No, that's exactly what's going on. Athanasius was very keen to co-opt the heroic and much admired Antony onto his side in the theological battles he, Athanasius, was fighting. That's why Antony is presented as denouncing Arianism at every turn. Which may perhaps be historically accurate - perhaps Athanasius had chosen a subject that suited his purposes well.
I figured as much with the denunnciations of Arianism, but should I assume that descriptions of his ascetic practice and its effects say something about how Athanasius understood the human body in light of the Incarnation? Also, how strong do you feel the case for Athanasian authorship is? My professor mentioned working with a scholar (at the University of Toronto, I believe) who was very skeptical of it when she worked on her PhD, and I was curious how you felt.
Also, David Bentley Hart claims in The Experience of God that most Medieval theologians wouldn't have any problem with the idea of biological evolution if they had any reason to believe in it. This claim seems fairly speculative, but at the same time Hart is a lot more familiar with relevant thinkers than I (and possibly you? I know you're more of a patristics guy) am. Do you have any comment on that claim?
That is logically inconsistent. To wit: everything can be considered as a concept, which, by definition, is 'in the minds of humans.' God is not miraculously excluded from that. (It doesn't touch upon the question whether God exists in an absolute way - which, obviously, also is a human concept.)
Everything that is a concept is not always of human origin. The earth itself does not originate in the mind of humans. It was here before humans appeared.
Actually, that also is illogical: everything that can be considered a concept is of human origin. In your example there would be no such thing as 'Earth' if no human had thought of it. Any 'concept' is by definition human. That's because we define those concepts (or our ancestors have).
You seem to be confusing the actual thing (a planet that would be there irrespective of whether we are on it) with our concept of it (the planet that we know as 'Earth').
That is logically inconsistent. To wit: everything can be considered as a concept, which, by definition, is 'in the minds of humans.' God is not miraculously excluded from that. (It doesn't touch upon the question whether God exists in an absolute way - which, obviously, also is a human concept.)
Actually, that also is illogical: everything that can be considered a concept is of human origin. In your example there would be no such thing as 'Earth' if no human had thought of it. Any 'concept' is by definition human. That's because we define those concepts (or our ancestors have).
You seem to be confusing the actual thing (a planet that would be there irrespective of whether we are on it) with our concept of it (the planet that we know as 'Earth').
Which came first; a human or the human who conceived that human in their mind? I am talking about reality, that is all I know. I cannot know the imaginary, as it only exist in the mind and not testable. If one has not experienced God, then God would still be imaginary to them. I do not limit reality to what I think about. I think about reality that I have experienced. If others have had similiar experiences, then I assume I am not alone in such a reality.
That is basically the same thing: what defines humans is that they can reflect on themselves. And obviously this reflection is part of reality - as perceived. You seem to think that 'reality' is something outside of you; it is not. It includes both you and your imaginative mind. So contained within reality is every concept imaginable.
Isn't reality experiences that happen to you outside of what you imagine life to be?
I do not accept that reality is everything imaginable. No one has experienced things that are not real, even if they can imagine them. Concepts are only images of reality in each person mind. Reality goes on even if a person cannot grasp the whole of reality. A person in their mind may experience spiders crawling all over their body, and it is an experience, but it never happened, it is not real. I could be sitting next to them and imagine that it is happening to them, but can see that it is not, therefore, I am not experiencing it the same as they are. Which is the actual reality? The Northeast had a blizzard last Tuesday. I can imagine all I want about it, but even if I had not even heard about it, it was still a reality. Reality happens even when humans have no part in it. Of course I am part of the reality when it includes me, but that hardly can exclude all of reality.
God is a reality that is impossible to prove does not exist. In the example of the spiders, I can video tape the experience and play it back to the person and prove to them the spiders where not real. One cannot video tape a God experience, and prove that God was not there. Even if it was a miracle, it does not prove that God had no part in it. We can prove that invisible spiders do not exist, but we cannot prove that an unknown God does not exist. Of course I cannot stop a person from believing that invisible spiders exist, just the same as I cannot blame you for thinking that God does not exist. It is not the same thing, because while the mind is just a function of a physical brain, it does not manufacture reality, it only processes the reality around it that it is a part of. The mind can manufacture objects and experiences that are not real, and putting God into that category happens all the time. Why would someone say that everything a human imagines is reality, and then turn around and claim that God does not exist or is not real? Are we now saying that what a person imagines not to exist, now suddenly cannot exist merely on the fact that one imagines it not to exist?
You seem to think that (your) imagination is not part of (your) reality. Considering you then present God (which you consider real, but whose existence can't be proven), that is again illogical. Irrespective of whether people believe in God, God is a reality, simply because there are people who believe God to be real. In other words, because the concept of God can be conceived, God is part of reality. (And paradoxically this holds true even if God would not exist.)
My imagination is part of me, but not necessarily the reality I exist in. I do not base my reality on my imagination. I base my reality on the external input I receive. Yes there is a difference in imagining a world and experiencing a world. While the brain may deceive me on either account, there are others who can confirm the reality around me, but they cannot confirm the reality I am just imagining in my brain. If you then move the goal post where even other humans do not exist in reality outside of my brain, then you just get into a circular enforcing logic loop.
I think that it is possible to prove that God exist. God would have to provide that proof. God can even prove he does not exist by refusing to prove that he exist. It is hard for a human to prove that God does or does not exist.
God exists whether or not people believe in God, and his existence does not rely on human proof, because it may be nigh impossible for a human to prove that God does or does not exist.
The issue here is not about God at all. It is about the point reality itself exist whether or not humans believe it does or does not. Can I prove that there is a reality outside of the brain? I have already tried that several times and it seems to not be working for me. If you insist that it is, then my imagined reality is different and does accept that reality is separate from my imagination. Not sure what that proves though. God is still outside of my real or imagined reality.
There is a child's lullaby that parents, guardians or care givers may keep singing over and over again. Does it reinforce the idea that "life is but a dream"? It would seem that the United States is proof that life is not a dream, even though people claim that the American dream is worth pursuing.
Ever heard of Richard Carrier? I'm watching a video of a presentation he made at Free Thought Festival in 2012, where he discusses the historicity of Jesus.
In it, he mentions that Philo of Alexandria tells of a pre-Christian Jewish belief in a celestial being actually named "Jesus" [I'll assume Philo would have spelled it Yeshua...]
I know that Judaism didn't really cement itself as a monotheistic religion until a few centuries before the common ear, but I've never heard anything of this celestial Jesus-being...
He seems like an otherwise reasonable fellow, so I'm just wondering if you could add anything to this?
Ever heard of Richard Carrier? I'm watching a video of a presentation he made at Free Thought Festival in 2012, where he discusses the historicity of Jesus.
In it, he mentions that Philo of Alexandria tells of a pre-Christian Jewish belief in a celestial being actually named "Jesus" [I'll assume Philo would have spelled it Yeshua...]
I know that Judaism didn't really cement itself as a monotheistic religion until a few centuries before the common ear, but I've never heard anything of this celestial Jesus-being...
He seems like an otherwise reasonable fellow, so I'm just wondering if you could add anything to this?
What is reasonable with starting out the premise painting the Christian view as a hallucination from some drug or escapism? Even those who were allegedly writing about it 2000 years ago warned about viewing the Gospel as some drunken stupor or feel good experience. It was not a fairy tale or some made up story. It was actual events that happened to actual people. I would like to see some one today prove that their use of the term religion meant the same thing in 30 AD as it does today.
The people writing in the first century were not comparing religions nor were they attempting to come up with a new religion. At best one can say that Jesus successfully ended the political, economic temple practice that bound the Jews together at that time. It was still a legal body of Judaism that was suffered to practice within the confines of Roman law. That is why they brought Jesus to Pilate to hand him over to die. Both Jesus and Paul explained that the Law was no longer needed, but that individual moral practices were sufficient to live an everyday life. That these views took off and formed another religion was not the work of Jesus or Paul. It was the point of religious political forces a century or two later.
It would seem to me that the point was to destroy religion, to destroy paganism, to take the ability of humans to reason, and show people they were free from these constraints and the rulers who use them to keep people in subjection. It was never to enslave or start some new religious practice to keep people indoctrinated. Paul emphasized that it was not some human endeavor, but came to each individual from God. The reason that it spread so fast was that it did not need any central governing body to keep it afloat. Even after it became centralized, it could not keep it's form, but kept fragmenting. So yes any human can come along and grab a few points from the Bible and start their own religion, and even add their own personal desires to the mix to make it more enticing. After a few hundred years, other humans slap the term Abrahamic on them. The whole point in determining that Jesus actually existed shows that Jesus did not attempt to form a new religious following. It is not logical to say that Jesus was made up decades after the fact and then say that Jesus founded a religion.
The Bible does not have to be read as just metaphorical, but if you try to say that every human author had the same experience and that they are somehow supposed to not contradict each other at certain points to be cohesive, that does not seem reasonable to me.
I tend to agree, but a fine tunned Universe has to have God somewhere for him to design it (implied multi verse), unless he is in our Universe which I tend to think he is, so we happen to live in a universe that happens to have a God you don't need Multi-verses, you only need our Universe
apart from the fact that God fine tunning the Universe is pure speculative conjecture
you can not have your cake and eat it too, as they say
In your definition of God though, why limit him within the universe? One can define a vehicle as a closed "universe", but one does not have to limit the designer as having to be confined within it, even if one was just a gear shift handle and longed for the designer to interact with it. Sometimes the designer leaves the vehicle in the garage and finds something else to do. Any part of the vehicle may be able to define anything in the "universe" except the designer, but it would be wrong if it thought the designer was also a part of the vehicle, especially if the designer was not even in the vehicle. That may be a simple analogy, but most things that do not design themselves do not include the designer within them. Neither does a closed system need other closed systems to define it. It may help to say the designer exist in another universe, but a designer does not have to "live" in something similar to what they design. It is probably even foolish to describe God in human terms, as seeing how that makes him one of us, but there are those who need to relate to God on a human level. The only point in pointing out the universe has a designer is that is has a designer. As for eating the cake, God could have created a perfectly chaotic universe with no rules and still be the God that created a universe that does not exemplify something that was designed for a purpose. Neither would a universe without design prove that it was not created by God. Trust in God has always been a personal choice with or without proof.
One of my undergraduate friends is a Theologian and his Birthday is coming up soon. What do theologians get for their birthdays? Do you know of any light-hearted sort of books, the kind a theologian would pick up for a bit of a laugh?
I've been looking more into the arguments for the non-historicity of Jesus, as presented by Carrier, Price, and others. I was skeptical at first, but I think they've started to win me over. Now I feel some of the arguments I might have used in Jesus/Christian-origin debates I've partaken in before were rather silly.
I figured as much with the denunnciations of Arianism, but should I assume that descriptions of his ascetic practice and its effects say something about how Athanasius understood the human body in light of the Incarnation?
Yes, I think you're quite right there. Athanasius certainly believed that the human body is the locus of divine action on human beings, first in Christ and then in Christians. And his portrayal of Antony certainly reflects that. However, that doesn't mean, again, that Athanasius is imposing something on Antony that wasn't there to start with. Beliefs of this kind were standard at the time. They were certainly standard among the desert fathers who, in Athanasius' time and shortly afterwards, were consciously imitating Antony: after all, why spend your life mortifying the flesh if you didn't think the flesh was important? Whether the historical Antony shared these views is impossible to determine, but there's no reason why he shouldn't have.
I found a paper on this subject which you might find relevant, though I've not had time to read it properly.
Also, how strong do you feel the case for Athanasian authorship is? My professor mentioned working with a scholar (at the University of Toronto, I believe) who was very skeptical of it when she worked on her PhD, and I was curious how you felt.
I don't know enough to judge on this. As far as I know there's no good reason to doubt Athanasian authorship and most people don't. The evidence is summed up here; obviously this is a very old account, but I would guess that the issues remain the same today.
Also, David Bentley Hart claims in The Experience of God that most Medieval theologians wouldn't have any problem with the idea of biological evolution if they had any reason to believe in it. This claim seems fairly speculative, but at the same time Hart is a lot more familiar with relevant thinkers than I (and possibly you? I know you're more of a patristics guy) am. Do you have any comment on that claim?
I think this is indeed very speculative. The problem is that medieval theologians were all working with a completely different worldview from our own, and you can't really import one major feature of our worldview into theirs without changing the whole thing quite radically. So if you were to get into the TARDIS, go and find Thomas Aquinas, and give him a Latin translation of The Origin of the Species and a few choice scientific articles with further evidence, it's impossible to know how he'd react.
My guess is that a good guide to what might happen can be found in the different reactions to Aristotelian philosophy in the thirteenth century. This was a basically secular, rationalist, quasi-scientific approach to the world that differed from traditional theology both in its methods and in its conclusions. Aristotle's claim that the world had no beginning was a particular sore point for many. Now some theologians simply rejected the whole lot, Etienne Tempier being the most prominent. Others simply accepted the whole lot, even if it seemed to contradict theology, Siger of Brabant being the most prominent (this is a bit of a caricature of Siger, but he was at least much more Aristotelian than most). I wouldn't be surprised if Tempier would have rejected Darwinism and Siger have enthusiastically adopted it, if they'd known about it. Those more in the middle, such as Bonaventure and Aquinas, are harder to judge. Bonaventure was suspicious of Aristotelianism and thought that on some points, such as the eternity of the world, it was plain wrong and could be shown to be wrong. Aquinas was enthusiastic about Aristotelinianism but did concede that on some matters, again such as the eternity of the world, Aristotle was wrong, but we know this only by revelation; you can't show him to be wrong through philosophy or science. Whether that means either of them would have accepted or rejected Darwinism, I don't know - it would depend on whether they would have thought it consistent or not with the teaching of the church, and it's impossible to know that.
Ever heard of Richard Carrier? I'm watching a video of a presentation he made at Free Thought Festival in 2012, where he discusses the historicity of Jesus.
In it, he mentions that Philo of Alexandria tells of a pre-Christian Jewish belief in a celestial being actually named "Jesus" [I'll assume Philo would have spelled it Yeshua...]
I know that Judaism didn't really cement itself as a monotheistic religion until a few centuries before the common ear, but I've never heard anything of this celestial Jesus-being...
He seems like an otherwise reasonable fellow, so I'm just wondering if you could add anything to this?
I've discussed Carrier briefly here. He seems pretty sensible but what I've seen of his arguments don't really hold water, in my view.
The claim about Philo talking about a celestial Jesus that he makes in the video you link to is pretty dubious. Philo certainly believed in a celestial being called the Logos that acted as a sort of mediator between God and human beings. He goes on about it constantly and it's one of the most well-known elements of his thought, and arguably an influence on later Christian theology. But to make out that Philo identifies the Logos with a heavenly figure called "Jesus" isn't accurate.
Although Carrier doesn't give the reference in that video, the text he's talking about is Philo's On the Confusion of Tongues XIV.62-63, which you can read here. In this passage, Philo is commenting on the following text from the book of Zechariah (I have bolded the bit he's talking about):
Zechariah 6:9-14 said:
The word of the Lord came to me: Collect silver and gold from the exiles - from Heldai, Tobijah, and Jedaiah - who have arrived from Babylon; and go the same day to the house of Josiah son of Zephaniah. Take the silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest Joshua son of Jehozadak; say to him: Thus says the Lord of hosts: Here is a man whose name is Branch: for he shall branch out in his place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord. It is he that shall build the temple of the Lord; he shall bear royal honour, and shall sit and rule on his throne. There shall be a priest by his throne, with peaceful understanding between the two of them. And the crown shall be in the care of Heldai, Tobijah, Jedaiah, and Josiah son of Zephaniah, as a memorial in the temple of the Lord.
The Joshua mentioned in this passage also appears in Zechariah 3; he was high priest at the time and is also mentioned in Nehemiah 7:7, Haggai 1:1, and Ezra 5:2 as one of those who helped build the Temple after the Exile, as stated in the passage above. "Joshua" is the same name as "Jesus", so there are at least three people in the Bible with this name: Jesus himself, the famous general Joshua who features in the book of that name, and this more obscure but still multiply-attested Joshua who was high priest at the time of the return from the Exile. (Other Jewish people with this name are known from antiquity outside the Bible.)
Now in the text I linked to earlier, Philo comments on just the verse that I highlighted above (giving it a different translation and meaning), saying:
Philo said:
I have also heard of one of the companions of Moses having uttered such a speech as this: "Behold, a man whose name is the East!" [Zech. 6:12]. A very novel appellation indeed, if you consider it as spoken of a man who is compounded of body and soul; but if you look upon it as applied to that incorporeal being who in no respect differs from the divine image, you will then agree that the name of the east has been given to him with great felicity. For the Father of the universe has caused him to spring up as the eldest son, whom, in another passage, he calls the firstborn; and he who is thus born, imitating the ways of his father, has formed such and such species, looking to his archetypal patterns.
So what Philo has done here is to take this single verse about "a man whose name is the east" and claim that it's a reference to the "firstborn Son", i.e. the Logos, which he talks about frequently.
What Philo hasn't done is to link this verse to any of the rest of the passage that I quoted, or to repeat the name "Joshua/Jesus", or anything of that kind. All he's done is identify a particular verse in the Old Testament as referring to the Logos. Now Philo thought that pretty much everything in the Old Testament was about the Logos. Indeed if you look merely through this one text of Philo's, you'll see that he also finds allegorical references to the Logos in Genesis 42:11 (about the sons of Jacob) and Deuteronomy 14:1 (about Israel as a whole). It doesn't follow that he thought that the sons of Jacob or Israel as a whole were identical with the Logos.
Philo's argument here is part of an exegesis of Genesis 11:1-9, the story of the tower of Babel. He interprets it as an allegory of the chaotic and fragmented state of the soul that abandons reason and God. In this section, he's commenting on Gen. 11:2: "And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there." Philo's method is the same as any Jewish commentator from this period (including Paul): he thinks of every line from the scriptures that contains words found in this line, and sticks them all together. So he thinks of a number of verses that refer to the "east" and argues that "east" is a term used to refer allegorically to reason. As a Middle Platonist of sorts, Philo believes that human reason is a sort of fragment of the divine Reason, the Logos. He cites a number of biblical references to the "east", arguing that they refer to the dawning of reason. The text from Zechariah is one of these. So his exegetical purpose is to show that in all of these texts "east" refers to divine reason, with the purpose of showing that the text he's actually commenting on, Gen. 11:2, is actually describing people who have abandoned reason (i.e. moved away from the east). He's not making some statement about the nature of the character of Joshua from Zechariah 6; he's not talking about him at all - he's defending an interpretation of a completely different verse in another book of the Bible by fixing on one particular word that appears in both passages. This is how ancient exegetes worked, and you can see a myriad of examples of this kind elsewhere in the same text.
Carrier's argument is thus something of a sleight of hand. He doesn't understand Philo's allegorical technique, which is to pull lines out of the Septuagint out of context and interpret them as referring to something from Platonic philosophy. It is disingenuous to assert, as Carrier does, that Philo talks about a heavenly being called "Jesus". He simply doesn't. He talks about a heavenly being, and at one point he takes a line from a story in the Old Testament about a person called "Joshua" and applies this line to the heavenly being as part of an interpretative strategy that's got an entirely different focus. That is not the same thing.
One of my undergraduate friends is a Theologian and his Birthday is coming up soon. What do theologians get for their birthdays? Do you know of any light-hearted sort of books, the kind a theologian would pick up for a bit of a laugh?
So, John the Baptiste. Did he eat locusts or carbon beans?
I'm assuming vegetarianism was considered more 'holy' back then, but did eating bugs count as violating vegetarianism? They don't seem to have blood, at least to people back then.
The Gospels say quite clearly that he ate locusts. Later commentators felt that he should have been a vegetarian and argued that the word for "locusts" actually meant something else; or they argued that the whole thing was an allegory for the Pharisees and the gentiles who listened to his teaching. But these arguments were based on later beliefs about the spiritual value of vegetarianism. There's nothing etymologically in the Gospel accounts to suppose that the locusts weren't really locusts, or that John was a vegetarian. You can see a brief summary of modern opinion on the Gospel accounts here, and on the later development of different opinions here.
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