Video Transcript: God's Attributes (Part 2)

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