/christianity/ - Christian Theology & Philosophy

1/?

The origins are pretty cool - unfortunately things went sideways, but it started with ancient Greek Philosophy and with the famous philosophers who gave rise to rational analysis - unfortunately things went sideways

1. Plato

Plato separated the world into the world of the senses and the world of ideas.

So for example we know that a fender stratocaster guitar is better than a IRIN guitar, but we recognize them both as guitars with varying levels of better-ness. we know that the Queen of England's throne is better than my cheap fold out office chair with the ripped padding. But we recognize both as chairs with varying levels of goodness.

So how do we recognize both thing as chairs or guitars even though they are so different and how can we recognize one as better than the other? Plato thought that there was ideal forms in the world of ideas. For example there is an ideal chair somewhere in the world of ideas that all chairs partake off, and it's from this that they get their identity as chairs. Similarly there is an ideal guitar somewhere in the world of ideas, and all guitars partake of this ideal form to get their essence.

The world of ideas is different from the physical world, it is eternal, unchanging and perfect. And in the physical world, we see imperfect shadows of the perfect things that exist in the ideal world

The divisions aren't clear for example, there might not be an ideal laptop, but there is an ideal computation machine and all laptops and computation machines are better or worse to the extent that they are more like the ideal computation machine which already exists in the world of ideas

So no one really invents anything, we just see the ideal world better. For example, there were stone tablets, then we moved to parchments, then scrolls and then books and printing presses, then word processors, then the internet – but all these are just better and better approximations of an ideal means of preserving words that exists in the world of ideas.

Plato believed that we can access the world of ideal forms through our ability to reason. A good example of this is mathematics where we get to work with numbers which allows us to deal with ideal concepts a little bit removed from the real world.

>>6448

2/?

So a cool thing happened when plato was talking to some of his philosopher buddies. Plato was explaining the world of ideal forms and they asked "is there an ideal version of man?"

And plato thought for a moment and answered, "Yes, and I don't know what to call such a being."

Plato then went on to write Timaeus a book that they won't teach you in Philosophy class today. You can read it online here:

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html

Timaeus basically argues that reason demands that the cosmos had a creator - because it is too well ordered not to have had a creator. Plato called this proposed creator "the demiurge ."

Plato said that when mathematicians worked out geometrical relationships like pythagoras did with the triangle, he was really revealing the rational design of the creator.

Plato maintained that the Demiurge had to be a universally good and benevolent figure, (ie. a lot like our God) . And that makes sense because he was an ideal figure from the world of ideas

So consider this, because this is amazing. Using reason alone, the world's first real philosopher, writing 400 years before the birth of Christ and without any knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures or traditions figured out the following about god just by using his rational faculties - and I'm quoting from his book here because it sounds just like Christianity :

> Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable. Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in every way better than the other. Now the deeds of the best could never be or have been other than the fairest; and the creator, reflecting on the things which are by nature visible, found that no unintelligent creature taken as a whole was fairer than the intelligent taken as a whole; and that intelligence could not be present in anything which was devoid of soul. For which reason, when he was framing the universe, he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, that he might be the creator of a work which was by nature fairest and best. Wherefore, using the language of probability, we may say that the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God.

>>6448

3/?

Unfortunately, Plato's theory had one big problem. If the creator was good and perfect, why was the world so clearly imperfect?

Plato did not have access to adam and eve or the story of the fall of man so he answered thus:

> The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect.

Note: There have been many academic interpretations of this which I believe are wrong, so I'm going to give my interpretation here.

I think what plato is saying here, is that when the creator created the world of ideas, he made it prefect because he was creating it based on what was in his mind. However, when he made the world we live in, he was copying form the world of ideas, and since it's only a copy it's less perfect than the things in the world of ideas

(pic somewhat related, more explains the reasoning behinds the ideas explained in my first post about the world of ideas and the world of forms and how Plato arrived at his conclusions)

>>6456

So far things look good, it looks as if Plato is on his his way to leading Greeks to the Christian God. So where did things go wrong?

Well it was too long ago to be certain how things went downhill. What we do know is that Plato and Socrates had many students including many among the rich and important young athenians of their day. That's why Socrates was accused of "corrupting the youth"."

Plato's ideas filtered down imperfectly through the centuries and by the 1st century there were Gnostics who took Plato's ideas of the demiurge and divorced it from it's philosophy while mixing it with Jewish, Christian and Pagan ideas.

This enraged many of Plato's followers such as Plotinus who criticized the gnostics for making Plato's creator an evil or imperfect figure. Plotinus said that Plato's ideas were meant for the academy and as they filtered to the general populous they were mixed with confusion, jargon and irrationality to create philosophies like Gnosticism