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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 2
Lesson 6: Religion- Religion: Cosmological Argument, Part 1
- Religion: Cosmological Argument, Part 2
- Religion: Classical Theism, Part 1 (Two Conceptions of God)
- Religion: Classical Theism, Part 2 (In Favor of Classical Theism)
- Religion: Classical Theism, Part 3 (God's Omnipotence)
- Religion: Classical Theism, Part 4 (God's Omniscience)
- Religion: Classical Theism, Part 5 (God’s Goodness and Justice)
- Religion: Classical Theism, Part 6 (Evil and Goodness in the World)
- Religion: Classical Theism, Part 7 (Atheistic Arguments from Evil)
- Religion: Pascal's Wager
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Religion: Classical Theism, Part 1 (Two Conceptions of God)
In this video, Elmar Kremer (University of Toronto) introduces two theories of the nature of God: classical theism and theistic personalism. In part 1, he considers the arguments that have been made for each theory.
Speaker: Dr. Elmar Kremer, Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto.
Speaker: Dr. Elmar Kremer, Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto.
Want to join the conversation?
- On the application of attributes to God, doesn't the school of negative theology(which has several good arguments, with the assumption of classical theism), as advocated by Moses Maimonides, say that god is indescribable based on characteristics?(2 votes)
- Negative is the means to find these characteristic unfortunately our language falls short but we do our best.(2 votes)
- I don't think that there is one God but many since Paganism has been around longer than Judaism Christianity and Islam.(1 vote)
- No one knows if God really exists. Your just assuming.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(intro music) Hello! My name is Elmar Kremer. I'm a
professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Toronto. Today, I'm going to be talking about
different philosophical ideas of the nature of god. Philosophers who talk about god
usually focus their work on the god of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. But not all philosophers think about
this god in the same way. Their approaches can be divided into two broad types: classical theism
and theistic personalism. Classical theists emphasize that god is
the one on whom everything else depends, and who himself does not
depend on anything. They take this to imply that god is profoundly different from all other things, so different that there is a constant need to purify our language and thought about god. We can truly say, for example,
that god is wise. But St. Thomas Aquinas cautions us that this term “wise” is not applied in
the same way to god and to man. When we say that god is wise, we are
extending the meaning of the word “wise” in something like the way we extend the
meaning of the word “line” if we say “a point is a line of zero length.” Theistic personalists, in contrast, hold that god is a person who differs from
created persons only degree, not in kind. God's wisdom, for example, is very much greater than the wisdom of a created person, and yet the two can be
put on the same scale. A teenager's wisdom, the wisdom
of Socrates, and god's wisdom are related in the way that a car's speed, a jet airplane's speed, and the
speed of light are related. The speed of light happens to be
the fastest speed around, but it is a speed in the same sense of the term
as the speed of a car or a jet airplane. Classical theists and theistic
personalists also differ in the way they think about creation. Classical theists say that since everything other than god depends
on god and he depends on nothing, it follows that he creates and
sustains the world ex nihilo. The idea that god causes the world and
everything in it ex nihilo is elusive, because causing something,
in the usual sense of the word, means changing what already exists, as when you make a table by joining
pieces of wood together or turn on the lights
by flipping a switch. But god does not act causally in that way, and so god and creatures are not causes
in the same sense of the word. Theistic personalists, in contrast, do
not see such a profound difference between god's causing and
creaturely causing. Richard Swinburne, for example, says that it is “easy to imagine what god's creating
things ex nihilo is like.” Creation ex nihilo, Swinburne thinks,
is god's willing that things exist and, lo! their existing! And that, Swinburne says, is a lot like
a human being willing that his hand should have a sixth finger, and lo! his
hand having a sixth finger. Classical theists, of course, would say
that the analogy throws no light on the idea of causation ex nihilo. Causing a person's hand
to have a sixth finger would be an example of acting on
something, on the hand, and therefore not an example of causing ex nihilo. And in any event, if a person were to say,
“Let there be a sixth finger on my hand!” and lo! a sixth finger appeared, that would hardly be a clear-cut
example of causation. On the contrary, the reasonable reaction would be to ask where
the finger came from. In the next segment, I'm going to give you
an argument in favor of classical theism. Subtitles by the Amara.org community