Video Transcript: Schema for the Relation of Divine and Non-divine

We're now going to establish a comparative method, a way of contrasting the  religions to one another. And it's suggested by the definition that we, that I  defended last time. If in fact, it's the case that religion centers on some divinity,  belief or other, and then that it also has beliefs about how the non divine  depends on the divine, as well as beliefs about how humans should set a proper relations of the Divine, that business of the non divine depending on the divine  can hand us away, to compare different religions. So, I'm assuming now that  you, you're remembering our definition it went like this, a belief is a religious  belief, provided that it's a belief in something as a self existent reality, and which  generates all else. Or it's a belief about how the non divine that I was calling that self existent reality divine. I said, we could use other words sacred or something, I don't care, I'm not loading that with anything except to being self existent.  Secondly, it's about the how the non divine depends on the divine that is, what is not self existent depends on what is. And lastly, how do humans come to stand  in proper relation to that. If you if you feel like asking, Why should we think  anything is self divine, that is self existent, that is an answer too. Take the idea  of a sum total of reality, the sum total of reality has to be self existent, in part or  whole, because there's nothing else for it to depend on. If we're talking about the sum total of reality, there is nothing else. Period. So there's nothing else for it to  depend on. So either it's the whole, that self existent, although the parts so that  it may come and go, or there's some part of it, that is self existent and the rest  depends on it. Now, Buddhism, Hinduism and Buddhism, take the view that it's  the whole, that self existent, and then they go on to tell you what you can and  can't know about that looks like and so on. All the parts within it appear to come  and go and pass away, but the whole is actually self existent. changeless. And  Judaism, Christianity and Islam take the other view, it's one part of the reality,  God is called into existence, all the rest, and all the rest depends on God.  Something's got to be self existent. The question is what? And that's where the  religions agree something's self existent, a disagree. They disagree on the what, what that is. Graduates to fellow students in graduate school, say to me walking  from one class to another, what you think people everywhere hold religious,  show me any belief that I have that's religious in any sense that I'll give it up on  the spot, the scent of this hostility. What? It's not so easy to do, right?  Somebody has to believe. Maybe you think it's the cosmos as a whole. Maybe  you think it's matter energy, maybe you think it's matter energy, plus the laws of  mathematics, or read all kinds of proposals in the history of philosophy. But  something's got to be in that role. And the question is, what? Many years later I  wrote, after I wrote my first book, I sent him a copy. I said, Hey, Buzz, remember when we talked about this? You said you give up any belief? That's religious, he  he wrote back and said, Yeah, he said, I've had to eat a lot of my words from  when I was young. That's it was good natured about it. Okay, so this is what  we're dealing with. The divine reality, however, that's thought of, and the non 

divine how's the non divine relate? So I'm going to, what I'm going to do is  introduce some little diagrams, Venn diagrams, to represent the divine and, and  the non divine in their relation, according to different religions. And I'm going to  start with the ones most familiar to you. So this is, here's one. I'm going to use a  solid line, a solid red line for the divine reality. And I'm going to use a dotted line  for what's non divine I'm going to say that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have  this in common, that they believe there's a transcendent God who has created  everything else. This is all non divine, because it depends on God, including  God's act of creating here is his act of creating the world. Right? That's his act.  But it's also dependent on do it this way. There, God has brought into existence,  the entire non divine world, everything about it, space, time, matter, energy,  laws, and so on. Now there is one change in this, that we have to make for  Christianity. All three religions hold this much in common. But Christianity also  holds that God has taken into himself some created things. And this is a doctrine of the Incarnation. In the doctrine of the Incarnation, Christianity teaches that  Jesus Christ was a human and a creature, but that God took Christ into himself.  And that's the way the Athanasian Creed puts it. It says, It is not that in the  Incarnation, our humanity became divine. Our creatureness the creaturely  existence became self existent, but that the divine took our humanity into  himself. So on this view, Jesus is the, the creaturely side of God, and God is the  divine side of Christ. In Christ, we have both divinity and humanity, without  mixing them up, without confusing, without claiming, there's only one nature  though there are two. But this is the way I would schematically represent it. And  my point here is wider than just this. It's that. God had always made himself  known by taking something into himself of creation. I'll call it in creaturation. God had revealed to Israel that he alone is God. The Shema, here, O Israel, the  LORD our God, the Lord is one, one, there is only one God. But quantity is a  feature of creation. Quantities aren't eternal, and uncreated. Only God is eternal  and uncreated. Remember, God is created everything visible or not. So God is  taken on the characteristic of being one. God has created space, but he is  everywhere in space, he takes it on. God has created a world in which there's  such a thing as being a parent, being a father, being a mother, God reveals  himself as Father, as Shepherd, as judge. He takes on these characteristics,  and really has them that I don't mean that there ever was a time he didn't have  them a by create, I don't mean comes into existence at a certain time. I mean, it  depends upon God's will. That's what I mean. So God has willed to be to us, one God, and we're going to add later in three persons. And who his father,  Redeemer, Lord, and so on. So this, although it's criticized by both Jews and  Muslims, as being inconsistent with the schema, actually is what makes it  possible for the schema to be right. And, and for us, nevertheless, to have  genuine knowledge about God. So I think that's the Christian version of the  schema is the one that works. So God had increaturated himself prior to Christ, 

that is he had taken creaturely characteristics to himself, and in Christ in the  Incarnation takes the whole person of Jesus Christ. If you take that away, I'm  saying if you take away the increaturation, and the Incarnation then you don't  know about God at all. Because he's called into being a world in which there's  quantity, space time, matter, energy, fatherhood, judgeship, shepherding, and all the other characteristics he describes to himself. In Scripture. They're all  creaturely, they're all created. That leaves you with nothing but guesses about  what God might be like. And that pretty much where Hinduism and Buddhism  fell, there's, there's a transcendent reality. That's the divine reality. But we don't  really know anything about it. That's not what happens, beginning in Judaism  then in Christianity and Islam. It's not we don't know anything about it. We know  about it, because God has entered creation, to seek and to save people and  save them first from death. And then from sin. Okay, I don't want to anticipate  too much. But here's the schema. This is one way people can think of the  relation of the Divine and non divine. And it's a way that Judaism, Christianity,  and Islam does. With Christianity, having this added little feature that God has  taken into himself created characteristics and the entire person of Jesus Christ.  Let's see what some of the other ways are, of thinking of the relation of the  Divine to the non divine, in the different religions, as they are found in the world.  Let's take the Hindu and Buddhist since we've been talking about that. In the schema, it's very hard to draw. It's the whole of reality, that is divine, not  any of the parts within it. The whole, however, is unthinkable, no way to  conceive of it at all. Any description or proposal you make will be false. The only  thing you can say is it's infinite. And by that it means literally boundless. So the  representative of our representation here, of a red circle, would have to be an  infinitely big red circle. And I can't draw that. So you have to just understand that a limitation of the diagram. What we experience with in our everyday lives in this cosmos that we live in, are not are things that are not self existent. They all  come into being and pass away, they changed and so and that, that shows that  they're not. They're less real than the divine. And in Hindu it both Hinduism and  Buddhism, the word for less real, is the word, Maya, which literally means  illusion. These things are illusory. And you say, Wait a minute. They're real, but  they're real, too, right? The answer is yes. Illusion doesn't mean there's nothing  there. When you call something an illusion. You're saying that what is there  appears to be different from what it really is. And that's what they mean. These  things that come into being pass away and change and are different, have  different quality sizes and locations and so on. That's that's illusion in  comparison with the unthinkable changeless infinite, divine being and they have  different names for that. In Hinduism. The Divine is called Brahman and Atman.  Brahman is the Divine that's in everything else Atman is the divine that's in  people. And Buddhism has a number of terms for this one is suchness. And  other is Dharmakaya. But there are there are others as well. Many, there are 

many in Buddhism emptiness, nothingness, they also use and sometimes  Nirvana nothing in the sense of not a thing, it isn't a thing, the way we think of  things, and experience things. It's not that there's nothing whatever there. But  it's not a thing. This is why in Buddhism and Hinduism, it's not true that they  have a supreme being. The Divine is not a being, if it were an individual thing,  then it wouldn't be divine, they think the Divine is the beingness, that's in  everything. And the Beingness itself can't be conceived at all. Well, that's a  second schema that fits world religions, there are other possibilities, I'm going to show you just a couple of them. But the two that I just cut, just had on the board, you know, the one and this one, cover the five religions that we're going to be  studying. So this is just to show you how this method might work. And it could be applied to other traditions. When I say the method work, I mean the method of  deriving these schemas from our definition. It could be, for example, that the  Divine is something within the world. Most of the world is not divine, but there's a sub part of it that is, and we look for that sub part try to find it, find out what it is.  There are two ways to do this. In ancient pagan religion, there was within the  natural world, a divine force or power. And it goes by many different names. It  has been called mana by the Trobriand Islanders, mana permeates all things. It  collects in some spots, which are therefore Sacred. It collects in some people  more than others. That's why some men are stronger. It collects in some fields  more than others. That's why the crops are better over here. In other in Japan,  the divine force is called Kami and it by the ancient Romans, it was called  Numin we still speak of something as being numinous meaning it's mysterious,  or sacred. And what would happen was that people in ancient Rome would be  concerned about building a new building or a bridge or something, they might  disturb some pocket of Numin. So they will have a priest come out and check it  out and give them a blessing. Try to preserve it from disaster you don't want to  get on the wrong side of this force. See. This is where the notion of magic  comes from as well. For in paganism, the mana or common or numi, was  exhausted by being concentrated into individual beings called gods. They  believe there were gods but Gods are are beings like us, except that they have  more Numin than humans do. Or more kami or more mana And for the Greeks,  for example, in Greek mythology it's the divine reality is called Okeanos by  Homer, and out of Okeanos develops the heavens, the earth, gods and humans. And gods have more of this divine in them than humans do. And the sign of that, in Greek mythology, is that the gods don't die, and we do. They're the immortals. Now, in the Scandinavian myths, the gods do die, they have more powers than  humans, there are more divinity in them than humans do. But not enough that  they are immortal, they they can be killed. So we have and I started to say, the  divine force is not exhausted, by the way it's, is it piled up in in Gods and  Goddesses, there's leftover divinity is kind of floating around. And this is why it's  possible in this pagan view, for people to get hold of this somehow, there are 

magic spells, called mantras. If you know the magic formula, you can get some  of this leftover divinity to work for you. Or maybe it's, it may be it is embodied in  a minor divinity. Think of the story of Aladdin and his lamp. There's a minor  divinity, a genie trapped in the lamp. When Aladdin rubs the lamp, the genie  comes out and asks what he says, he has the magical control over the divine, a  lesser divinity, but is still more powerful than human. That's the difference  between magic and religion in religion, humans seek to discover the divine and  to stand in relation to the Divine, which is almost always somehow to serve the  divine to be subservient to the Divine magic is the attempt to get control over the divine and make it work for for you. So that becomes possible in the pagan  schema of things on the the Hindu Buddhist schema, it should be impossible.  And on the Jewish Christian Muslim schema, it's impossible. So this is where  the magic arises. There's another form of this could use the same schema. It's  called naturalism. And on the naturalist view of things, there's something in the  world that's divine, all right. But it's not a divine power, different from natural  objects. It's some type of natural thing. And some of the candidates here have  been matter and energy. It's self sufficient Self existent. it's just there. Another  candidate has been space, there have been scientists of the 20th century that  have held that space is infinite, eternal, uncreated, and that space  spontaneously generates matter. In other words, what we call matter is  something like concentrated space. We have, and this is the ultimate reality.  Others have held that No, it's the laws of logic, or math. Or both. And some have held that it's this plus this or this plus this. Others have held that all we know of  the the world around us is that it's sensations. We know our sensations and we  know logic. And that's it. That view is called logical positivism. And it was a very  strong movement in philosophy in the early 20th century, and completely  collapsed by the early 1960s. But it's still a possible viewpoint and still a divinity  belief. Naturalism, many naturalist start that again, many naturalist think that  they're entirely opposed to religion. And what they mean by that is they don't like the world religions, the five that we're going to study, but what they don't realize  many of them is that they have a divinity belief anyway, something's got to be  self existent. What is it, that's the cosmos as a whole, or its matter and energy,  or its space, or its rational laws plus matter, energy or some combination, it just  is. And they end up with a divinity belief at the core of their worldview, as well as  anybody else. And there are I've put some names over here, paganism and  naturalism in this schema. The first one I had, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  And together they are called theistic, theistic, they believe in God. Theism is a  belief in God who trends is a transcendent creator, but a personal God who  makes his will known to humans. The the view of the Hindu and Buddhist is  called pantheism. Not exactly a proper term means everything is God. It should,  but they don't believe in any, any gods. So it should be pan divinism or  something if it's, but this is the best word we've got. That's the only one we can 

manage here. So we're there a pantheistic, pagan-naturalist, theistic. And of  course, there are variations on these things. Somebody could be a pagan or  naturalist and have not one but two divinities. In which case, realities divided  between what depends on one and what depends on the other, or perhaps it's  

not divided that way, every individual thing is partly dependent on one and partly dependent on the other. All kinds of ways to mix and match these come up. One afternoon, I played around with these circles, I think I got about a dozen possible schemas for religions that don't exist. So I'm not I'm not suggesting that you go  

out and start your own. But I would imagine you'd have the best success with  that in California. But here we have a way of thinking about the relation of the  non divine with the divine in the five major religions that we're going to look at,  and we'll be able to refer back to these schemas. Time and time again. As we  

proceed through the course, please do the reading. For next time. We'll start  with Hinduism.