The Crucifixion of the Warrior God by Boyd Gregory A

Author:Boyd,Gregory A. [Boyd,Gregory A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781506420752
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2017-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

A Misguided Line of Reasoning

A Historic Misstep

The third objection I would like to raise against the classical understanding of God concerns the process of reasoning that led to it. In keeping with the ancient Greek philosophical tradition, we have seen that Aquinas assumed that to account for the contingent, compound, temporal, ever-changing, and imperfect world without falling into an infinite regress, we have to posit a reality that is altogether necessary, simple, timeless, unchanging, and perfect. This Hellenistic philosophical line of reasoning is fundamentally flawed, in my estimation. And inasmuch as this line of reasoning exerted such a strong influence on the Christian tradition from Augustine on, I consider it one of the greatest missteps in the history of western philosophy.

I grant that we will find ourselves in an infinite regress if we ascribe to the “ground of being” the same non-self-explanatory qualities as the contingent and ever-changing world we are trying to explain. But it does not follow from this that we must therefore conclude that the “ground of being” must be altogether devoid of these qualities. To explain the contingent and ever-becoming world, we need only deny that the “ground of being” is altogether contingent and changing. In other words, we need only posit that the “ground of being” is necessary and unchanging in at least one respect, leaving open the question of whether or not it may also be contingent and changing in other respects. And one compelling philosophical reason why we might conclude that the “ground of being” must include contingency and change is that if we instead assume that the “ground of being” is altogether necessary and unchanging, there is no intelligible way of bridging the “ground of being” with the contingent and ever-changing world.[81]

A major contributing factor to the misstep that Greek philosophy and the classical tradition made was that they generally assumed that the “ground of being” had to be altogether simple. Behind this assumption was the observation that things that are comprised of parts change and ultimately decay, and this of course cannot hold true of the reality we posit to explain a world of compound things that change and decay.[82] However, to account for such a world, we need not posit a reality that is altogether simple. We only need posit a reality that is not composed of parts and that does not change and decay. Such a reality could be simple in certain respects but multiple in other respects, along the lines of Aquinas’s doctrine of the Trinity.[83] Yet, unlike Aquinas’s doctrine of the Trinity, I submit that the respect in which the “ground of being” is simple is also the respect in which it is necessary and unchanging, while the respect in which it is multiple is also the respect in which it is contingent and changing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.