{"id":2598,"date":"2011-05-10T20:30:45","date_gmt":"2011-05-11T01:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/biblearchive.com\/blog\/?p=2598"},"modified":"2011-05-10T20:46:46","modified_gmt":"2011-05-11T01:46:46","slug":"god-and-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblearchive.com\/blog\/god-and-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"God and Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Etienne Gilson in God and Philosophy<\/a><\/em> (1941) makes the argument that God\u2019s existence can not be demonstrated, especially since the Church keeps embracing the God of Plato over against the Christian God of the Bible. Now, I know that I\u2019ve heard this argument before. Usually it looks more like a pejorative point raised to defame ones opponents. So you\u2019ll see the Open Theist pointing out that all of Christendom has inherited Plato\u2019s Immutable Good as God instead of the relational God of Scripture. But that doesn\u2019t seem to be the argument the author is making.<\/p>\n

Etienne wants to show that the existence of the Christian God can\u2019t be demonstrated philosophically because Human Reason bottoms out (or tops out). \u00a0He starts off examining early philosophy and arriving at Plato\u2019s conclusion: the furthest human reason can go is The Immutable Good. Philosophically speaking there\u2019s not much reason to go further than what Plato came up with.<\/p>\n

Christianity, though, stands against this having a God who is not only the Ultimate Good, or the First Cause, but he is intimately concerned with people, he creates, he pre-exists creation, he is personally involved, he incarnates\u2014etc. Stuff that really can\u2019t be established metaphysically.<\/p>\n

Then the author looks at how Christians wound up doubling back on the God of Philosophy and calling him the God of the Bible. So you\u2019ll have Augustine inheriting the world of Plato by falling \u201cheir to Plato\u2019s man\u201d where man is not the \u201csubstantial unity of body and soul; he was essentially a soul.\u201d Aquinas would be the crowning achievement of Natural Theology but then hits a glass ceiling where humans double back to human reason.<\/p>\n

Descartes, using reason to establish that he exists and then using God to justify and trust his own reason: by doing this Descartes doubles back on the Philosopher\u2019s God. He can assign a mess of categories to this God (that he incarnated, that he is personal, etc) but there\u2019s no real reason to add all that. Etienne says that Descartes\u2019 \u201cphilosophy was neither directly nor indirectly regulated by theology, he had no reason whatsoever to suppose that their conclusions would ultimately coincide. When you get to someone like Spinoza, labeled \u201can atheist by his adversaries\u201d, we see a Non-Christian Cartesian who is a firm believer of his own Philosophical God while having nothing to do with the Christian God.<\/p>\n

\u201cGod is the absolute essence whose intrinsic necessity makes necessary the being of all that is, so that he is absolutely all that is, just as, in as much as it is, all that is \u2018necessarily involves the eternal and infinite essence of God.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I still haven\u2019t finished the book (even if I enjoy watching a Tomistic Catholic anticipating Van Til), but it was interesting to think how these two categories can be seen in our own experience. You\u2019ll have Christians defending a position because an idea comes forward as representing the entire Godhead though that idea is not established by Reason but Rationalism\u2019s near sister: Romanticism.<\/p>\n

Like the Philosopher\u2019s God, Jesus winds up being this romanticized idea of Immutable Love who would never do such-and-such. This was really evident last week with the announcement on the death of Osama Bin Laden<\/a>: Christians shouldn\u2019t do X because Christ wouldn\u2019t do that all based on a lot of wishful thinking and some proof-text. But if Plantinga (with his warranted Christian belief of Reformed Epistemology) and Calvin (with his sensus<\/em> divinitatis<\/em>)are right, it\u2019s not really another God that folk are positing; it\u2019s really just denying an aspect of The Real God which people don\u2019t find appealing.<\/p>\n

For instance, if the Gospel accounts didn\u2019t include Christ clearing out the temple in anger, or getting ticked off at the wailing at Lazarus\u2019 tomb, I have a feeling that people would say things like \u201cChrist would never do that\u201d because the romantic ideal is holding sway. They\u2019d still be referring to the Real Christ but they\u2019d be denying something he would do because it doesn\u2019t coincide with their feeling of what Christ would do. It\u2019s not a Cartesian God arriving at Plato, but something else. A God who is also not philosophically established as existent but persists because of a specific sub-cultural ideal.<\/p>\n

Here’s some Carson from Love in Hard Places:<\/p>\n

… to avoid distortion we should re\ufb02ect on the love of God\u00a0only in conjunction with re\ufb02ection on all of God\u2019s other perfections.\u00a0Otherwise there will be a tendency to pit one attribute of God against\u00a0other attributes of God, to domesticate one or more of God\u2019s characteristics by appealing to the supremacy of another. If we rejoice in God\u2019s\u00a0love, we shall rejoice no less in God\u2019s holiness, in God\u2019s sovereignty, in\u00a0God\u2019s omniscience, and so forth, and we shall be certain that all of God\u2019s\u00a0perfections work together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think in both cases, it\u2019s facing something CS Lewis warns about: you take Aslan on his own terms. He is no tame lion. Nor is he safe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Etienne Gilson in God and Philosophy (1941) makes the argument that God\u2019s existence can not be demonstrated, especially since the Church keeps embracing the God of Plato over against the Christian God of the Bible. Now, I know that I\u2019ve heard this argument before. 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