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

The World Turned Upside Down

1. People believe many of the things they believed in antiquity, but the frame which gives them meaning has shifted.
2. The modern approach to understanding is to deal in discrete and measurable entities, and their combinations. In the ancient world, they were more interested in understanding the part in relation to the whole.
3. How this reversal came about is complex, and the process is not yet complete. The ancient world view is essentially a teleological perspective, in which the final cause of everything has an impact on all significant things in the world. In this world view, facts are intimately associated with values.
4. Teleology has been expelled from our sciences, because it is regarded as a baseless principle, and not a real cause at all.
5. Losing the teleological perspective from modern science is generally regarded as a great advance, freeing us from superstitious notions about purpose, whether in evolution of animals and other creatures, and also frees us from reading the hand of the gods in events. In our world, though artists and poets frame things otherwise, there is no moral connection between facts in themselves, and values. The deficiency is supplied by law and a rational understanding of society. It is the real purpose of the European enlightenment.
6. However the success of the enlightenment enterprise creates a difficulty for us in understanding the ancient world. It makes it incomprehensible to us in its own terms, and it has become a very strange place.
7. To simplify the difficulty, the enlightenment scholars imagined they could discern the real driving forces in ancient society, which were not necessarily clear from the texts and the archaeological evidence. This meant grading the evidence from antiquity in terms of its real meaning, and giving precedence to particular interpretation. This process became an important part of classical scholarship.
8. Latterly, ancient history largely has been taught in terms of Marx’s economic model of reality (even if Marx was not often mentioned), in which everything is explained in terms of material and economic pressures operating on society. I was taught the history of the ancient near east entirely in this way. Many interesting aspects of the ancient world consequently were downgraded in importance, and some were not mentioned at all (we shall return to some of these). Since all ancient societies were deemed to be explicable in terms of this materialistic model, assessment of each culture was reduced to ‘how well did they do?’ Moral judgements were not encouraged.
9. We need to look at how ancient societies understood themselves. A number of ancient writers concerned themselves with what we need to understand, including Plato and Aristotle. .Some of the details can be reasonably inferred, and can be added to the picture if they both inform the evidence, and are supported by the evidence.
10. It has been noted that ‘completed action’ is of great importance in the ancient world, principally in the context of ritual. Why is this? It implies that ‘incompletness’ is a negative thing. Completeness was a characteristic of the gods. This is true whether we are considering the head of a pantheon, or the lowliest member of it. All are regarded as complete in themselves. It is a characteristic of divinity.
11. We are used to thinking that it is the detail, the narrative of the ritual which ought to have been considered efficacious by those participating in the ritual. The detail and the narrative are important, but it is the completion of detail and narrative which are regarded as achieving the desired result.
12. The Sumerian god Ea is the god of the waters of the Abyss. He is depicted in iconography as sitting enthroned in the deep. He is in the same place as the subject of his lordship. The kings of Babylon had themselves depicted sitting on the rolling sea in a ritual context, in order to, as we would have it, be associated with Ea, his responsibilities and characteristics. Thus their kingship is connected with the world of the divine.
13. This however is to see the image within the ritual as a metaphor. It is much more than a metaphor. If the ritual is performed correctly and completely, not only is the king standing in the place of the god, the completeness establishes an essential identity with the god.
14. This is a hard idea to follow.  We should recall that much of the cultural trajectory of the 1^st millennium BCE in the Mediterranean and the Near east revolved around the pursuit of political hegemony, which would be achieved through overturning control of the highly theocratic Assyria. The Persians took it, and then Alexander. And Alexander styled himself a god.  To run Assyria was to represent the will of the divine on earth.
15. Modern historians see this pursuit as the seeking of the trappings of divine kingship, which can then be used as part of the propaganda of the hegemony, thus buttressing it. But this is to slip past what might have been the understanding at the time, among ruling elites.  There was a long-standing discussion in the ancient world about whether or not a man could be a god, and how that transition might be effected.
16. We need to look at the range of causes understood in the ancient world. We have good detail about the causes understood by the Greeks, through Aristotle. These were: formal, material, efficient, and final. The final cause is the ultimate teleological explanation. The formal cause, in the case of a statue, would be the idea of the statue, the material cause would be the wood, bronze or ivory out of which the statue is to be made, the efficient cause is the sculptor who gives the form to the statue, and the final cause is the reason or end for which the statue has been created.
17. Each of these causes contributes to the completion of whatever it is that is being made. The final cause of an entity might not be framed in terms of an ultimate final cause – Aristotle describes the bricks of a house existing for the purpose of creating a house – but its completion would conjoin it with the ultimate final cause. We know that the completion of a sacred building was treated as a very serious matter, on a par with the proper completion of a performed ritual. Likewise the decommissioning of a sacred building was as important an act as its creation (in Mesopotamia very often marked by completely backfilling the structure).
18. These ideas stretch back to the Bronze age and most likely far beyond, even if their formalization in writing dates from the fourth century BCE in Greece. The perfecting of objects, whether through refinement of their form, their material, the craftsmanship of their execution, their size (microliths and megaliths), through the purpose of the object, or through the birth and death of living things, can be identified in both archaeology, and references in texts.
19. Aristotle in ‘On Coming-to-Be and Passing Away’ gives an interesting perspective on the relation of mundane reality to a more enduring reality. Forms come to be and pass away into something else. There are areas of stability, but essentially all mundane things he understood as alterations of something else.
20. In his ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ it becomes clear that his teleological perspective means that moral action has implications for the status of the agent. He concludes that a principal characteristic of the gods is contemplation, and that the end result of achieving the intellectual virtues is a state of contemplation by the agent. We can take this characterization of the gods with a pinch of salt, in that it would not have offered much incentive for his pupil Alexander, but Aristotle does suggest that this is at least a form of emulation of the divine.
21. Looking at the two works together, we can see that in his former work his view is that mundane reality is woven out of a supersensible reality which is transcendent .And he argues in the second  that the end of the moral life is a state of immobile contemplation.  Which again is a state which transcends mortal existence.
22. This transcendent reality, it seems, does not have any obvious relation to mundane existence, since it is beyond change, and does not allow action. It is the supersensible reality from which mundane reality somehow emerges as a subset of possibility.
23. It is only possible for this to happen (according to this line of argument) if the transcendent is connected in some way with the world of the mundane. Living form, judgement and decision are only possible in the mundane world, through common properties with reality itself. The importance of the connection with the supersensible world cannot be overestimated, and this is achieved through completions. 

Plato's Point of View

One of the greatest barriers to the understanding of Plato is that he is writing from a perspective quite different from our own. I say ‘our own’, because this perspective can be clearly defined as something which we, in our cultural continuum, implicitly accept (even if a number of individuals in that culture don’t). That is, we assume that what is real is what is physical. So when Plato was writing about what is metaphysical rather than the physical, he was writing about something extra, something beyond that physical reality. Sometimes this other level of reality is spoken of as a supersensible realm, in that it is beyond the world of sensory experience, and also beyond a comprehension which requires sense data.

This is not the way that Plato would have looked at transcendent reality. It is not something extra, superposed on physical reality and the world of sensory experience. It was there first, and had its existence before matter and sensory experience came to have existence.

This is the plenum, which I have discussed elsewhere. It is unlimited, and undefined. It is what must be there before anything is defined. It is neither presence nor absence. It can be thought of as the nothingness before the creation of anything, but to characterise it as nothingness is to misunderstand both what it is, and how it needs to be understood.

If the physical world did not exist, and so there was no such thing as movement, all that might be possible, in terms of a physical existence, and consequently movement, would necessarily exist in potential in that transcendent and undefined plenum. The evidence of our senses, and the categories of our understanding, tell us that the world of movement and change, illusion or not, has a certain level of reality, which has a certain mathematical regularity, which is one way to define something which has intelligible reality. All of that is necessarily present in the plenum, which is ever-present and unchanging, and devoid of actual movement. Of any sort at all.

From Plato’s point of view, the transcendent reality is the only thing which is truly real, and which is necessarily what it is, and not something other than it is. It is not a copy of anything. It is eternal in its nature, and is not subject to change of any sort.

The major difficulty in understanding Plato arises from the fact that almost all discussion in Plato’s canon of works is based on an abstract understanding of the transcendent reality. He is not trying to penetrate what is transcendently real from the point of view of physical or sensory reality, existing in time and space. Instead, he has an understanding of the nature of what is real, largely built on logical  and dialectical argument.

By this I mean the nature of reality itself can be approached and understood by questioning what it is, and what it is not, what properties it may or may not have, and how it stands in relation to the physical world. Questions such as ‘is reality itself one or many? If it is one, how is it the case that the physical and sensory world is full of things, and why is it represented to us in such a way?’ And the opposite question also makes sense: ‘if reality consists of the many, and not one thing, in what way can we understand reality as reality itself? Why should there be many things at the root of reality?’

Which is how the ancient consensus about the nature of reality came to be. This consensus was in place as early as the mid-second millennium BCE. But possibly much earlier than that.

So much of Plato’s argumentation is based on a point of view which we generally do not share in the modern world, and which is hard for us to fathom. Where Plato's work is taught, which is almost every major academic institution in the world, it is not taught or understood in terms of a range of arguments which apply to the transcendent reality, and questions of existence and the creation of a physical world which is full of both things and images. Instead, it is taught in terms of exercises in human thought, covering a vast range of subjects, including discussions of metaphysics, the ideas of beauty and justice, ethics and morality, of friendship and love, mathematics, geometry; even philology and etymology (in the Cratylus). It is taught in this way, since much of subsequent philosophical thought has its roots in Plato’s dialogues, even if we do not fully understand the point of view expressed in them.

So Platonic thought is taught in a fragmentary way, which Plato would not have understood, and the intellectual and logical roots of the dialogues are often treated as neither here nor there.

The tradition of studying Plato lay largely fallow after the collapse of the ancient world, and particularly after the closure of the philosophical schools in 529 C.E. This closure is an extremely significant event in history, though the destruction of the glories of the ancient world had been under way already for a considerable period (as far back as the argument with Caligula about putting images of Caesar in the temple in Jerusalem, recorded by Philo Judaeus, who was the man who drew the short straw). The closure of the schools tells us that the basis upon which the ancient world once argued about the nature of reality and physical existence was opposed by imperial power and its requirements, and that humanity was entering a period in which knowledge and thought were thoroughly deprecated.

Ideas of the importance of knowledge and what it is, and also what is meant by the divine, and the role of the divine for the human race, were now based on the requirements of the secular powers, and their political and ideological concerns.

Formerly, political power, and royal and imperial knowledge of the will of the divine and the gods, drew strength from the idea that there was a rational connection between the nature of reality and the divine, and the world of the here and now, the secular world of time, and of physical power (expressed eloquently by Homer, with the golden chain of Zeus stretching into the world, according to his will). Now the nature of reality was of no interest, and gave nothing to the secular powers. Whatever was left of the notion of a rational connection between physical reality and the divine ran the other way. Physical power and its preoccupations would now determine the kinds of discussions there would be about divine things.

We have been on this downward slide since the time of imperial Rome and its campaigns of conquest. It is one of the most powerful of Roman legacies.

   

The story of the occasional and partial reversals of this long intellectual and cultural slide has yet to be told coherently, and I am not going to undertake the task here. I will mention the reversal in the Italian renaissance, where Plato was understood rather differently than he is now. For example, it is useful to approach Plato through Marsilio Ficino’s understanding of his work, and also through the writings of Giordano Bruno.

So it is not that we have no alternative ways to approach Platonic thought; but we choose not to look at another approach, since we know what is real, and what isn’t. We think this is a rational view, and our own way of thinking, but it has been gifted to us as the result of political and ideological struggles long ago, which did not fear to destroy rational connection with a transcendent Reality, once understood as the reason why the physical world existed at all. 

One God or Many?

Akhandadhi Das 'Thought for the day' BBC R4 17 April 2015

[link to audio file will break after one month]

Akhandadhi Das cramming as much Hindu philosophy into 3 minutes as possible. Including reference to the concept of Brahman, which is a level of unchanging reality which transcends the creation and stands behind it, but is also mysteriously present all through the created world.

Brahman is also the supreme and transcendent deity of the Hindu pantheon. Like other polytheistic religions, the Hindu pantheon can be, and sometimes is,  read as a more or less disordered collection of tribal and ethnically-based deities. But in fact, in the Upanishads the other gods are clearly subsumed in Brahman. So something very sophisticated is going on here.

Das also talks about 'the one' and 'the different' in Hindu thought. This parallels the concept of 'the same' and 'the different' in Plato. Both are key to the business of philosophy.

There is a lack of clarity and agreement about the actual age of the Upanishads, which were originally transmitted orally, before being later committed to writing. The oldest are at least contemporary with classical Greece.

Plato clearly refers to a single supreme and transcendent deity in his writings, who is ultimately responsible for the creation (via the demiourgos). Yet he is writing in the cultural context of a polytheistic pantheon. Classicists have shown a remarkable lack of concern about this apparent disjunction. It is one of the reasons why Plato's writing about the creation is often treated in terms of a species of literary fiction, having very little to do with Greek patterns of thought outside the Academy.

Are these parallels significant? I think that they are. The reason they exist is because they are built on similar inferences about the nature of reality.