I said:
JAL said:
I 'm not insisting you got it DIRECTLY from Plato. Even if you learned it from a pastor, or from seminary, the ORIGIN of the doctrine, historically, is Plato (and/or his followers known as Platonists)
You responded:
Quoting you, this appears that you are accusing me of getting my nonexistent "platonism" directly from Plato.
DIRECTLY from Plato? Didn't I just insinuate the opposite? Twice you boasted of priding yourself in how carefully you read a post before responding to it, and yet, time and again, I'm completely mystified by your responses.
Some Christians have no inkling of the logical underpinnings of this immaterial Spirit-concept. In order to make an informed decision about it,they need a little understanding. I'll hit on some key points briefly, for the benefit of those unacquainted.
This excerpt from Catholic Encyclopedia is a good introduction.
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Scholasticism
But since it's a long treatise, I'll highlight some of the major thrusts.
(1) The excerpt traces the dominant influence of Plato and his disciple Aristotle for the first 1700 years of church history. For example it documents that the concept of an immaterial soul came directly from those two thinkers.
(2) It answers the question as to WHY Plato had so much influence on the church. The early church fathers recognized that Scripture was a book of brevity and thus limited in scope - it didn't seem to provide a massive amount of detailed information on technical issues of science and philosophy. Hence the fathers assumed that God provided Greek philosophers as a kind of supplement to Scripture. According to the Catholic Encylopedia, "The [fathers] advanced the explanation that all the wisdom of Plato and the other Greeks was due to the inspiration of the Logos [the divine Word]; that it was God's truth, and, therefore, could not be in contradiction with the supernatural revelation contained in the Gospels...We find [this assumpion] in St. Basil, in Origen, and even in St. Augustine."
Greek philosphy - placed on a par with Scripture? This kind of mentality prevailed for 1700 years! Out of this COGNITIVE ENVIRONMENT sprung the Christian dogmas of immaterial souls,angels,and God. My advice to any Christians reading this thread is this: know your heritage. Before you buy into such a doctrine, be keenly aware of what presuppostions, historically, precipitated it.
Ok so what specific Plato-style rationales led to such doctrines? Plato's Theory of Forms (see Wikipedia) held that properties EXIST. For instance if we see a red object, it might be due to an existing (immaterial) form/substance called 'redness', imposing redness upon the material object. A dog is a chunk of matter molded by an existing form/property called 'dog-ness'. Thus properties exist and are called FORMS. Likwise goodness, love, omniscience, omnipotence are forms (existing properties/attributes).
However, the ECFs took it even one step further when applying this concept to God. Here a good source is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This online encypoledia is a peer-reviewed reference work authored by professors expert in their fields.
Divine Simplicity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
But since this too is a long article (and especially difficult), I'll hit on some key points.
As pointed out in the very 1st paragraph of the Stanford article, the ECFs took the matter-form composition one step further when applying this concept to God, to avoid reducing Him to an ordinary creature. Thus they made a distinction between God and creature:
(1) An ordinary creature is matter influenced by these immaterial forms/properties.
(2) God is not a matter-form composition. Rather He Himself is pure properties/forms. Because, if a property/form could exist separately from God, He would be dependent on it (He would depend on it as His source of holiness), whence He would be neither a transcendent entity nor the ultimate source of holiness. (That was their reasoning anyway).
Thus God is not a matter-form composition, he is not COMPOSED of multiple aspects or parts in any sense at all. Another name for this lack of composition is simplicity. Hence it is known as the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS). As the article states in the first paragraph:
"According to the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, God is radically unlike creatures in that he is devoid of any complexity or composition, whether physical or metaphysical. Besides lacking spatial and temporal parts, God is free of matter-form composition, potency-act composition, and existence-essence composition. There is no real distinction between God...and his attributes....God is omniscient, then, not in virtue of exemplifying omniscience — which would imply a real distinction between God and the property of omniscience — but by BEING omniscience [itself]".
Indeed even a multitide of forms/properties would itself be a composition, hence God boils down to only one existing property/form combining all His positive aspects. I suppose we could call this form/property God-ness. God is the God-ness property. (I'm still wondering how we get a Trinity out of a God uncomposed of parts).
The next paragraph begins with an interesting question. "What could motivate such a strange and seemingly incoherent doctrine?" Yes, it certainly seems incoherent to me. Although the remainder of the article is devoted to defending the coherence of this God-ness notion, I have at least six objections NOT addressed in the article.
(1) It's not clear how an immaterial God could actually DO anything. How can immaterial hands perform surgery on the sick? As mentioned in post #5 (and demonstrated throughout this thread), Scripture EXPLICITLY documents physical divine activity.
(2) Reality is what it is. Just because some Christian theologians formulated THEIR philosophical definition of the ideal God, doesn't mean that He is necessarily such.
(3) In point of fact it doesn't seem to work. At post 134 I argued that a community of beings seems to require, for logistical reasons, matter-energy as the basis of intercommunication.
Are These Mainstream Doctrines In Need of Reform?
And scripture backs this up. Note for example what David said at Psalm 18: "In my distress I called to the Lord;I cried to my God for help. From his temple he heard my voice; my cry came before him, into his ears". David issued sounds waves as a method of prayer. Those sound waves (presumably relayed by the material divine Word), reached the very throne of God, making entrance into His ears.
(4) The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity claims that God even lacks 'temporal parts' (has no time-composition). He's timeless. This contradicts merit defined unanimously as freely choosing to labor/suffer for a righteous cause over an extended period of time (e.g. Calvary).
(5) Merit isn't the only trait necessitating time. Consciousness too. Timeless consciousness is logically incoherent. It's gibberish. At post 192, I defined consciousness as loudness:
Are These Mainstream Doctrines In Need of Reform?
Consciousness is two types of loudness. (1) The loudness of present-moment contrasts. You can't see white chalk on a white chalkboard. (2) The loudness of present-past contrasts (i.e. the present experience contrasted with remembered experiences), which allows for a sense of DURATION. Joy cannot be enjoyed without a sense of duration, it has to LAST for a little while. If God perceived all past, present, and future in one simultaneity - one timeless flash - it would rob Him of real conscious experience, both its joys and its sorrows for example. Doesn't make sense.
(6) Disembodied personhood is logically incoherent. It's gibberish. Try to imagine yourself devoid of any kind of torso, and thus not beholding yourself as an object situated in an environment of objects distinct from you. Gradually this imagination causes you to vanish from the picture until there's no longer any conscious 'you' to speak of. Thus it doesn't make sense to refer to God as a disembodied conscious Person. Such would be UNCONSCIOUSNESS.
To summarize those six points, I would say the following to the ECFs if I had the chance, "When you ancients formulated your theory of the ideal, fully transcendent God, you failed to consider whether such a God is logistically feasible, whether it is even coherent to define a conscious Person - much less a Trinity of persons (or a community of beings) - as a mere intangible PROPERTY."
So to anyone reading this thread - that's your theological heritage. You can take it or leave it. I would leave it, if I were you.