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Tag: god

  • Three Dominant Conceptions of God

    Three Dominant Conceptions of God

    Classical Theism is the belief in which God is an absolute and ultimate metaphysical being. Whereas most theists agree that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and good, some classical theists go further and conceive of God as utterly transcendent, simple, and as having attributes such as immutability, impassibility, and timelessness. The ideas of Classical Theism are associated with philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, St. Anselm, Maimonides, Averroes and Thomas Aquinas.

    Because Greek philosophy influences traditional theistic ideas and focus on God in the abstract and metaphysical sense, Classical Theism can be difficult to reconcile with the caring, and compassionate view of God manifested in the religious texts of the main monotheistic religions including the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an

    Aristotelian Theology takes a somewhat different viewpoint than Classical Theism. In Metaphysics, Aristotle discusses the meaning of “being as being.” Aristotle holds that “being” refers to the Unmoved Movers, and assigned one of these to each movement in the heavens. Each Unmoved Mover continuously contemplates its contemplation, and everything that fits the second meaning of “being” by having its source of motion in itself, moves because the knowledge of its Mover causes it to emulate this Mover (or should).

    Aristotle’s definition of God connects perfection to this being, and as a perfect being can only contemplate upon perfection and not on imperfection, otherwise perfection would not be one of his attributes. God, according to Aristotle, is in a state of “stasis” untouched by change and fault. As such, the “unmoved mover” is dissimilar to the conception of God seen in most religions.

    Pantheism is the belief that all reality is identical with divinity and that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God. Pantheists do not believe in a distinct personal or anthropomorphic God. Additionally, Pantheists believe in and accept all interpretations of God regardless of religion and view all religions as equal.

    Pantheism views all religions as equally valid and that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God.
    Pantheism views all religions as equally valid and that everything that people can observe represents God.

    Many traditional and folk religions can be seen as being aligned with the ideas of pantheism and there are elements of pantheism in some forms of Christianity and Hinduism. Pantheism is also popular in some New age religious movements such as Neopaganism and Theosophy.

     

     

     

  • Ockham’s Razor

    Ockham’s Razor

    Ockham’s Razor is a well-known concept within philosophy and logic. It stipulates that in trying to understand something and to determine the solution to a given problem, getting any unnecessary information out of the way is the fastest way to determine the truth or to find out the best explanation.

    The originator of the concept was William of Ockham (1285-1349), an English Franciscan friar, philosopher, and theologian. Ockham spent most of his life developing a philosophical concept that reconciled religious belief with demonstratable, generally experienced truth, mainly by separating the two from each other.

    Getting any unnecessary information out of the way is the fastest way to determine the truth or to find out the best explanation.

    Where earlier philosophers attempted to justify God’s existence with physical proof, Ockham declared religious belief to be incapable of such proof and a matter of faith. He rejected the notions preserved from Classical times of the independent existence of qualities such as truth, hardness, and durability and said these ideas had value only as descriptions of particular objects and were really characteristics of human cognition.