Plotinus, maybe you should post your qualifications and experience from the first Ask a Theologian thread, just to prove that you're not just a 'random poster'. After all, that post was eight years ago now, so we could hardly accuse you of being a fly-by-night poster, now could we?
I could, but it shouldn't really be about who has what degrees. When Anselm of Canterbury published the
Proslogium, containing his famous ontological argument for God's existence, he received
a reply from Gaunilo, an otherwise obscure monk. Anselm was pleased with Gaunilo's criticisms and had them circulated with later editions of the
Proslogium, together with his own reply to the criticisms. He wasn't bothered by the fact that he, Anselm, was prior of a famous monastery at this time and Gaunilo was a nobody. It was the quality of the arguments that he thought important. We ought to take the same line.
Besides, this all began when Unicorny posted his arguments on my
Ask a... thread, so presumably he thinks my opinions are worth something or he wouldn't have asked for them specifically in the first place.
Ah
Pantheism correct? Those religion courses are starting to come back to me...
Well, not exactly, since pantheism is the view that God is identical with the universe, whereas Aquinas (and indeed most Christian tradition) thinks that the universe is dependent on, but not identical with, God. But the lines between these different positions can be pretty blurry.
Now I raised this issue earlier, but now that I have your attention... How does this view of God deal with the issue of us (humans on Earth) being relevant enough to warrant God's attention, particularly as individuals?
If the answer is "magic" or "omniscience" or something similar, then that is a perfectly satisfactory answer, but I wonder if there is something more specific. Particularly as it relates to the "Fine-Tuning" concept.
I think the answer is more likely to be "love". As traditionally conceived, God values the whole of his creation, though he relates to different bits of it in different ways. He is able to relate personally to human beings, in a way that he can't to most other parts of creation (as far as we know), because human beings are personal creatures which are able to love God back in a more sophisticated way than the average space rock can. So the fact that human beings are a very tiny part of creation isn't really important (it's not like God has limited attention); it's the nature that makes them of interest to God and makes him able to love them in that particular way.
So my first question on this is - Was God-as-Existence the dominant concept being taught to rank-and-file Christians or was the small God concept being taught? Was this God-as-Existence a primarily scholarly concept that was known but not really preached? I ask because I never remember being introduced to such concepts until I went off to University... and I went to a lot of protestant Church and bible study growing up but also some Catholic school.
I don't know. By definition it's pretty hard to know what "ordinary" believers in the past thought about things, because they didn't write it down. There have certainly always been different conceptions of God, at least within Christianity. A good example is the First Origenist Controversy, which took place in Egypt in the early fifth century, and was mainly between sophisticated Greek-educated monks who assumed a Platonic, abstract sort of view of God as incorporeal, and less educated, Egyptian monks who assumed a more traditional pagan concept of God as physical and basically a big human being (even though they were Christian). The Egyptians "won" in the short term but the Greeks "won" in the long term.
Second question - If the Forms (ideas) of Earth and all of us are contained only within God's mind, then are our physical manifestations within God's mind as well? Or outside the mind but just connected to and controlled by it? In other words, are we dreams or puppets in this model? I ask because it would still seem that under this construction of the universe, Fine Tuning would still be irrelevant. Or am I missing something? The Catholic v. Protestant distinction is helpful. And thanks Plotinus for all of that, very helpful and informative (Note that I snipped some of your comments for space).
George Berkeley famously thought that the physical world consists solely of ideas in our minds that are put there by God; but he didn't think that our minds themselves are within God's mind. The only person who, to my knowledge, takes the first view you suggest is Jonathan Edwards, who thinks that even human minds are just streams of ideas in God's mind, and the physical world around us is just streams of ideas in
our minds; so really all that exists is God and his ideas. That wouldn't necessarily make us God's puppets (maybe an idea can act in ways that the mind it's in doesn't anticipate), though Edwards did believe strongly in predestination.
Note though that even if one did take a "God as giant Holodeck" view, fine-tuning might still be relevant. This is because, unlike Gene Roddenberry, God is traditionally supposed to act in a perfectly orderly way. That is, God
could run the world in a completely ad hoc way, causing things to happen that he wants to happen even if they don't conform to the same physical laws. Indeed he could, presumably, do this even if the physical universe is quite distinct from him and isn't merely ideas in his mind. However, God's perfection is shown in the fact that he causes the universe to operate in an orderly, predictable way, following orderly and predictable laws. Berkeley argues that this is a greater sign of God's greatness than miracles are, which break these laws. And Leibniz argues that even miracles that appear to break physical laws are really conforming to more fundamental laws that we don't know.
