880 lines
67 KiB
HTML
880 lines
67 KiB
HTML
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<html>
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<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
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<title> </title>
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<meta name="generator" content="LibreOffice 4.2.8.2 (Linux)">
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<meta name="author" content="Amr Gharbeia">
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<meta name="created" content="20010831;25400000000000">
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">O<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdnR_15" align="right" hspace="5" vspace="10" width="136" height="41" border="0">ntological
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philosophy entails, as we have seen, the existence of an immanent
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God. But believers in a traditional religion, especially those who
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believe in a transcendent God, are likely to be skeptical about the
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world itself being sufficiently perfect to be worthy of worship. One
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way to quell such doubts is to show that all the reasons for holding
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that a transcendent God is worthy of worship are reasons that also
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hold for the immanent God of ontological philosophy. That is possible
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in this case because the points of disagreement about the nature of
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God are not relevant to God's worthiness of worship. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">In
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what follows, I will argue that the immanent God entailed by
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spatiomaterialism is worthy of worship by arguing that it has all the
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traits that are thought to make the traditional God of
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epistemological philosophy worthy of worship. And since it will also
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solve the theoretical problems that philosophical theology has
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encountered trying to think about God coherently, it may even
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convince traditional theists that such an immanent God is what they
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have actually been believing in. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">This
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is to give an ontological interpretation of Christianity, but a
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similar argument can be constructed, I believe, for the beliefs of
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all the other traditional religions. In their case as well, what
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makes God worthy of worship is also implicit in this immanent God, as
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would be shown by giving an ontological interpretation of them. That
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is, at least, what ontological philosophy would expect, since
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traditional religions are trying to grasp something about the world
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that really is holy, but as through a glass darkly. However, only
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Christian theology will be discussed in the following argument.
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Christianity is the religion in which epistemological philosophy was
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historically developed most fully, and though this critique of
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Christian theology will suggest how it would work in other
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traditional religious, I must leave that to others. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Let me
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emphasize, however, that what I say here about Christianity is not
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the result of a conversion experience on my part. I have not been
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reborn by accepting Jesus as my savior. I long ago abandoned the
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faith of my parents and left the church, because I could not believe
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that naturalism is false, at least, not in the way required to
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believe in a transcendent God. Nor could I believe that one discovers
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the truth about such matters by an act of faith. However, in the long
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process of working out this ontological explanation of the wholeness
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of the world, I have become increasingly sympathetic with religion,
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for I have slowly discovered that the wholeness of the world entails
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the existence of a perfect being -- one that can be recognized as the
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God referred to by Christian theology, because it has all the traits
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that make the transcendent God of traditional Christianity worthy of
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worship. Thus, all that Christians would have to give up in order to
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recognize that ontological philosophy confirms what they want to
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believe about the world are metaphysical beliefs that cause
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theoretical problems — except possibly for the belief in personal
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immortality, and I will argue that they would not really want that,
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if they understood the nature of existence. </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Some might,
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therefore, claim that Jesus is a prophet of ontological philosophy.
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But Jesus is not what leads reason to recognize the existence of God.
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The path that leads to the explanation of the wholeness of the world
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in its most complete sense is the path that Socrates was on. And that
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is a path that began when the Pre-Socratic philosophers gave up
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religious explanations of the world in favor of an ontological
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explanation. Indeed, ontological philosophy is, I believe, the wisdom
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that Socrates was seeking when he distinguished himself from the
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sophists as a philosopher, that is, a <i>lover </i>of wisdom. It is
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the knowledge of the nature of the world, including the nature of
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goodness, that makes rational beings choose goals that are good
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because they are good. That is, knowledge is virtue! The Socratic
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principle is true. Thus, although the end of the road of reason is,
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as I will argue, what Jesus was talking about, it is only reason, not
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faith (and certainly not force), that can lead us there.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>The
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doctrines of Christian theology. </i>What I take to be Christian
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theology can be summed up as five doctrines. They are mainly the
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doctrines that emerged in the medieval period. Many variations on
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them and interpretations of them have been developed since then,
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including some that take Christianity to be merely a mythical
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representation of a moral code. But the more traditional Christian
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beliefs about the nature of God and the meaning of life bring out
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more clearly what is true in Christianity, according to this
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ontological theology. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>God’s
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transcendence of the natural world. </i>Christians (and Jews) have to
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believe that God transcends the natural world, because He is supposed
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to have created it by an act of free will. The natural world includes
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everything in space and time, and thus, unless God were a substance
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that exists outside space and time, He could not have created it. </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>The
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trinity.</i> The most distinctive tenet of Christian theology is,
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perhaps, the doctrine of the trinity, that God is actually three
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persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is the
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creator of the natural world, who for some reason put human beings on
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earth. The Son is the incarnation of God on earth whose sacrifice was
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meant to earn the forgiveness of our sins so that believing that
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Jesus is Christ would give us salvation from sin and eternal bliss.
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Thus, God had to be at least two persons. But Christians also believe
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that God acts in the world by way of the Holy Spirit as well, and
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that is God as a third person. Thus, despite being a single
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substance, God is supposed to be three persons, the Father, the Son
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and the Holy Spirit (and theologians have struggled vainly to explain
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how that is possible).</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>Original
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sin. </i>The source of evil in the world is supposed to be a result
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of original sin. In the beginning, when Adam and Eve were in the
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Garden of Eden, God forbad them to eat the fruit of the tree of the
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knowledge of good and evil. But Adam and Eve had free will, and being
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persuaded by a serpent, representing Satan (an angel in rebellion
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against God), they ate the apple, thereby defying God’s command.
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That was the original sin. As punishment, God banished Adam and Eve
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from the Garden of Eden, and after the fall, they and all their
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children and children's children became mortal beings. They were
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ashamed of their bodies; they had to labor in order to live; they
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were both agents and patients of such suffering as war; and they who
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had to suffer famine and disease, as well as death. Thus, the evil in
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the world is supposed to come from an act of free will in defiance of
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God’s command. And their offspring would always be tempted to
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choose evil and sin, because Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of the
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tree of the knowledge of good and evil. </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>The
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gospel.</i> Christians believe that the “good news” brought by
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Jesus as the Christ, or savior, was that God had forgiven our sins,
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including our original sin. It was possible, therefore, with the
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grace of God, to avoid sin. This meant, according to Jesus, that the
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kingdom of God is at hand and, since it would thereafter be possible
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to avoid the evils that had plagued the descendants of Adam and Eve,
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we would live in heaven forever. All that is required for this to
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happen is that that we believe in Jesus as our savior, that we love
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God, and that we love our neighbors as ourselves, that is, a
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conversion to Christianity. Though only faith in Christ is required
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for salvation from sin, it is the struggle to overcome sin and evil
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that is the basic meaning of life, according to Christianity.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>Immortality.</i>
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When Jesus was crucified, God sacrificed his only Son, and the
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divinity of Jesus was shown by his resurrection from the dead after
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three days and his bodily ascension into Heaven some while later,
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joining his Father. The reward of believing in Christ is salvation
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from sin, and according to the traditional Christian belief, that
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means having eternal life in the presence of God, that is, in heaven.
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Thus, Christianity holds that everyone has an immortal soul in the
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sense that each person is a substance that lives after the death of
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their bodies on earth. For the saved, that means living eternally in
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the presence of God, and heaven is thought to transcend the natural
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world, just as God Himself does. But the eternal fate of our souls
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depends on our free will, that is, whether we choose to believe in
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Christ. Those who do not are not saved, and their immortal souls
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spend eternity in Hell, deprived of God’s presence. Thus, what is
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at stake in the choice one makes about how to live one’s life is
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the fate of one’s eternal soul.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>An
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ontological interpretation of Christian doctrines.</i> God is
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immanent, according to ontological philosophy, because it implies
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that the world itself is a perfect being. The basic nature of a
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spatiomaterial world like ours gives rise to progressive evolution,
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and that eventually leads to the existence of perfect rational
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beings, who act for the good of the world as a whole. That is our
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foundation for explaining what is true and what is false in the
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doctrines of Christian theism. Insofar as the beliefs that make the
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Christian transcendent God worthy of worship can be explained by our
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immanent God, Christians must admit that this pantheistic God is also
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worthy of their worship. Nor can Christians deny that this immanent
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God is worthy of their worship, if the ways in which it contradicts
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traditional theism are not what make their transcendent God worthy of
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worship. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">This way of
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showing that the pantheistic God of ontological philosophy is worthy
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of worship is, of course, an <i>ad hominum </i>argument for
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Christians. It will not persuade everyone, because non-Christians may
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deny that even the Christian God is worthy of worship. But that is
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not necessary, since we have already seen that ontological reason
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acknowledge a religious reason. But it will show how ontological
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reason can be seen as taking up where Christianity (and religion
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generally) leaves off, enabling rational beings to have from reason
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something more than what Christians had to take on faith.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">I will take
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up each of the traditional doctrines of Christianity and offer what
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seems to me to be the most sympathetic interpretation of them from
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the standpoint of ontological philosophy. But I will leave the first
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doctrine, about the transcendence of God, to the last.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">T<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdnR_19" align="right" hspace="5" vspace="10" width="118" height="26" border="0">he
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central doctrine from which Christianity derives its name is the
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belief that Jesus was Christ, the Son of God. The doctrine of the
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incarnation of God is problematic, because it means that one and the
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same substances that created the natural world must also be
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particular substance in that world. It is hard to explain how a
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single substance can be two such different persons, but if God must
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be two persons, it is not much more implausible to suppose that there
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are three altogether. Indeed, Christianity assumes that, in addition
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to the transcendent Father and bodily Son, God exists in a third
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form, as the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is supposed to do God’s
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work on earth. Thus, the doctrine of the trinity holds that, even
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though God is a single substance, He is three different persons: the
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Father, who created the natural world and sent his Son to save us;
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the Son, who brought the father's word to the world; and the Holy
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Spirit, who does God's work. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">It
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seems to some that the doctrine of the trinity is self-contradictory,
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and though believers are willing to believe that it is just another
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mystery that lies beyond the understanding of finite rational beings,
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the immanent God entailed by spatiomaterialism suggests a solution to
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that mystery. It is possible for finite rational beings to understand
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how the three persons of God are a single substance, because in a
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spatiomaterial world like our own, that substance could be the whole
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world. </font></font></font>
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</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">It is
|
||
possible to explain what is meant by "God, the Father,"for
|
||
that could be the basic nature of the world. That is what is
|
||
responsible for the existence of beings like us in the world, for it
|
||
is the ontological cause of the evolutionary process by which a
|
||
rational beings come to exist in the world. Since what evolves in the
|
||
culture of philosophical spiritual animals is the knowledge that
|
||
provides makes heaven on earth possible. The word of God can be seen
|
||
as what is spoken by rational subjects with ontological reason, and
|
||
thus, they can be seen as what is meant by "God as the Son."
|
||
That is, the individual's knowledge of the truth about the wholeness
|
||
of the world, including the nature of goodness, is the knowledge of
|
||
the word of the Father, which Christ was supposed to have. And the
|
||
"Holy Spirit" refers to the spiritual animal that exists
|
||
when the word of the Father is known, because when ontological
|
||
philosophy evolves, reason understands the wholeness of the world,
|
||
and by acknowledging its religious interest, ontological reason does
|
||
God’s work, the work of becoming a perfect rational being, that is,
|
||
God’s self-creation. Thus, all three persons of God can be seen as
|
||
aspects of the same perfect substance, namely, the world as a whole. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">It
|
||
might seem that, although ontological philosophy can explain how a
|
||
single substance can have all three aspects, it does not quite
|
||
explain the doctrine of the Trinity, because it does not show that
|
||
they are all persons. Individuals are clearly persons, because they
|
||
are rational beings. And since spiritual animals are rational beings,
|
||
they can also be called persons. But even if the basic nature of a
|
||
spatiomaterial world like ours is perfect in the sense of giving rise
|
||
to natural perfection, the world as a whole is hardly a person. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">This
|
||
objection overlooks, however, a consequence of ontological reason
|
||
acting in the interest of the world as a whole. When reason takes on
|
||
the function of being the behavior guidance system for the world
|
||
itself, the world itself becomes a rational being. And since rational
|
||
beings are persons, the world is a person. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">In other
|
||
words, the reason that there are three <i>persons </i>of God is that
|
||
ontological reason has three practical interests, individual,
|
||
spiritual and religious. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">These three
|
||
rational beings are a single substance in the sense that they are all
|
||
constituted by space and matter, the substances whose existence
|
||
explains the existence of everything else in the world. The
|
||
difference between them is that they are rational beings on different
|
||
levels of part-whole complexity in space. The Son refers to each of
|
||
the rational subjects who are parts of spiritual animals after
|
||
ontological reason evolves. The Holy Spirit includes the spiritual
|
||
animal (or all the spiritual animals) whose behavior is guided by
|
||
ontological reason to do what is good for the world as a whole. And
|
||
the Father is the whole world to whose natural perfection religious
|
||
goals contribute. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">To be sure,
|
||
what is affected by the activities of the Son and the Holy Spirit may
|
||
extend no farther than their own planetary system. But that does not
|
||
mean that it is not a contribution to the natural perfection of the
|
||
world as a whole. It does make the whole world more perfect than it
|
||
would be without ontological reason, and it happens throughout the
|
||
universe, since because perfect rational beings evolve on every
|
||
suitable planetary system. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
most telling objection to traditional pantheism is that it is
|
||
incompatible with God being a person, but that does not tell against
|
||
the kind of pantheism entailed by ontological philosophy. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The God of
|
||
ontological theology is a person, because He has the nature of a
|
||
rational being. Even though ontological philosophy takes the world as
|
||
a whole to be God, that is compatible with God being a person,
|
||
because the world itself has behavior that is guided to do what is
|
||
good for it by rational subjects who do what as good for the world as
|
||
part of their self interest. That is not incompatible with God being
|
||
a rational agent that also has an individual and spiritual self
|
||
interest. Indeed, even if Christianity had not believed in the
|
||
Trinity, ontological philosophy would still have had to recognize
|
||
something surprisingly similar to it, because a spatiomaterial world
|
||
like ours necessarily has rational subjects with an individual,
|
||
spiritual and rational self interest. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">I<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdnR_17" align="right" hspace="5" vspace="10" width="118" height="26" border="0">t
|
||
is even possible for ontological philosophy to confirm the
|
||
traditional Christian view of original sin as the source of evil in
|
||
the world and, thereby, understand its view of the meaning of life.
|
||
But since its interpretation of that doctrine locates original sin in
|
||
the larger context of evolution, it avoids the problems that the
|
||
existence of evil has posed for traditional theism.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Original
|
||
sin can be explained as war. Accordingly, the Garden of Eden would
|
||
represent the innocent life of higher primates or first hominids. War
|
||
was an inevitable evil, because this means that the serpent that
|
||
talked Adam and Eve into disobeying God's command was the evolution
|
||
of natural sentences (rather than an angel rebelling against God,
|
||
which is, in any case, difficult to reconcile with God's omnipotence.
|
||
The use of language made war a possible means for groups of hominids
|
||
to overcome the scarcity caused by the reproduction of spiritual
|
||
animals, and it can even be seen as a "violation" of God's
|
||
command in the sense that groups of nonlinguistic animals are
|
||
apparently unable to evolve the behavior of killing other groups of
|
||
animals from their own species in order to acquire food. But the
|
||
evolution of war in spiritual animals was inevitable, and the advent
|
||
of war can be seen as banishing them from the Garden of Eden, for it
|
||
forced them to live in a dangerous world indeed. To fight wars was,
|
||
furthermore, to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good
|
||
and evil, because as we have seen, the group-level selection pressure
|
||
imposed by warfare led to the evolution of reason. Though the
|
||
original function of reason was to choose more reliably between war
|
||
and peace, that became, as reason evolved, the more general choice
|
||
between good and evil, because reason had to enable members of
|
||
spiritual animals to live at peace with one another. Evil is what is
|
||
at stake in morality, because individuals had the option of
|
||
intentionally harming others as a means to their ends, and from their
|
||
adaptation to war, they even had desires that made it possible to
|
||
enjoy killing other members of their own species. Reason discovered
|
||
moral rules that limited the pursuit of their interests, and it gave
|
||
them autonomy, or free will, that is, the ability to resist even the
|
||
strongest animal desire and do what they believe is good and right.
|
||
But it was an imperfect mechanism, and moral evil was an inevitable
|
||
apart of the world. Thus, their fate was to be both the agent and
|
||
patient of harm done intentionally, both war and moral trespasses
|
||
against other individuals — not to mention bearing the burden of
|
||
the labor involved in the evolution spiritual animals. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Ontological
|
||
philosophy can, therefore, confirm, in a way, the traditional
|
||
doctrine of original sin. But what is more, ontological theology
|
||
solves other problems that Christian theology faces about the nature
|
||
of evil. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">One problem
|
||
with the doctrine of original sin is the inability to explain why God
|
||
would create beings with a free will who He knew would disobey Him.
|
||
That is supposed to be part of God’s mysterious purpose and, thus,
|
||
beyond human understanding. And even though Christians believe that
|
||
God ultimately would forgive them their original sin, making
|
||
salvation possible, there is no explanation why, generation after
|
||
generation, the fate of their immortal souls should depend on the
|
||
choices they make on earth. That was still part of the mystery. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Another
|
||
problem is the fact that evil exists at all, for that argues against
|
||
the existence of a supernatural God. That is the so-called “problem
|
||
of evil.” If God created a world that contains evil, then either
|
||
(1) God must not be absolutely good, (2) God must not be all-knowing,
|
||
or (3) God must not be all-powerful. God must lack at least one of
|
||
these three traditional perfections. There is some plausibility to
|
||
the claim that the existence of moral evil is necessary on the
|
||
grounds that evil will be done as long as there are beings who have
|
||
both free will and the capacity to do evil, and that cannot be
|
||
avoided, if the existence of human beings in a world like our serves
|
||
some higher purpose that God in creating the natural world in the
|
||
first place. But it is still a mystery why the existence of finite
|
||
beings with free will is good or makes the natural world good. And
|
||
even if there is some such explanation of moral evil, there is still
|
||
no explanation why natural evil, such as famine, disease, and
|
||
earthquakes, should be part of God's plan. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Ontological
|
||
theology, however, solves both these problems. Evil does not show
|
||
that an immanent God must lack any of the personal perfections of
|
||
God, because the world as a perfect rational being will do everything
|
||
that can be done to avoid evil in the world. It is just that the evil
|
||
that occurs in evolution is not something that can be avoided,
|
||
because that is how perfect rational beings come to exist. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Ontological
|
||
philosophy also explains, therefore, why there are beings with free
|
||
will who must struggle against original sin in order to avoid evil.
|
||
War and the evolution of reason is an inevitable stage in the
|
||
evolution of spiritual animals. Furthermore, this explanation reveals
|
||
why the existence of such rational beings is good: it makes a
|
||
necessary contribution to the natural perfection of life, the natural
|
||
perfection of evolutionary change, and in the end, to the evolution
|
||
of perfect rational beings in the world. No being who lacks the power
|
||
to do evil can be an all-powerful being. The progressiveness of
|
||
evolution, therefore, compensates for the moral evil that exists in
|
||
the world. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Finally,
|
||
even the natural evil that exists in the world is compensated.
|
||
Nothing can be good without evil, because evil is necessary for
|
||
evolution. The scarcity caused as reproductive cycles multiply is
|
||
evil, by our definition of "good", because it detracts from
|
||
the natural perfection of which it is part. But such evil is
|
||
compensated. There would be no natural perfection and, thus, no
|
||
goodness without it, because that is how reproductive cycles impose
|
||
natural selection on themselves and propel evolution along. Likewise,
|
||
since disease is a necessary consequence of the evolution of
|
||
organisms at lower levels of biological organization, it makes a
|
||
contribution to the natural perfection of the ecology. Death is a
|
||
necessary part of the structure of the reproductive cycles of
|
||
multicellular animals and, thus, of subsequent evolution. And even
|
||
natural catastrophes, like the impact of asteroids, play a necessary
|
||
role, because they alter conditions so radically that inherently more
|
||
powerful organisms can replace inherently less powerful incumbents in
|
||
ecological niches. That is, after all, how mammals replaced dinosaurs
|
||
in the most energy rich ecological niches some 65 million years ago. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">N<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdnR_18" align="right" hspace="5" vspace="10" width="118" height="27" border="0">ot
|
||
only does the belief in an immanent God make it possible to see a
|
||
truth in the Christian belief about the meaning of life -- that it is
|
||
the struggle for salvation from original sin -- but it can also be
|
||
seen as confirming the “glad tidings” taught by Jesus about
|
||
eventual success. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>Grace.
|
||
</i>The “good news” was that God has forgiven us our sins, and
|
||
according to ontological philosophy, Christians are right to believe
|
||
that salvation from original sin is possible. Indeed, it can even be
|
||
said to depend on the grace of God, although the grace of God must be
|
||
understood, not as a gift of forgiveness of sin by a transcendent
|
||
God, but rather as the fact that the nature of the world makes
|
||
perfection possible for spiritual animals and their members. It is
|
||
possible in the end to control population growth and arrange human
|
||
affairs so that wars do not occur and human beings are not even
|
||
tempted to do evil to one another. Indeed, that is part of the
|
||
natural perfection of the world itself that ontological reason
|
||
undertakes to bring about when it acknowledges its religious
|
||
interest. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>Heaven.</i>
|
||
Salvation from sin means that the kingdom of God is at hand and that
|
||
we shall have eternal life in heaven. What Jesus saw was the kind of
|
||
natural perfection that is possible for beings like us, who can see
|
||
into one another minds and act together in pursuing goals. Jesus was
|
||
right to insist that what it involves is loving God and loving one’s
|
||
neighbor, for that is what is involved in pursuing religious goals.
|
||
But according to ontological theology, heaven will be at hand only
|
||
when ontological reason acknowledges its religious interest and
|
||
pursues goals because they make the world as a whole naturally
|
||
perfect. And in that heaven, there will be eternal life. Once a
|
||
perfect rational being exists, reason can go on pursuing goals that
|
||
are in individual, spiritual and religious interest forever, because
|
||
spiritual animals can live as long as the world. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>Belief
|
||
in Christ.</i> Salvation is supposed to be the result of believing in
|
||
Christ, that is, believing that He is the Son of god and following
|
||
his commandments to love God and our neighbors as ourselves. But
|
||
Jesus was mistaken to believe that all that heaven requires is a
|
||
change of heart, a conversion to Christianity. Heaven will exist only
|
||
when original sin is overcome, and according to this naturalistic
|
||
ontological interpretation of his gospel, that requires the labor of
|
||
reason, though cultural evolution and history. When Jesus taught his
|
||
vision of perfection, there was still much more for reason to learn
|
||
before it could understand the wholeness of the world. And once that
|
||
is understood, reason still must do God’s work by, among other
|
||
things, controlling the causes of war and controlling the causes of
|
||
the moral evil that individuals do to one another. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">On this
|
||
interpretation of Christian theology, therefore, the significance of
|
||
the belief that Christ is God become man is that it is possible for
|
||
rational subjects like us to understand the word of God and create
|
||
heaven on earth. That is, Jesus represents the fate of rational
|
||
subjects generally. It happens during the philosophical stage of
|
||
spiritual evolution when reason finally understands how the world is
|
||
whole, sees itself as the inevitable outcome of evolution, and by
|
||
understanding the nature of goodness, understands how and why it is
|
||
good for reason to pursue goals that are good for the world as a
|
||
whole. As ontological reason acknowledges its religious interest and
|
||
does the work of creating God, original sin is overcome and eternal
|
||
life in heaven begins. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">In sum,
|
||
salvation depends, not on faith, but on reason. The incarnation of
|
||
God is that rational subjects have the kind of understanding that God
|
||
was supposed to have when he created the natural world. It is, in
|
||
effect, to understand God's purpose in creating the world. And that
|
||
is what makes it possible to create heaven on Earth.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">T<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdnR_20" align="right" hspace="5" vspace="10" width="118" height="25" border="0">he
|
||
promise of eternal life in the presence of God may seem to be where
|
||
ontological philosophy fails to explain Christian theology, because
|
||
it must deny that rational subjects have immortal souls. The immortal
|
||
soul is supposed to be a substance that continues to endure though
|
||
time after the body decays. But except for the matter and space that
|
||
constituted the body, there is no such substance, and thus, there can
|
||
be no life after death. That does not mean, however, that ontological
|
||
philosophy must deny the promise of eternal life in heaven. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Though they
|
||
are not immortal as individuals, rational beings can and will be
|
||
immortal as a spiritual animal. Spiritual animals can be immortal,
|
||
because they do not reproduce by the sexual mixing of parts of their
|
||
structures, like eukaryotes. They reproduce by division, like
|
||
prokaryotes. The same spiritual animal can continue to exist
|
||
indefinitely, and that is what begins when reason evolves into God.
|
||
The perfect rational being that comes to exist on earth as the
|
||
outcome of evolution is the existence of God in the world, and that
|
||
is eternal life in heaven. The immortality of the spiritual animal is
|
||
a kind of immortality for the rational subject, because the spiritual
|
||
animal is an aspect of the self in whose interest the rational
|
||
subject acts. Indeed, the <i>world itself </i>as a whole is an aspect
|
||
of the self in whose interest the rational subject acts, once the
|
||
world becomes a perfect rational being in that sense. The immortality
|
||
of the spiritual animal and the world are way in which the self live
|
||
on after the death of the individual body. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">To be sure,
|
||
the individual must eventually die. Since rational subjects are
|
||
multicellular animals, they cannot live without going through
|
||
reproductive cycles in which they are born and die. But the life of
|
||
the rational subject as an individual multicellular animal is not the
|
||
only life she has, because she is, as a rational being with
|
||
ontological reason, the agent who guides the behavior of her
|
||
spiritual animal and even the world itself, not just her own body.
|
||
That is, the self in whose interest she acts is not just the
|
||
individual, but also the spiritual animal and the world, and her
|
||
spiritual and divine self are immortal. That is how the rational
|
||
subject has life after death.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Ontological
|
||
philosophy does imply, nevertheless, that rational subjects do not
|
||
continue to live as individuals after the death of the body, and this
|
||
is not what Christians believe about how their souls are immortal. It
|
||
may, however, be closer to what Jesus himself actually meant, because
|
||
as a Jew, the kind of salvation that he probably believed the Messiah
|
||
would bring was heaven on Earth. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The belief
|
||
that salvation takes the form of immortal souls in an otherworldly
|
||
heaven could have been what the earliest followers of Jesus came to
|
||
believe in order to avoid losing their faith in Jesus’ message when
|
||
he was crucified. If they expected the kingdom of God to begin
|
||
immediately on earth, his death would suggest that Jesus was simply
|
||
mistaken. But it was possible to continue to believe that Jesus'
|
||
followers would have eternal life in heaven, even though it did not
|
||
happen on earth, if it meant having immortal souls that live in the
|
||
presence of God in a transcendent realm. That would be the
|
||
significance of the resurrection and ascension, and it would be
|
||
another distortion caused by the belief in a transcendent God. (For a
|
||
defense of such a view, see Thomas <font color="#0000ff"><u><a href="/F:/Philosophy/Existentialism/The%20Wholeness%20Of%20the%20World/www.twow.net/ObjText/#Sheehan">Sheehan</a></u></font>,
|
||
1986.) </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Though
|
||
ontological philosophy must deny that rational subjects have immortal
|
||
lives as individuals, that does not mean that its immanent God is any
|
||
less worthy of worship than the traditional Christian God. It merely
|
||
reflects the difference in what rational beings really want that
|
||
comes from understanding the nature of existence. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">In a world
|
||
constituted by space and matter, the immortality of bodily existence
|
||
is not a good thing. Rational subjects who understand their nature
|
||
ontologically as inevitable products of evolution by reproductive
|
||
causation will not want to be immortal as individual multicellular
|
||
animals. They will recognize that the desire to have an immortal soul
|
||
is a form of narcissism, an unhealthy kind of "selfishness."
|
||
</font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">It is
|
||
possible to extend lives, and that will be done, because it is good.
|
||
Life is not currently long enough to make the most of it. And it will
|
||
probably also be possible to make the body immortal in the sense that
|
||
it will not die of old age or disease, but only by accident. But it
|
||
would not be good to make the body immortal, because the natural
|
||
perfection of the rational subject as an individual requires a
|
||
temporal limit to life. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The life of
|
||
an individual is a process of growth. She starts out as a baby, only
|
||
later acquiring the capacity for reflection, and she goes through a
|
||
process of development and growth that continues throughout life,
|
||
until death. What makes the maximum holistic power of the
|
||
multicellular animal <i>holistic </i>is that it controls all the
|
||
conditions that affect reproduction over the whole cycle. That is the
|
||
way to make the most of the least in the case of the individual
|
||
animal. The parts that fit together as such an optimal whole are
|
||
mainly the rational actions that make up the life as a
|
||
four-dimensional object, and the individual gains power to control
|
||
relevant conditions in the process of growing older. One acquires
|
||
practical wisdom as time is running out. The self one constructs is
|
||
like a painting, as I suggested earlier, that is painted from left to
|
||
right on the canvas, trying to make the most of every part of the
|
||
life. That each moment make its own essential contribution to the
|
||
perfection of the whole -- that is, that it not be redundant -- is a
|
||
essential aspect of the structure of the natural perfection of the
|
||
individual animal. If life did not terminate at some point, there
|
||
would be no whole of which the parts are all parts and thus no
|
||
possibility of a natural perfection about it. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Or to put
|
||
it negatively, growth is such an essential part of the structure of
|
||
the natural perfection of individual life that the worst hell that a
|
||
reflective subject with ontological reason could imagine is to have
|
||
grown as much as possible for beings of her kind and yet be unable to
|
||
die. Even if she were in perfect health and in possession of her
|
||
faculties, it would become boring to go on living, because in a world
|
||
made of space and matter, there is a limit to how much an rational
|
||
subject can do and learn and enjoy. After she had passed that limit
|
||
far enough, it would be torture to wake up each day and know that it
|
||
would just another repetition of something already experienced many
|
||
times before. Fortunately, such a condition is not possible for
|
||
rational subjects with behavior guidance systems based on brains. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">G<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdnR_16" align="right" hspace="5" vspace="10" width="118" height="26" border="0">od’s
|
||
transcendence of the natural world.</font> Christians believe that
|
||
God transcends the natural world, and that seems to be an aspect of
|
||
traditional theology that ontological philosophy must deny. But
|
||
transcendence is not relevant to God's worthiness of worship, for it
|
||
is simply what Christians had to believe in order to believe that God
|
||
is responsible for their own existence and the source of purpose in
|
||
the world. Ontological philosophy makes it possible to see God as the
|
||
creator in the latter sense without transcending the natural world. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Christian
|
||
believe that God created the natural world out of nothing. It is the
|
||
role of God as the Father to call into existence by an act of will
|
||
the natural world and the teleological order it involves, including
|
||
human beings. But if God as the Father is the basic nature of a
|
||
spatiomaterial world like ours, as ontological philosophy implies,
|
||
God is still the source of human beings and all the purpose in the
|
||
world. That is, God is still the creator of the natural world in the
|
||
relevant sense, and thus, such an immanent God is no less worthy of
|
||
worship than the transcendent God of traditional Christian theology.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">An immanent
|
||
God cannot create the world as act of will. But the world can, and
|
||
does, by the very nature of what exists in it, give rise to the
|
||
existence of rational beings like us. It is our “creator” in the
|
||
sense of being the source of our existence. To be sure, since we are
|
||
a necessary consequence of its nature, we are not something done from
|
||
the knowledge of the nature of goodness, that is, created as an act
|
||
of free will. But the nature of the world gives rise to us as part of
|
||
the process by which it gives rise to natural perfection and a real
|
||
difference between good and bad in the world. Thus, even though God
|
||
is not a substance existing outside space and time that gives rise to
|
||
a world of objects in space that change through time, God turns out
|
||
to be the cause of our human world and the source of real difference
|
||
between good and bad. Hence, an immanent God is no less awesome. Nor
|
||
is such an immanent God any less beneficent, that is, “good-doing,”
|
||
though, of course, He cannot be benevolent, that is, “good-willing,”
|
||
except through God’s self creation as a perfect rational being. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Simply
|
||
being immanent does not make God any less a perfect rational being
|
||
than a transcendent God. To be sure, an immanent God does not know as
|
||
much and is not as powerful as it seems a transcendent God would be.
|
||
But that does not make an immanent God any less worthy of worship,
|
||
because it does not imply that an immanent God is inferior to a
|
||
transcendent God. It is merely a difference is the conception of
|
||
perfection that comes from one's conception of the nature of
|
||
existence. The kind of perfect knowledge and power that is
|
||
conceivable in a substance that exists outside space and time is
|
||
different from the kind of perfect knowledge and power that is
|
||
conceivable in something made of space and matter in time. But that
|
||
does not show that one is better than the other, for it is just a
|
||
question of which ontology is true of the actual world. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Finally, if
|
||
there is a difference in perfection, there is one way in which an
|
||
immanent God is more perfect than a transcendent God. Both are alike
|
||
in having something permanent and unchanging about them. A
|
||
transcendent God is unchanging because He outside of time, whereas an
|
||
immanent God is unchanging because He is constituted by substances
|
||
that endure through time with the same essential natures and they
|
||
inevitably give rise to perfect rational beings. But since a
|
||
transcendent God is outside time, He cannot change at all. Thus, He
|
||
lacks at least one perfection that an immanent God can have, namely,
|
||
the natural perfection of change itself. When evolution is change in
|
||
the direction of natural perfection, as we have seen, each moment in
|
||
the existence of the world makes a unique and necessary contribution
|
||
to the existence of a perfect rational being in the world. Time is
|
||
another way in which parts may be combined optimally as a whole, and
|
||
a transcendent God is deprived of it. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">God’s
|
||
transcendence of the natural world is not, therefore, what makes Him
|
||
worthy of reverence. Rather, transcendence marks Him as the God of
|
||
epistemological philosophy. Though Christianity inherited the belief
|
||
that God is the creator of the natural world from Judaism, His
|
||
transcendence of the natural world is explained in Christian theology
|
||
in a way that depends on Western philosophy. Ever since Augustine, at
|
||
least, it has been explained in terms of Plato’s dualism of
|
||
Becoming and Being (albeit by way of its transformation into a more
|
||
idealist, neo-Platonist metaphysics by Plotinus). Plato first used
|
||
the dichotomy between naturalistic and subjectivistic understanding
|
||
(together with the radically different phenomenal appearances of the
|
||
objects of each form of understanding) to explain what is good in the
|
||
natural world as deriving from a supernatural source. And deriving
|
||
from a form of metaphysical dualism that results from the
|
||
epistemological approach to philosophy, it is not surprising that the
|
||
belief in a transcendent God leads to serious theoretical problems.
|
||
The problems are all solved by ontological theology.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>The
|
||
Problem of Proving God's Existence. </i>The most immediate problem of
|
||
traditional theology is proving God's existence. The dualism entailed
|
||
by realism in epistemological philosophy usually leads, as we have
|
||
seen, to doubts about realism, or anti-realism, and in the case of
|
||
Christian theism, that means atheism. The transcendence of God makes
|
||
it impossible to prove His existence from within space and time. But
|
||
it is possible, as we have seen, to prove the existence of an
|
||
immanent God, for this is a spatiomaterial world of the right kind. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
metaphysical dualisms of epistemological philosophy are inherently
|
||
problematic. Plato could not explain adequately how two such
|
||
different substances as Being and Becoming are related as parts of
|
||
the same world. Christianity escapes being embarrassed by that
|
||
problem only by insisting that the relationship is just part of the
|
||
mystery about God. Though as persons (or rational beings), we are
|
||
supposed to be created in the image of God, we are finite rational
|
||
beings, and thus, we must simply accept the mystery and have faith in
|
||
God. But the mysteriousness of God cannot, as such, make God worthy
|
||
of worship. At best, the mystery merely leaves the possibility that
|
||
God will turn out to be holy. And at worst, it is a mask that could
|
||
just as well be worn by an evil or contemptible being and faith could
|
||
be our undoing. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>The
|
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Problem of God's Foreknowledge. </i>Nor does the dualism of God and
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nature escape the theoretical problems inherent in a Platonic
|
||
metaphysics. For example, God, being perfect, is supposed to be
|
||
omniscient, as well as omnipotent and absolutely good. But since He
|
||
exists outside of time as the creator of the natural world, He
|
||
creates all the moments in the history of the natural world at once,
|
||
including everything that finite rational beings ever do. Thus, God
|
||
must already know what each individual will choose in each situation
|
||
she faces. But that is hard to reconcile with the belief that
|
||
individuals have a free will and that what becomes of us and the
|
||
world is the result of our doing it. The future is not open. It is
|
||
always already determined what we will do. Thus, God’s
|
||
foreknowledge of what will happen seems to deny that rational
|
||
subjects are free to choose in the way they think they are. </font></font>
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||
</p>
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||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">No such
|
||
problem arises from the belief that God is immanent, even though God
|
||
is still a perfect rational being, including omniscience, because
|
||
knowing everything that it is possible to know as a rational being
|
||
constituted space and matter does not include knowing what every
|
||
rational being will ever do. It is possible to know what individuals
|
||
have done in the past. And it is possible to know what will happen in
|
||
the long run because of global regularities. But there are no
|
||
necessary truths about what rational beings will choose in particular
|
||
situations. That is among the contingent details that can be known
|
||
only through experience of the world. (Nor is there any reason to
|
||
believe that actual choices can be predicted by knowing how the bits
|
||
of matter constituting a rational subject are moving and
|
||
interacting.) In any case, since what exists are substances that
|
||
endure through time, the future is open in the sense that it depends
|
||
on what we choose to do (along with what else is happening at the
|
||
time). Thus, the belief in an immanent God solves the traditional
|
||
problem about God’s omniscience imply foreknowledge of our choices.
|
||
</font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Nothing
|
||
that Christians must give up, if they accept the foundation of
|
||
ontological philosophy and accepts the necessary truths that follow
|
||
from it, shows that the immanent God entailed by spatiomaterialism is
|
||
any less worthy of worship than their traditional God. What changes
|
||
is one's conception of the nature of existence, and that has
|
||
implications about the nature of perfection that can be conceived in
|
||
such a world. Thus, even though ontological philosophy must deny that
|
||
God transcends the natural world, that does not mean that there is no
|
||
perfect being, for as it turns out in a spatiomaterial world like
|
||
ours, the world itself is as perfect a perfect being as can be
|
||
conceived to be made of space and matter. And that perfect being is
|
||
demonstrably worthy of worship, if the God of traditional Christian
|
||
theology is. Indeed, ontological theology would have to include the
|
||
doctrine of the trinity, quite apart from Christian theology, because
|
||
the ultimate perfection of the world comes from how perfect rational
|
||
subjects have three kinds of self interest: individual, spiritual and
|
||
religious. Far from denying the doctrine of original sin, ontological
|
||
philosophy clarifies what it is. With that clarification of original
|
||
sin is, it not only confirms the Christian belief about the meaning
|
||
of life being the struggle to overcome sin, but it points the way to
|
||
overcoming it. Salvation is surely no less valuable for being
|
||
achieved by reason rather than by faith. The denial of personal
|
||
immortality may seem to be a sticking point for some, but the
|
||
desirability of immortality is an illusion that comes from failing to
|
||
recognize the basic nature of the life of individual reflective
|
||
subjects, for when it is understood ontologically, its natural
|
||
perfection precludes immortality. Indeed, it would be hell, and as it
|
||
turns out, there is no hell, according to ontological theology. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; text-indent: 0cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">If,
|
||
therefore, the Christian God is worthy of worship, the perfect
|
||
rational being that the world turns out to be, according to
|
||
ontological philosophy, is no less worthy of worship. On the
|
||
contrary, the insights into the nature of God make Him more worthy of
|
||
worship. Not only is it possible to know about God without a leap of
|
||
faith, but it is possible for reason to know what work it is that
|
||
needs to be done in the name of God.</font></font></font></p>
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