Today, my spiritual processing led me back to an earlier insight I had: "There's more God in Good than there is good in "God."
Of course, from another pov, God and the Good are synonymous.
Theists and Atheist alike would agree that when my four year old granddaughter was terrified while undergoing a medical procedure and I held her little hand to comfort and support her, THAT was good. The theist would say a godly behavior.
I'm not sure the theist necessarily would, or that they would be correct in so saying. More accurate, from the theist, is where good is done, God can be said to be present ...
But at base, the theist wants "good" from his or her "God." So the sensed (or merely imagined) deity is really just a means for actualizing potential goodness.
At a simple level, maybe, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that.
It's no basis for a thorough critique of theism, however, as theism has a lot more sophisticated reasoning than that.
Perhaps the deity is just an unnecessary middle man. If we go directly for "good" then perhaps it becomes a positive self fulfilling prophecy that somehow or another manages to make it happen.
Well the relation between 'God' and 'the Good' is complex ...
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In Plato, God is transcendent, and arguably, the Good more transcendent still – for Plato, at the apex stands the highest and most perfect being – and one who uses eternal forms, or archetypes, to fashion a universe that is eternal and uncreated. The Good and God are thus synonymous, and one can say 'God' is the highest form of Good, as the gods can themselves express forms or archetypes.
God might be said to be the face of the Good.
By virtue of God/Good, the Cosmos has order and purpose and meaning, but is itself limited and contingent by its imperfections inherent in the material domain – at an extreme view, creation is 'a necessary evil' to catch and arrest the fall of the (eternal) soul from the contemplation of God/Good.
(For the Gnostics, matter is essentially evil, a place of punishment, for the necessary purpose of correcting the soul, whose purpose is to escape the body at its earliest possible opportunity.
For a sort-of-Origen, the world is a place of pedagogy, of learning, rather than punishment.)
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Aristotle saw that all things seek divine perfection – they seek their End in their Origin – in God.
From contingent things we come to know universals, whereas God knows universals prior to their existence in contingent things.
God, the highest being, dwells in the perfect contemplation of the most worthy object – Himself. He cares nothing for the world – being an Unmoved Mover, He is not moved by it.
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For Plotinus (and Neoplatonism generally) the universe is the inevitable overflow – emanation – of divinity, of Divine Plenitude; God creates because He can, there is nothing to stop Him, but there is nothing that requires him to do so either – so creation whilst one might argue that God must create because it is in His nature to do so, nevertheless this
particular creation – as opposed to any other (and perhaps alongside of an infinite number of other creations) – is an entirely free and gratuitous act.
In that overflow, the universe comes out of God in a timeless process. It does not come by creation because that would entail consciousness and will, which Plotinus claimed would limit God. The first emanation out of God (
nous Gk: 'mind') is the highest, successive emanations being less and less real. Finally, evil is matter with no form at all, and as such has no positive existence.
God is an impersonal 'It' who can be described only in terms of what he is not. This negative way of describing God (Gk
apokatastasis or Latin
via negativa) is a more intellectually rigorous method.
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Christian philosophers such as Justin Martyr (c. 100-c. 165) believed that God was a reasonable and rational being, therefore the language of reason and rationality was not alien to God. Thus they saw Christian Revelation as transcending but nevertheless compatible with the highest and best Greek thought.
Scripture asserts, in essence, the same God as the God of Plato, of Aristotle, of Zeno of Citium – God as Perfect Being – with certain distinctions.
Whereas Aristotle concluded that the greatest being must be aware only of himself, Augustine emphasised a God who not only loves his creation and his creature, but that God is the ground of all being.
Origen saw God as eternally creating; not God as a one-time actor, but as a dynamic continuum, a verb, rather than a noun.
St Maximus the Confessor reversed the rather negative Platonic triad of the original and eternal and timeless state of souls in the rest (Gk:
stasis) of the contemplation of God, becoming satiated and turning/falling away (movement: Gk:
kinesis) and the necessary creation of matter to catch the falling soul into fleshly becoming (Gk: Genesis), turning it on its head top become [i[Genesis - kinesis - stasis[/i] – all created nature emerges from nothing, by the will of God, and journeys inexorably, albeit (often tragically) erratically, towards its end, which is God, and its final rest, the 'peace that surpasseth all understanding' – a much more optimistic and positive outlook!
Johannes Scotus Erigena saw God creating the universe according to eternal patterns in his mind and it is an expression of his thought (the Good), however incomplete an expression the cosmos may be.
Erigena’s (disputed) pantheistic tendencies can be seen in his notion that “God is in all things.” Creation is not in time but is eternal. In the process God used universals and made them particulars (e.g., humanity became individual persons).
Immortality is the reverse process of particulars going back to universals. In Erigena’s terms, division is the process of differentiating universals into particulars; analysis is the reverse, a return to unity and thus to God. These are not mere mental activities but mirror reality and God’s relationship to the world. God is ultimately unknowable, being beyond all language and categories – including the Good.
Meister Eckhart spoke of this ascent of the soul into such a union with the divine that all distinction between the soul and its creator ceases to exist ... and he was not alone in that, St Bonaventure, 40 years prior, was a contemporary of St Thomas Aquinas (they both taught at the same time in Paris – imagine that!) and spoke in much the same terms of a mystical assent.
Aristotle’s predications cannot apply to God because they assume some type of substance.
God can be described, albeit inadequately, using both affirmative and negative statements. Positive statements are only approximate but can be balanced by negative statements. For example, it can be said that God is good (positive), but also that he is not good (negative) in that he is above goodness. These can be combined in the statement that he is “supergood.” In spite of these approximations, God must be reached by mystical experience.
There is a view in the Traditional that there is a direct correlation between Creation and Incarnation.
We could trust in "human potential." And perhaps quite a few theists would be okay with that, as long as they could claim that "God" created that potential.
We could, but that wouldn't get us very far![/u]
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