well, most of them anyway.
Could you make some general remarks on the doctrine of divine simplicity?
-What (essentially) is it?
-What motivated its adoption? Was it a natural outgrowth of some historical view, a piece of revealed theology, or was there some philosophical reason for its adoption?
This is something I don't know an enormous amount about, but I might be able to manage some general remarks... I suppose there are two kinds of doctrines of divine simplicity, looking at it historically - one ancient and basically Platonic, and one medieval and basically Aristotelian.
A fundamental principle of Platonic metaphysics in late antiquity was that unity was more fundamental than plurality. This is why many Platonists worried about the relations between the "monad" and the "dyad", meaning the ultimate explanations of unity and plurality: unity must be prior, but in that case, where does the dyad come from? You could interpret the whole of Plotinus' metaphysics as an attempt to answer that question. Remember that he called his ultimate principle "the One". In Platonic terms, a true unity must be perfectly simple in the sense of containing no diversity. That means it cannot have parts, for example. Because if you have something made of different parts, the parts are prior to the whole, and the whole is explicable in terms of its parts, but not vice versa.
Why must unity be prior to plurality? I think much of this is because of the assumption that unity and existence are very closely connected. To be a
substance is to be
one thing. This is a very ingrained principle not just in Platonism but in medieval and early modern philosophy too. If a supposed substance turns out, on closer inspection, to be made up of a load of smaller substances, then it wasn't really a substance at all but a mere aggregate. And an aggregate is not really a thing, just a collection of things. So there was a sense that the ultimate cause of everything else, which must
exist and be
real in the most fundamental way possible, simply must be the most perfect unity that there could be, and that means it must be perfectly simple.
The medieval doctrine of divine simplicity is perhaps motivated by similar ideas, but more explicitly by Aristotelian metaphysics. The idea here is not simply that God is simple in the sense of not being made up of other things, but that he is metaphysically simple in the sense that we cannot distinguish between form and matter, or substance and accident, in him. In other words, the different elements of normal substances - even the simplest ones - cannot be discerned in God. URL=http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1003.htm]Aquinas argued[/URL] that God must be pure actuality, because he is the prime mover. But something that is pure actuality cannot have any potentiality in it. But matter is potentiality, brought into actuality by form; so in God there is no distinction between form and matter. He cannot have accidents because something that has an accident could potentially not have that accident, but in God there is no potentiality. And so on. The result of all this is that God is not a
thing at all like other things. His essence is existence, and in the hands of twentieth-century existentialist theologians such as Paul Tillich that became the claim that "God" is simply another word for "existence", which I don't think it something that Aquinas would have approved of, but his theology does seem somewhat to tend that way.
So in short, I think that this doctrine was definitely motivated by philosphical considerations rather than historical or biblical ones.
The switching religion in that case is, I suppose, in 99% of the cases a change between two christian denominations, which is not that "big" of a change (well at least seen form outside the Christian faith). I wonder how many people in general change religion in a big way like muslims becoming christians, hindu becoming muslims, etc
I'd be surprised if this were true. Speaking without the benefit of any facts or statistics, I should think it would be far more common in a country like the US for people to give up religion altogether than for them to change from one denomination to another. I don't think changing denominations happens all that often, with the exception of marriages. Certainly someone may (for example) convert from Methodism to Catholicism, and they may have good reasons for doing so. But I think that people tend to remain in the churches where they start off. They would probably be more likely just to give up being religious altogether than switch from one church to another. And, yes, I suspect that (again, in a country such as the US) changing from one religion to another altogether would probably be pretty rare. I should think it would be far more common for people to convert to a religion if they're not religious at all to start with.
What are the merits and demerits of
this documentary?
I didn't watch that when it was on TV as I really don't need to see more stuff about Darwin and religion. You'd think, from the endless media coverage of Darwin at the moment, that he was primarily interested in religion and not a scientist at all; such is the way that people such as Dawkins have managed to set the terms of the public dialogue on the subject. Anyway, I'm glad to see that this documentary was basically saying something pretty similar. I was only going to watch the first section or two but I ended up watching the whole thing. My main impression was that it must have been a very difficult documentary to make from the production and direction point of view: all that narration about issues. What images could they possibly show? Lots of scenes from nature documentaries, of course, and less obviously relevant shots of busy streets and railway stations. It's interesting to note that this sort of approach does actually work, visually, proving the old editors' adage that it doesn't really matter what you show on the screen as long as it's moving.
The basic argument is absolutely correct, especially on the theoretical side, although the documentary focused much more on the historical issues rather than the theoretical ones. I think it's entirely right that evolution and theism don't have much to do with each other, positively or negatively, and moreover his criticism of the mimetic theory at the end is just obviously right.
On the historical side he did over-simplify things, though. First, not all ancient Christians interpreted the Bible allegorically, and some actively thought it wrong to do so (Theodore of Mopsuestia wrote a whole book attacking the practice). So it's not as simple as saying that an allegorical interpretation of Genesis was always the teaching of the church until James Ussher turned up. It's more complex than that. For example, poor old Ussher gets this endless stick for his claim that the world began in 4004 BC, but
lots of people at that time were making similar claims. What they were all doing was applying Enlightenment principles of rational inquiry to chronology and the study of the Bible. Also, I'm not entirely convinced the presentation of Augustine as a sort of proto-evolutionist, although I do agree with the claim that were Augustine to reappear now and have evolution explained to him, he probably wouldn't have a problem with it.
It's also not exactly true that Darwinism became controversial in a religious context only in the twentieth century; there were debates about it in Darwin's day. But it is true that these debates weren't really anything like the more familiar twentieth-century ones. It's also true that Christians hadn't had any particular problems with the notion of a very ancient world or indeed with evolution itself, both of which had become scientific commonplaces by the end of the first third of the nineteenth century among Christians and scientists alike. And it was good to point out that the scientists who came up with all this stuff
were scientists, and even clerics (although obviously you
had to be an Anglican cleric to teach at Oxford at that time, so the mere fact that someone was in holy orders doesn't necessarily mean that they were particularly religiously committed, but that's by the by). What the documentary didn't really make clear was (a) that Darwin didn't propose a theory of evolution - he proposed a theory of
what makes evolution happen, and (b)
this was the more worrying element of his work from a Christian viewpoint. The documentary only focuses on the question of the accuracy of the opening chapters of Genesis. But of course someone could say that those chapters are allegorical or even not true at all, believe in evolution, and think that God just created everything in an evolutionary way (ie, spread out over a long time). What Darwin did was explain how evolution can work using purely natural laws, without any divine intervention required. So that's quite a different issue from the one about biblical accuracy or literalness.
The documentary did a good job in arguing that the "battle" over Darwinism today is really going on between extremists on both sides: Christian fundamentalists on the one hand and Dawkins-types on the other, and this is quite true. In fact it's a funny thing that really these two groups have, in some ways, a lot in common: they both agree that evolution and theism are incompatible. Dawkins himself says he has more respect for someone who thinks this and who rejects evolution than he does for a theist who believes in evolution. And of course some American fundamentalists have been very grateful to Dawkins for his argument that the theory of evolution leads to atheism, because they can cite it in court cases to show that the theory of evolution is a religious doctrine and shouldn't be taught in schools. What the documentary didn't do is explain where these two extremist groups came from. After all, American fundamentalist didn't really emerge just as a reaction to the permissivism of the 1960s - its main tenets were already set out in "The fundamentals" of the 1910s (hence the name). And the idea that science and religion are fundamentally opposed, and that religion has always tried to smother science and science has always ultimately won, goes back to the late nineteenth century and certain popular historical writers who basically created this understanding of history on the basis of what was happening at the time.
So the documentary did an OK job on the history side of it, but did simplify things. I suppose you could say the same on the
theoretical side of it - that is, whether evolution and theism really are incompatible or not. But there's only so much you can do with a series of soundbites, which is what all the interviews basically came down to. I think it might have been interesting to get some of these people with opposing views together and see how they responded to each other, and this could have been done without just turning it into a televised debate; but then that would not have meshed well with the "personal quest" style of narrative that these documentaries invariably take (and which is silly really - as if you have to go to Palestine to read a book on Philo).
So it was about as good as a documentary of that kind could have been, really, despite its simplifications and the fact that really the documentary format, especially this kind of format, isn't really suitable for tackling a subject of this kind. It's good that the BBC saw fit to make a film arguing for a more measured and sensible approach to these matters than you find in most of the media. That still doesn't excuse remaking Reggie Perrin though.
What is your opinion of the interaction between Zoroastrianism and Judaism? Did Zoroastrianism influence Judaism significantly?
Also, what was the nature of pre-Babylonian Captivity Judaism? From my readings of the bible, I sense that Judaism was perhaps a Henotheistic religion at one time.
Forgive me if anything I said is idiotic or insane.
There's nothing idiotic or insane about that. But unfortunately I don't know much about this sort of thing, which is well outside my area of expertise. As I understand it, little is known of early Zoroastrianism, and there is no particular evidence that it particularly influenced Judaism, although people may speculate that it did. And yes, as I understand it, Judaism probably was henotheistic at one time. The Jews originally thought that Yahweh was the god of their particular tribe; then they progressed to thinking that he was the best of all the gods; then they progressed to thinking that he was the only god. Moreover, before the Captivity, Judaism was a more prophetic sort of religion than it later became. Traditionally we think that Moses and the Law came first, and later the prophets turned up to remind people to follow the Law. That's the story that the Bible itself tells. But the books of the Law as we know them only took shape during the Captivity and shortly afterwards. They reflect the views of people at that time, projected back to the legendary past. So it would be more accurate to say that the prophets came first (or some of them at least), then the Law was codified. This is why, if you read the prophetic books, you won't find many mentions of Moses and the Law - which is odd if you think that they came later and were trying to get people to stick to them.
[EDIT] Maimonides simulposted me. Thanks!
I detect no idiocy.
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