DT Strain
Spiritual Naturalist
I just read a most stimulating thought of Musonius Rufus (Roman Stoic philosopher) saying that "the gods know everything so they have no need of reasoning". This is a remarkable incredible point supporting a naturalism-compatible impersonal God. It is about the contradiction between being (1) an all-knowing and (b) a reasoning 'person'.
Reasoning is taking information/ideas/concepts and juggling them in your mind, trying to understand something or come to some conclusion. When you reason, you are working toward some future state that is, presumably, more preferred than your current state.
But if you are already perfect and know all, then what is there to think/reason about? What decision is there that needs to be made that wasn't already made by the nature of existence at its birth? In fact, if you were visited by a genie who granted your wish to be all-knowing, you might find your individuality and personhood dissolved into the infinite. Our reasoning personhood requires finitude - limits on what we know, so that we have to work things out with incomplete information that is continuously being gathered.
People often think of suggestions of God as impersonal as a demotion - as if God would lack something we have. But persons are tiny limited things. So, when we try to make God a person, we are dragging God down to be as limited as we.
Since we are persons, however, I shall ask: what are your thoughts?
Reasoning is taking information/ideas/concepts and juggling them in your mind, trying to understand something or come to some conclusion. When you reason, you are working toward some future state that is, presumably, more preferred than your current state.
But if you are already perfect and know all, then what is there to think/reason about? What decision is there that needs to be made that wasn't already made by the nature of existence at its birth? In fact, if you were visited by a genie who granted your wish to be all-knowing, you might find your individuality and personhood dissolved into the infinite. Our reasoning personhood requires finitude - limits on what we know, so that we have to work things out with incomplete information that is continuously being gathered.
People often think of suggestions of God as impersonal as a demotion - as if God would lack something we have. But persons are tiny limited things. So, when we try to make God a person, we are dragging God down to be as limited as we.
Since we are persons, however, I shall ask: what are your thoughts?
