Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Creation and Logic

  • "Would a God necessarily have to be a "supreme geometer," (95) committed to an ordered and rational creation? What if the creator had a preference for disunity and a messy creation?" 
While a further advanced study in creationism would help better answer this question, my background in private schools and a strong christian upbringing (church on Wednesday and Sunday, prayers before meals, family culture centered around faith) allows me to have some insight into this question. I have always thought that God is that which we can not explain. Our natural human fear of the unknown allows us to formulate some type of greater human being. The genesis of most of our theories and ideas stems from our own internal biological feelings.We want answers to questions that we can not solve about ourselves, the world, and society, be it microbiological or astrophysical, (especially for philosophers). So from a human standpoint I envision these thinkers attempting to make sense of their world given the most recent and available tools they had. The relationship between creator and created is complex. Most human beings will have a desire to understand their conception or creation. Most will try to relate it to some identifiable phenomena they experience rationally or emotionally. Neither is wrong, it's what makes human existence a universal, and beautiful phenomena. Perhaps, the creator or creation point happened and it was messy, yet, as humans beings we desire to make sense logical and ordered sense of our world. Perhaps geometry is our idea but we want to pay respect to the being, be it God or science that allowed us to understand and have it discover-able. Perhaps we want to think of God as being similar to us, the rational thinker.

5 comments:

  1. I enjoyed your post and was thinking about the “rational thinker,” “Prime Movers,” and “the-ground-of-all-being” concepts of God, when I recalled this passage in our text.

    “They [the Romans] desperately wanted answers. As the emperor Alexander Severus (who was an avid fan of Plato’s Republic) said, they had tried everything else and had found it was a waste of time. So they looked to their teacher, Plotinus, their guru almost, to explain how to find their way back to truth and spiritual health” (p. 142).

    “Desperate” might be the operative term, but I think it’s human nature to ask these big questions. On the other hand, there seems to be an endless supply of folks willing to make stuff up (and charge money for it) in order to satisfy these questions.

    Even if we look back to Plato’s Republic at 510d, where he explains that “[Knowledge] is like a line divided into two unequal sections”—the visible and the intelligible. The hierarchy begins with imagination and extends through belief, thought, and finally understanding.

    There’s no evidence to show that Plato’s forms and Plotinus’s “One” are anything more than the products of vivid imaginations. This question is this: are these satisfactory answers or does it move the question back one place to “who created God?”

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  2. There are never any satisfactory answers. I'm a natural skeptic, reality oftentimes seems like a figment of the imagination, something created by either our minds or the suggestions of someone else. Some people choose to accept a lie, and some people decide to decide to try to understand reality mathematically or scientifically. Similar to the Matrix and the red or blue pill. Historically, it is difficult to understand what exactly the philosophers were thinking, since the only thing we can truly know with certainty is our present moment. Much like Descartes and his wax. The forms are merely a design created to make sense of the world. And much like my first philosophy professor stated, philosophy is much like "fox-hunting", it's about the pursuit not neccessarily the end result. Maybe though, God created himself or god caused the "big bang", the end truth lies though that we will never know, because we are stuck in a finite space in time with only our imaginations.

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  3. Ontology is definitely one interesting area of philosophy. It seems that Plato and Aristotle are the two founders of this area, and it would be interesting to trace the journey that their theories had into contemporary western culture.

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  5. Would be, will be, and IS. It's just getting interesting now, with the neo-Platonists. Next chapter, S/Paul will turn up in Athens. The journey continues!

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