Before the Ontological Argument (Writing to Alvin Plantinga)

Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 23:44:33 +0000
To: Alvin Plantinga 
From: Thomas Yaeger 
Subject: Before the Ontological Argument

Dear Professor Plantinga,

Things have moved along a great deal since I last wrote to you. You might like to read the following article, which argues that the idea of the One, and its transcendent nature, was known in the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age in Britain. Which, if this argument is correct, means we are talking about more than five thousand years ago, and long before Anselm and Aquinas attempted to make rational sense of religion.

There are many parallels in the mathematics which are evident in the Neolithic monuments with ideas which we can identify in later times - in particular in the case of ancient Greece. Such as the ideas of totality, the important role of integral numbers in connecting us with what is Divine, and the centrality of mathematical and geometric commensurability.  Greek conceptions about these is a development of the earlier ideas, as close study shows.

The underlying perception in the British Neolithic was that the physical reality in which we live is not Reality itself, which is demonstrated by the various puzzles (the aporia) which physical reality contains. This view also emerges from Plato, since he argues (through Socrates) that Reality itself exists in no time or space. Time and space are representations of a transcendent reality, and not truly real in themselves.

I'm arguing that a rational basis for belief in the Divine is a contradiction in terms. I know how important this is to you, so my apologies. The ancient arguments however make the modern idea of belief irrelevant to any conjecture about the Divine. If there is a transcendent reality which we might term as the Divine, it is necessarily real, since it is what lies behind all human experience, despite having its reality nowhere in time and space.

As I suggested before, the ancient conception was that Reality and the Divine were coterminous - or otherwise, two ways of speaking about the same thing.

One of the implications of the idea that reality itself is One, and cannot change, but stands behind physical reality, is that Reality and physical reality are essentially the same (I've argued this in detail in my books). Though they are represented differently to the human understanding. Physical reality contains a number of incommensurable values, whereas Reality contains values which are commensurable, and often related to what is incommensurable in physical reality. If they are in fact one and the same reality, but with a double nature, reconciling the differences between these worlds might have been a matter of some importance to religious establishments in the ancient world. Which is what I argue (in this article) the priests responsible for the design and building of megalithic structures were doing. The mathematics bear this out.

This offers important clues to the actual origin and significance of human religion, despite some of the nonsense which has been written on this subject.

The article is at:

'The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard'.

http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-mathematical-origins-of-megalithic.html

....

 Best wishes,

Thomas Yaeger