The mixing of religious and non-religious beliefs in an individual.

How Christianity baptized Western Philosophy

In the eleventh century, a brilliant logician, St. Anselm of Canterbury, come up with a celebrated proof of the existence of God. In the following argument, he imagines that someone has made the claim that “God does not exist,” and uses logic to prove its impossibility.

PROBLEM: Someone understands the statement that “God exists,” but claims that it is not true.

POSSIBLE OUTCOMES: Either God does not exist in reality, but exists in the mind (because we understand the statement “God exists” and can imagine him) or God exists in both mind and reality.

PROPOSITION 1: “God” is the name we give to the greatest thing we can imagine.

PROPOSITION 2: It is greater to exist in the mind and reality than only in the mind. (Or put differently, a real ice-cream is better than an imaginary one, no matter how good we imagine the imaginary one to be.)

SUMATION: If God existed only in the mind, it would be possible to imagine something in reality which was greater, but which was not God.

CONCLUSION: Therefore, in order to be the greatest thing possible, God must exist in reality.

Despite the neatness of Anselm’s approach, it has its problems. For Anselm, these problems begins when Saint Thomas Aquinas introduced the arguments of Aristotle’s about a First Cause. We remember how Aristotle talks about the mundane tangible things in the universe and he observes that if you push something, like a rock, then it moves and if that rock then hits something else, then it moves too? Well, Aquinas approached to the problem from a different starting position. He used things observable in the real world (clues) to lead to answers based on deduction.

Aristotle showed that each moving thing had to have been first moved. This could almost go back to infinity, he said, but not quite: at some point there had to be something which started it all, something which moves something else but which is not itself moved. Yes, it’s a bit like the chicken and egg debate) There must be, in Aristotle’s words, a Primus Motor, an Unmoved Mover. Aquinas therefore fused the two arguments together and suggested that we might as well call this Mover “God.”

Aquinas was able to solve his case because he was able to reject the “forward-logic” of the world around him and concentrate on the details. But how, I might ask can we refute this kind of deduction?

Tags: Aquinas, Aristotle, Christianity, Philosophy

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Generous George on March 5, 2011 at 9:16pm

How fortunate to be blessed with that divine knowledge and privileged to know.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Khem the Is Real-ite on July 15, 2011 at 10:50pm

skadoodily-bump

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Khem the Is Real-ite on July 16, 2011 at 1:10am

ttt

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Claudia M. Mazzucco on July 16, 2011 at 7:38am

What is that supposed to mean?!!!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeff H on July 16, 2011 at 7:49am

It means Khem was bored and wanted this discussion to come around again,

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by James Germiquet on July 16, 2011 at 10:21am

maybe for khem this time we can concider it more along the lines of how christianity bastardized western phiposophy.

On a more serious note the problem is that we have no idea what "reality" really is other than this totally inasequate perception of it.

We don't even know what God is, and 'everything; exists "in the mind", and we never know what is happening in 'real time' because by the time we receive the audio/video or physical sensation and recognize it the event has long since past and all we can do is react to someithing that happened in the past, or something we believe happened in the past. Some say 'deja vu' is just the brain seeing something and then mistakenly storing that event out of sequence so we think it is something we have done before.

All we have is what we are doing at this instance which goes into the vaccuum of the past so fast we don't even realize it.

Of course in the NOW you are reading what I wrote a long time ago (yes time is relative is it not)?

And if in the future you happen to respond I will not see that response till long after you have posted it.

It is interesting how my life (our lives if you exist) are simply a creation and collection of such cognition of what we perceive of as physical reality.

▶ Reply

▶ Reply to Discussion

‹ Previous
1
2
Next ›

RSS

Welcome to
Open Source Religion

Sign Up
or Sign In

Or sign in with:

Just mention Open Source Religion, Proprietary Religion, Belief Genome, Belief Modules, or Prerequisite Beliefs in a tweet to appear in this twitter feed.