What we know about God

What we know about God?

• How is God related to the Universe? • Is He a person like we are, or is He unlike us? • Can He be a kind of force that has brought into being everything? • Can we know Him? • How is He related to us, human beings?

• The early Hebrews were among the first to conceive of there being one god and to do away with all other gods. • He was introduced through 10 Commandments revealed at Mount Sinai and was called as “Jehovah” • All the power and influence in the Universe had been ascribed to Him

• The Greeks – the head of the community of their gods was Zeus (super king) • He was a glorified man with all the weaknesses of men, but also with many virtues • All other gods were offspring of Zeus (Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite) • The community was full of jealousies, squabbling and intrigues.

• Hesiod wrote “Theogony” (book of the gods) • At the beginning was Chaos • It beget Gaea (the earth), Eros (love), Erebos (darkness), Nyx (night). • Erebos (darkness) and Nyx (night) united and gave birth to Aethe (light) and Hemera (day). • The earth begot Pontus (sea) and so on…

• Altars and temples were erected • A whole class of people devoted to conducting worship, who claimed to comprehend gods better than others (laymen), was formed • They saw themselves entitled to give advices to the people as to how to win the favor of or conciliate Gods.

• Most of the early Greek philosophers accepted gods as the popular mind accepted them. • They accounted for the Universe differently • God was the source of the original stuff and the power which established the order of the Universe • Possibly, they attempted to carry their religion in one basket and their philosophy in another and sometimes mixed them up in the process of thinking

• Heraclitus – strong dislike of the religion of the masses • “And to these images they pray, just as if one were to converse with men’s houses, for they know not what gods and heroes are”

• Xenophanes – 6 th century BC – God is one and unchangeable. He lives in one place and never moves (though His parts can move). He is a whole, an eternal unity. He is One and All (pantheism) • “If oxen or lions had hands, and could paint and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of gods like horses and oxen like oxen. Each would represent them with bodies according to the form of each” • “So the Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians give’em theirs red hair and blur eyes”

• Sophists – these practical teachers of young men made it their business to attack everything and gods did not get away lightly. • It became necessary for thinkers to ask themselves – what is the true conception of God?

• Socrates – masses misunderstood him and condemned him to death for his disbelieve in many gods • Plato has strewn the popular conceptions of gods in his works; still, sometimes he speaks about one God who is the master of the Universe (Demiurge) who takes already-created ideas and matter and moulds the Universe as an architect; he is the source of souls • Spirit of man is like God; the body is a prison for our mind - “We ought to fly away from earth as quickly as we can and to fly away is to become like God”

• Aristotle – there are 2 causes in the Universe matter and form. Forms are forces realizing themselves in the world of matter the way the ideas of the artist realize themselves in marble. • Matter moves because of form. Everything is alive, for matter constantly strives (or moves) to realize the form (the oak tree is the form and the acorn is the matter). And the atoms of the acorn were trying to combine into the acorn because the acorn was carrying in itself the form of the acorn.

• At the very end of this movement, there is form without matter – the Unmoved Mover • God is the center toward which everything strives; He is the unifying principle of the Universe. Every form is realized in Him. • He is pure intelligence and the ideal of every philosopher

• Epicureans – they believed in many gods. Gods were shaped like man, but were more beautiful, being made of light. They differed in sex, spoke the Greek and needed food. They don’t interfere with this world at all, being too perfect. • Some Skeptics – human reason is unable to know God at all and understand that He is existent. We cannot be sure about ourselves, as well.

• Stoics – God is related to the world just like the soul is related to the human body; He is the Soul of the Universe; all movement stems from it. • As all of the flower is contained in its seed, God is contained in everything in this Universe. • This God knows the future, punishes the evil and loves man. • He lives at the farthest circle of the universe and, from there, passes through everything just like our soul, being placed somewhere in our body, passes through the whole of it.

• Philo/Plotinus – brought the Hebrew tradition in contact with Greek philosophy thinking that it was consistent with the best in Greek thought. • We can’t know what is He like for He is far above us in everything, but can be certain that He exists. But we can say what he is not like. • Anything we think of Him is too pure to be true of Him • He is absolutely good, perfect, blessed and, as such, cannot come into touch with matter.

• He gives off powers which combine in one power called “the Logos” or divine Wisdom, which is the intermediary between God and the world • For Plotinus, God is like an infinite stream which flows out but is never exhausted. The world depends upon God, but God does not need the world

• Creation is a fall from God. The matter is the farthest thing from God is pure and the world is impure.

• Gospel of John (100 AD) – speaks about the Logos. • As the Christianity became popular in the Greek-Roman world, the time was ripe to bring a harmony between it and the Greek philosophy. • Apologists - God is eternal, all good, all wise and absolute in every way, who creates out of nothing. • He predetermined everything right from the beginning.

• Augustine – God is the idealization of everything considered to be good and worthy. His predetermination of everything is because of His virtue to know about everything. • John Scouts Erigena – God and his creation are one; God is in the world, the world is God, but God is more than the world; He is the world plus. The world is only a slight revelation of God. • Man can know something about God from looking at the universe, but this is only a small, insignificant part of God. He is never known fully

• • Trinity consists of: The Father is One or Goodness The Holy Ghost or World Soul The Logos or the mind of God

• Roscelin – applied the doctrine of Nominalism to the Trinity. There is no reality corresponding to the name “God”. There are only 3 different substances or persons equal in power. In opposition to it, the Church officials saw that the preservation of the Trinity rested upon adoption of the Realism. The Universals are the only reals; individuals are forms of the universal.

• If God does nor exist, the idea of God would not be the idea of the greatest thinkable. Man could still think of something greater, something that did exist. The perfection of God implies the existence of God, because there is no perfection without being.

• Mysticism • God is to be experienced (contemplated), not to be known • No amount of reasoning can give this understanding of God (Richard of St. Victor) • “The sweet home-coming from the land of bodies to the region of spirit, the surrender of the self in and to God” • All a man can do is to prepare himself through some exercises for “this plunge into the ocean of infinite truth”. And then… to wait.

• Thomas Aquinas • God is pure form; His existence is known from the facts of His creation.

• John Duns Scotus – God is infinite will which is so free that He can will or nor will just as He wants. All this is proven from the experience which we have of the world around us.

• Meister Eckhart – 13 and 14 th centuries • God is inconceivable, something in which all things are one. • God cannot reveal himself but becomes known only through the Trinity. Constantly the Tree Persons of the Trinity flow out of God and back into Him. • “I am God communicating Himself, I am immanent in the essence of God, He works through me, as I return to God in the mystic experience, I become one with God again”

• During the Renaissance, man undertook to think themselves free from the prolonged dominance of the Church and its doctrines. • They found out some inconsistencies in some doctrines of the Scholastics but did not dispose of the idea of God • Nicolas of Cusa – we have to have an direct intuition of God like a mystic has. It is beyond reason where we can grasp the “learned ignorance” – the supersensible experience of God

• Giordano Bruno – God is immanent in the universe, the principle of activity. He is unity of all opposites on the world who Himself does not have any opposites. That’s what we cannot bring our minds around at all • Jacob Boehme – through the objects of the Universe God becomes conscious of Himself. This sort of craving gives rise to the universe with all its opposites.

• Theology and science were gradually divided, each take its own place. Philosopher’s God seemed to differ from theologian’s God • Francis Bacon – the natural (provides us with a proof of His existence and tells nothing more) and the revealed theology (tells the rest). • “We must quit this small vessel of human reason, and put ourselves on board the ship of the Church, which alone possesses the divine needle for justly shaping the course”.

• Thomas Hobbes – speaks of God as starting the universe in motion and of Him as ruling the world through the human rulers of the world. • Descartes – tell us a great deal about God. • The cause of the idea of God must be as real as the idea, therefore, He exists. • Mind and body depend upon Him.

• Blaise Pascal -

• Spinoza – outside God there is no substance. We know Him through ideas and bodies, but this does not exhaust Him, He is far more than this, and we can never know Him completely. • God is neither personality nor conscience. He has no intelligence, feeling or will, has no purpose – everything follows from His nature according to strict law.

• John Lock – we have no innate idea of God. We should use our abilities properly. • We can built idea of God out of other ideas about experience we have (like power, pleasure, duration). But to do this, we should extend them to infinity. • Man studies himself and comes to know that he must have been fashioned by some being who is greater than he. • God established laws and we discover them through studying the Universe or through revelation. Gad can enforce these laws either by punishments or rewards in this and in the next world even to eternity.

• George Berkeley – God is the Supreme Being and the source of everything. To say that a table existed only when he was perceiving it, did not satisfy him. God perceives it anyway and it exists as a thought in God’s mind even if I left the room. • God is the cause of this world which is immaterial, mental in its essence.

• David Hume – human reason cannot demonstrate the nature of God. He held all of the arguments of the previous philosophers to be faulty. • Our reason is too weak to construct any proper conception of God. But we should believe in Him, for such a belief is the basis of all human hopes, of morality, and of society. • Belief in God comes from our desire for happiness, fear of death and future misery, and the thirst for revenge. These emotional factors lead us to believe in God, not our reasoning.

• Leibnitz – monads (self-contained units of the Universe) are ordered in a series of increasing clearness. As opposite the dullest monad, there is the most perfect monad, that is, God. • Monads are shut off from one another, but God has constructed the world in a way that each monad acts as though it were influenced and were influencing. • We can have a glimpse of God when take qualities which we find in ourselves like goodness, power, knowledge and raising them to infinity. • God is unchangeable, He comprehends everything at a glance and completely.

• Immanuel Kant – God is the Highest Idea which man can have, the idea of the highest unity, of the one Absolute Whole including and encompassing everything. But it is transcendent to experience. • It is one of the results of reason which brings under one head all happenings • He is necessary for the moral life • His argument for the existence of God: each individual can find it inherent in his reason that

• To live accordingly to an absolute good will deserves happiness. • But many good people are unhappy and many evil people are happy • There must be wise, good and powerful God to join happiness and goodness. • We can form an idea of the Whole of the Universe and can personify it. • God is a necessary unknown brought back by our reason

• Fichte – God is the universal active reason which cannot be kept from creating. • He is a “Universal Life-Process” dominating conscience of every individual • Morality demands God; therefore, He exists

• Friedrich Schleiermacher – it is impossible to ascribe to God the usual attributes of personality, thought, will, and the like. He is the source of all life. • Only through religious feeling man can know Him, feeling absolute dependence. He is a “world ground”.

• Hegel – God is Idea, the entire process of evolution, past, present and future. The reasoning process of historical unfolding is contained within God. • As the world develops through evolution, He becomes self-conscious more fully. He develops with the world.

• Auguste Comte (Positivism) – all attempts to get at the essence of things are symptoms of immature development of the human mind. We should give up all endeavors to discover God and preoccupy ourselves with discovering the relations existing between things, phenomena.

• Sir William Hamilton – to know anything about God is impossible because the human mind can only know that which is conditioned by something else. • Herbert Spencer – all we can know is that which is finite and limited. But we can relate things to an Absolute or the Unknowable. He exists but what He is like no one can know.

• William James – belief in God is necessary for the satisfaction of man’s nature. We cannot prove anything about Him, but we have a will to believe in Him, and we must satisfy this will. • God is not divorced from the Universe. He is man’s great Companion, his helper. He is, as it were, man-like - conscious, personal, and good, but much more powerful than man.

• John Dewey would not use the term God without defining it in such a way that it ceases to have any real meaning. • He recognized that men do have some experiences which they have interpreted in terms of God. • He thinks that such interpretation carries with it too much that cannot be proven and, therefore, should not be made. • Man found himself in a universe that is incomprehensible and that deals out to him much that is evil in his sight. Attempt of man to account for the Universe is, in fact, his attempt to save himself from the evil of the world.

• The religious tradition – more or less personal God caring for man and who is the creator of the universe.

• The scientific tradition – is not so sure that there is anything in the universe which cares for man or that the creative force of the Universe is anything like personality. It knows forces, drives, energies working and creating, and destroying. Man, with his values and wishes, is coming into being as these forces operate and is going to pieces as they continue to operate. Scientists would not dispute if someone is to give these forces the name “God”, but they will state that this word must not be applied with all its traditional connotations.

• The “Absolute” name has been put forward instead of the “God” name either as the ground of the universe or of the unity of the Universe