Changing understanding of God

[Athena]

There is a new book out titled "The God Biographers". I do not have it yet, but hope to have it soon, because I know the understanding of God has changed very much throughout history, and without question science is changing our understanding of God. If you know of any of the people listed below, would you please write what you know. The book is expensive and if you know enough, I won't buy the book.

 

The God Biographers presents a sweeping narrative of the Western image of God since antiquity, following the theme of how the _old_ biography of God has been challenged by a _new_ biography in the twenty-first century. The new biography has made its case in free will theism, process thought, evolutionary doctrines, relational theology, and _open theism__a story of people, ideas, and events that is brought up to the present in this engaging narrative. Readers will meet the God biographers in the old and new camps. On the one side are Job, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, and Calvin. On the other side is a group that includes the early Unitarian and Wesleyan thinkers, the process thinkers Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Charles Hartshorne, and finally a new breed of evangelical philosophers. This story looks closely at the cultural and scientific context of each age and how these shaped the images of God. In the twenty-first century, that image is being shaped by new human experiences and the findings of science. Today, the debate between the old biographers and the new is playing out in the forums of modern theology, courtrooms, and social movements. Larry Witham tells that panoramic story in an engaging narrative for specialists and general readers alike.

[mississippichem]

There is a new book out titled "The God Biographers". I do not have it yet, but hope to have it soon, because I know the understanding of God has changed very much throughout history, and without question science is changing our understanding of God. If you know of any of the people listed below, would you please write what you know. The book is expensive and if you know enough, I won't buy the book.

 

How is science changing our understanding of God?

 

That sounds like an interesting book though.

Edited May 18, 2011 by mississippichem

[Marat]

This sounds like an interesting book, but hasn't the essential philosophical groundwork of a renewed understanding of God for the modern world already been worked out some time ago by authors like Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ludwig Boltmann, Paul Tillich, and Carl Jung? Essentially, they decided that the old account of the nature of God was just too silly for words, so they tried to make it more respectable by extinguishing its preposterous physicality and anthropomorphism, and substituting for this a rather hyperinflated balloon filled with metaphysical implications. But since saving the God concept that way turned out to push it too close to atheism, theology has been in a bit of a quandry ever since.

 

What I don't understand about those who follow the full historical development of the concept of God under all the contingent, empirical influences of Ancient Greek metaphysics, Roman Stoicism, Medieval Nominalism, Medieval Universalism, modern Existentialism, the Kerygma and Myth school, etc., is how they can take God seriously as a real and transcendent being when they can see that the concept of God is so much a product of the surrounding historical forces, none of which can claim to be transcendent truths rather than just varying currents of human opinion? It is as if a hundred monkeys typing for a million years by coindicence produced, among millions of pages of nonsense, one coherent page, and we were then to fall down on our knees and worship the message of that text as divine. "But we can see that it originated in pure contingency!" I shout from the sidelines, yet everyone continues worshipping it.

 

For example, we know that historically the early Israelites were influenced by the monotheism developing in Ancient Egypt, and we can see that the Ancient Egyptian stories of Isis and Osiris are analogous to the Christ story, as are the Ancient Greek stories of the death and resurrection of various gods, such as Orpheus and Dionysus. We can also trace the various routes by which these ideas, plus the Ancient Greek idea of a soul persisting after death (cf. the Harpy Tomb), contributed to the mix of ideas in the Roman Province of Judea to produce the basis of modern Christianity. Yet while we dismiss Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek myths as ridiculous, we suddenly regard the product of their historical combination in Ancient Judea as the one true word of God and the one great miracle that opened the gates of Heaven for mankind. Since anyone with a knowledge of the historical influences operating in Ancient Judea at the time could reasonably have posited the emergence of something like modern Christian doctrine just from the purely natural, empirical, and contingent interaction of those intellectual historical forces, even had there been no divine intervention to produce the essential miracle of the one true resurrection of the one true God, why are we so sure that the accidental confluence of those intellectual historical influences is divine?

[Athena]

How is science changing our understanding of God?

 

That sounds like an interesting book though.

 

I don't know as much about this as I wish I did, but---

 

The first big knock for Christianity was the undeniable proof that the earth revolves around the sun, and the planets are not perfect orbs in the heavens. This was obvious when Galileo used a telescope to study the heavens, but the church refused to look through his telescope, and prevented him from telling the truth, by holding him under house arrest, and threatening to kill him if he didn't remain silent. When the truth could no longer be denied, it was more difficult for the Protestants to adjust to this scientific fact, because they thought reforming the church, meant interpreting the bible literally, and the Catholics had a more abstract approach to the bible.

 

Newton made a big difference, and I think Deism was the result? I think Deism claims God made everything and it all continues to function like a machine. Once our mechanical universe was created by God, He steps back and just lets the machine run. On the one hand, there was a thrill that there are laws regulating everything, because this seems to prove there is a God. On the other, some are pleased with the idea that we are created equal, instead of God controlling everything, including who is born to be a master and who is born to be a slave. Making Newton partly responsible for a different way of understanding God, and also in part, for the acceptance of democracy.

 

The most intense fight between Judaism had with the Hellenism is this idea that God chooses kings, etc., and the Hellenist rulers who spread to Israel didn't respect this, and appointed people to governing positions not respecting their birth right place in society. When the Greeks wrote the bible, they unfortunately locked us into the idea that God chose who will be masters and servants, and this held back democracy, until there was a place without an already established king. Christians remain divided on this issue, and not all of them support democracy.

 

Darwin, of course, strongly impacted religion and this fight is still going on, with powerful people in Texas insisting school text should teach creationism along side evolution. Chardin, a Catholic priest wrote evolution is God's plan, several years ago, but the church refused to allow him to publish. His family had his book published when he died. The God of Abraham religions have a big, big problem with evolution, because maybe then we aren't born in sin, and don't need our souls saved. However, the religious people's ability to rationalize science with their beliefs is quite amazing.

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Thank you all that information, Marat. I am so in agreement with you. I think this shows how much power Christians have had over education, and education for technology has not been the big improvement it could be. I think the religious folks would like to claim civilization begins with the Hebrews and the word of God, but the holy book mentions Egypt and Babylon so we can't avoid mentioning them. However, we do not mention earlier civilizations such as Sumer, and its explanation of the Garden of Eden and flood, so seriously how concerned are we are in presenting a non biased history?

 

I seriously do not know how much longer a well educated public will passively accept a Christian biased history? Thanks to geology, archeology and related sciences, how much longer can our schools not reflect what we have learned through the sciences in the teaching of history? I am not as sure as you about the non existence of God, but think it is paramount we participate in the resurrection that is the work of geologist and archeologist, and use all the intelligence to we can muster to rethinking everything important to our survival on this planet.

Edited May 19, 2011 by Athena

[lemur]

they tried to make it more respectable by extinguishing its preposterous physicality and anthropomorphism, and substituting for this a rather hyperinflated balloon filled with metaphysical implications. But since saving the God concept that way turned out to push it too close to atheism, theology has been in a bit of a quandry ever since.

Some Jehovah's witnesses explained it best to me in terms of God needing a human image so that people could experience intimacy with "Him." They basically explained that thinking of "God" as a force or using an impersonal noun, i.e. "god," causes people to feel social distance toward divinity. By thinking of him as a loving father, one who loves you and wants the best for you, it makes it easier for people to embrace religious teachings as having benevolent intentions as opposed to the way some religions present God as an angry punisher (also anthropomorphic btw). Personally, I actually think it can be enlightening to think of God as a force or use various other metaphors in exploring the meaning, but I think the anthropomorphic approach can also be methodologically useful.

[Marat]

Christians use a variety of inconsistent approaches to defend their belief and dodge from one approach to the next according to the arguments presented against them. Thus if you complain that their god seems too anthropomorphic, they explain that it is only metaphorically so, in order to appeal to the literalism of the original audience to whom the message was first presented. But then if you complain about other sections of their message, such as Christ rising up into heaven postumously, this is not defended as a metaphor for literalist primitives but is instead taken deadly seriously in its most literal meaning as god saving us by dying and tangibly coming out of a physical tomb. But then the question has to be: How do Christians know what in the Bible is to be taken literally and what is just a metaphor? A book full of supernatural assertions contains no key about what it is reasonable to think of as real and what has to be thought of only as symbolic, the way a normal, empirical history text using the phrase, "That was the face that launched a thousand ships," would clearly signal that a face did not really launch any ships, but that that was just a metaphorical turn of phrase.