Video Transcript: The General Relation of Religious Belief to Theory Making and Delimiting Hypotheses

To begin this session, I'd like to consider some objections to this belief in God,  and also explain what I see as the reasons why people have failed to see that  this stuff requires a Christian philosophy makes it not only possible, but  obligatory. Let's start with some objections. One of the most common ones that I hear is that the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece or Rome, don't fit the  definition for divinity. It's not the case that Zeus in the ancient Greek religion was supposed to have created the universe, nor he wasn't all knowing he wasn't all  powerful didn't have any of the characteristics that we think of God is having.  And that's true. So that's because in those traditions, they made a distinction  between what is the divine, and Gods and Goddesses which were individual  beings that had more divine power than humans. But they were not, per se,  divine. That's the way it goes. So you think about the myths that Homer tells  about the gods. It's what he calls Okeanos. That's divine, that's just there. And  then Okeanos begins to divide up and it generates the heavens, the earth, gods, the humans. So everything has some some divinity in it. Gods are beings to  have more divinity than humans do. So it's important for us not to offend them,  because they can make life miserable for us if we do. So we butter them up and  ask for favors and hope for the best or something like that. So that, in that  religion, they're not dealing with what is divine per se. Roman religions say they  call the divine numen, and something that was loaded with divine power was  numinous. And so for different projects, work projects in Rome, they would get a  priest to come bless certain plot of land, that on which they wanted to construct  a big public building, they wanted to be sure that it wasn't numinous or they want to cross the divine, but they didn't worship the divine. Separately, the approach  provides only through the gods and goddesses that have more Divine Divinity  than we do. That should also help make sense to you of why the Roman  emperors didn't see it as a piece of insanity to claim that they were gods. They  do have more numen than the average person, right? That's why they're  Emperor and the, the average person is just an average person. So a lot of  them refer to themselves as mortal gods. The other beings that we worship  talking about the temple, have so much divinity in them, they can never die. I,  the Emperor can die, but are all other respects, I have more divinity in me, and  that's why I'm superior to everybody else that I rule. You can see the two  viewpoints, they're the Roman viewpoint and the Jewish and Christian one, just  go right past each other. For a Jew or Christian, insane for a person to say he's,  he's a God, he has more divine power than anybody else. And for the Romans  that made all kinds of sense. divinity is in places and objects and things and  people in different degrees all the time. And that's what the priests are for, to sort that out and tell us if it's okay to build this building here or not. The second thing  that I want to point to is that it's not the case, I'm going to argue it's not the case, that people invent the idea of divinity. They invent specific gods. Whether that's  Jupiter, or Zeus, or Neptune, or who it is. But they don't invent the idea of 

divinity. Something has to be devine. Let me tell you why. It's not because of  great long, abstruse, logical proofs, complete with modal operators. It's not that  it's something much more obvious. The sum total of reality has to be self  existent. Because there's nothing else for it to depend on. Give me a chance to  say it again, the sum total of all reality has to be self existent, either in whole or  in part, just because there's nothing else. If there's nothing for it to depend on, it  doesn't depend. And one of the great differences among the world religions is  that difference between in whole or in part in Hinduism and Buddhism, it's the  whole that's divine, and everything that occurs within that whole in the creative  world in which we live. That appears not to be divine because it comes into the  end to being in a passive way is merely an illusion. The other view that reality is  in part divine, the part of the reality that's divine is God and God calls into  existence all the rest of it, which always depends on him. That's the view held by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So, you will immediately get from this two  possible ways that religion could be different, two possible ways, in the way that  non divine depends on the divine. But the divine itself is not a hypothesis. Now if this is the right definition of divinity, and it can impact theories, then I owe you an explanation as to why nobody ever tried to construct a Christian philosophy until  the previous century, the last century. Why did Christians think that wasn't a  possible tour? Wasn't a test they could undertake. We I read to you, Father  Copleston statement? So you know, he's just saying no, that doesn't make any  sense. There's not a Christian biology or Christian math. So how can there be a  Christian theory of reality or theory of knowledge. And here's the reason this  myth removed this stuff. I think I can do this fairly simply, and quickly. philosophy begins among the ancient pagan Greeks. And they assume that it's the universe that self exists, in part. So if this is the complete universe, they start philosophy  by trying to locate what it is in that universe, that is self existent. And all the rest  depends on it. And this is the way they see philosophy and science proceeding,  you identify what's divine, and then you trace the causal pathways to everything  else. And this shows the gives you the right explanation of reality. When  Christianity comes on the scene, philosophy is already five to 600 years old.  They've been at this for centuries, the early Christians look at this, and they say,  Well, it can't be right that the Divine is in the world. It's not It's gone. It's no, I  mean, not in the world God can be present is still part of the universe that's  divine, instead of God. So they deny that. But they ask the question, why  couldn't it be that something in the universe, is what everything else depends  on, so long as you add and that depends on God. So you can't regard that as  divine. But you could continue to regard it as what everything else in the  universe depends on and denies divinity and claim God creates this and this  creates everything else. And so that's just what they did. Now, my objection to  that, is that it violates Colossians 1, which says that God has created all things  visible or invisible, and the only one on on whom all things depends is Christ. In 

other words, only Jesus Christ mediates the power of God's creation. So saying  that no it's the realm of perfections. Or it's matter, or it's matter plus the  perfections or matter plus logical mathematical laws or logical combined  materialists with Pythagoris or whatever it is. That's, that's all wrong. There isn't  anything. Not only are we denying that any part of the cosmos is Divine is self  existent, we're developing, we're denying that any part is what creates all the  rest of it. There is nothing. It all directly depends on God. And why? Because  Colossians says that it's only Christ who mediates the power of God through him all things are made visible or invisible. And he is the one that hangs all things  together. That's what the Greek says. So that in between position is what has  prevented most Christians from thinking that there needs to be a distinctively  Christian approach. The Eastern Orthodoxy was not fooled on this point. And St. Gregory Palama, theologian of the 14th century, says this. The Christian can  tolerate no mediating substance between God and creatures. The absolute  rejection of that of that ploy that move. And yet that's the one that holds the field  today among most Christians, and most among most Jews in philosophy. That's  why and that's why the views that I'm going to be explaining to you in the other  sessions was never tried before the 20th century before Professor Dooyeweerd  tried it. So I think that's probably enough to wrap up this session. You have a lot  to think over and reread, and I'll try and start my next lecture with a little recap of what we've already done. get you accustomed to this. Do rewind and re watch  what you need to do.