The topic of Gnosticism and its relationship to the gospel of Jesus Christ is not simply an academic issue. The Cathari-Albigensian heresy might be used as an illustrative template for the social purging of organized religion with views apposite of Gnostic heresy. When the Roman Catholic Church had military power for sectarian cleansing it depleted Western Europe of the well-meaning though incorrect ecclesia. In the U.S.A. the Mormon Church might be compared to the Gnostic-Cathari heresy. The U.S.A. does not legally tolerate religious intolerance.
Preponderantly, except for most Muslim countries where all souls are in effect required to submit to a neo-Spinozoan uniform Mohammedan orthodox monistic theology of God with empirical exhaustion, the heresy of non-differentiated sameness of God is not a popular point of view so far as people have an opinion about God in-the-world.
The naïve theological monism effacing even consideration of the possibility of philosophical material-spiritual dualism or pluralism within monism might have been possible governments in a seventh century culture reacting to a plethora of eccentric mystery religions and oppressive neo-theocratic rival governments yet is untenable to enlightened thought today. Paradoxically the Cathari and Gnostic approaches to the sameness of the material world as evil have much in common with the simplistic extreme monism of Mohammedanism, yet Mohammedanism has the most repressive religious intolerance of other sects and faiths of all the world’s major religions as it seeks to force the world into same-sect monism.
Taghut is a Muslim term for non-conformity to extreme monism. Taghut refers to the selection of Satanic media will-to-power. Religious pluralism and the subtleties of the trinity are, to same-sect monists, satanic-a term better reserved for the broadcast media same-narrative out-of-body view of politics and social reality greasing the insinuation of concentrated material wealth and power through corporatism and pseudo-socialism. Broadcast media are a political dualism in support of infrasexualty, adult life aborting civil wars and birth control to redistribute power through their actions, propaganda, displacement and all with plausible deniability.
While Paul criticized Gnosticism, it is not actually plain what it was that was being criticized. He did not recapitulate the Gnostic philosophy as might a history of philosophy. It took away from the historical context of the Lord Jesus Christ perhaps and moved toward an esoteric sort of Zoroastrian approach to what Hegel might have called 'realms of absolute spirit' if he were commenting on Gnosticism at all
One may critique the Gnostic style gospel of Thomas as being without Jesus in an historical setting. Evidently some of the things Jesus said are placed into something more of a Neo-Platonist context. That would be a rather abstract and somewhat fictitious approach. A narrative approach without historical context to affirm Neo-Platonist paradigmata could make Richard Nixon seem like a Yoda from extra-dimensions.
It is understandable that some would do so believing first in Neo-Platonism and secondarily interpreting what they learn about Jesus Christ within that paradigm. Plainly one is better finding the gospel of the Lord as presented in the canon first before reading about Neo-Platonism. With the benefit of 2500 years of progress in physical cosmology it is simpler to compare Platonic ideas with what is observable and theoretical physics in regard to natural philosophy and the revealed word of God.
I think the mind-matter duality issue is a problem for some. There are physicalists that view mind as a complex sort of matter. W.V.O. Quine the great analytic philosopher and logician assented to that point of view if asked. It does seem self-evident to many that mind is qualitatively different than matter however. Duality in substances between a material world and a hypothetical spiritual world does not necessarily require that the material world be comparatively inferior to the spiritual world. It does not need to be morally inferior. The fall of mankind does not mean that matter must be implicitly evil or immoral though mankind seems entrapped here as a corrective measure for original sin and Christians do look forward to liberation from the temporal material body to a spiritual heaven with a new and improved kind of body good for eternity.
The body is short lived-like a blade of grass said Solomon. When in Anchorage in the winter of 2010-11I camped in a tent below freezing between late December to April without propane to heat water. I got the flu and pneumonia at a shelter in late December where some people had actual frostbite. Director Crocket of the homeless service Bean's Cafe would later die of pneumonia. It was a tough variety I guess. Lungs become coated with virus and the dry cold makes breathing tough.
I returned Dec 27th to a small tent in a camp shared only with a few Moose part-timers occasionally walking past or sleeping in the snow. I had an abscessed tooth and didn’t know it. It turned out that whenever I ate chocolate it must have made way through a hole at the base of the tooth into the ear area or something. Several times I sort of keeled over to my left side while standing and my mind sort of began to dissolve in quarters something like a computer screen losing parts of its operations and breaking apart before shutting down. I lost equilibrium and nearly consciousness simultaneously though I didn’t pass out once I was on the ground It was something uncomical like the spinning sign in Mel Brook's High Anxiety. It was a terrible experience and occurred at least 15 times that season.
It gave me a different perspective on the mind as a phenomenon equivalent to the body. One’s own sentience is contingent on the brain and I think the entire thing dies with the body. I believe God has the data of what the soul is on his hard drive (a metaphor) and reconstitutes it as easily as I would duplicate a file on the computer I am writing on. God before any metaphysical or physical mechanics in which we humans classify mind, spirit, body, materiality, language or human experience.
When I stopped eating any sort of chocolate and later got the abscessed tooth cut out and the hole on the upper side fixed by an orthodontist I no longer had that worse-than-seasickness experience and my balance returned to normal.
God seemed to regard His creation as a good thing in the beginning. An artist might regard sentient beings as immoral and never find paint or the clay of his sculptures to have some sort of morality at all. Instead the immorality of any artwork would require sentient representationalism of wickedness. So the matter of a spiritual world as a better place can be regarded perhaps as better in several ways or from several points of view if such exists. At any rate matter may be a complex sort of spiritual substance itself that we regard as the practico-inert substance provided by God for human beings to exist in-human beings with a spiritual element of sentience.
Temporal moral values may be implicitly inferior to correct eternal values of Christians in the kingdom of God under direct supervision of The Lord. Duality of mind and matter can perhaps be compared with duality of matter and spirit, or of two different Universes with different physical laws, or of two different quantitative experiences by minds that are founded in spirit of presentations by God. As contingent beings created by God it is sort of difficult to categorize ultimate constructions of God as being made of anything besides His will. Gnostics probably got a lot of Platonic paradigmata wrong and misapplied it to the Lord. Jesus as God required no mechanical causality for his presence that transcends space-time and matter even though he was born in human form. It was and is God’s show.
One may have a philosopher's appreciation of subtleties that comprise the facts of Platonism and a good historical grasp of the way that it influenced thought in the several centuries moving through pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmendides to Attic philosophers, the Peripatetic philosophers and on to neo-Platonic Alexandrian philosophers, and eventually Plotinus.
On the other hand most new age people probably haven't a meaningful grasp of how Neo-Platonism fits into the intellectual history of the west. Neither would they be considering synthetic accretions of Zoroastrianism with Platonism or Neo-Platonism. Consider Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's ideas about Zoroaster and dualism. It is easy to leap to all sorts of wrong assumptions metaphysically with dualism and categorizations about good, evil and so forth. The creation can have good, evil and even matter and spirit without benefit of radical oversimplification or quantification from the secular about its ultimate nature, disposition or composition.
Philosophy is something of an academic discipline these days. Specialists may not actually pursue wisdom so much as technical careers that assume empirical and secular criteria unaware even of the history of philosophy. Even so some philosophers probably try to understand everything including ancient and modern philosophy.
Philosophy before the Lord wasn't a religion so much as an inquiry into the nature and mechanics of reality. Platonism found forms and abstractions of things expressible in language. Humans noticing forms of matter, temporal breakdown or change of matter and so forth thought about it and that was philosophy or Alethea-the pursuit of wisdom- without divine revelation from God.
The spinning bucket thought experiment of Isaac Newton is preceded by more than 2500 years by the pre-Socratic ideas of Parmenides considering the ideas of volume and objects embedded within it such as a sphere (the Earth)-do they displace something that was already there, or is empty space destroyed when matter occupies where it was. Those deep philosophical kinds of cosmological inquiry remain in considering singularities, black holes and such ideas. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus' idea about the One might be associated with the parallel criterion of a singularity of space-time at the heart of the start of the Universe posited through Einstein’s field equations of General Relativity. Philosophy was mostly about physical reality. Christian religion is about revealed knowledge. There is a fundamental difference between the two pursuits and the knowledge content of their data-base.
I believe that one cannot use an argument from design or an ontological argument as a valid way to 'prove' the existence of God. I suppose one could make an existential argument for the existence of God too, and derive some sort of Bishop Berkleyan conclusion. The most one could do though is confirm what the Bible already reveals as true, rather than generate some points about God that could be considered true yet aren't found in the Bible.
It is likely that whatever people discover with natural philosophical inquiry will in some manner be found to cohere satisfactorily with the revealed word of God. I don't think there is a chance that God intends to deceive anyone with a vast disconformity of what seems manifestly true between evident physical causal mechanics and the revealed word of God in the Bible. Sometimes people don't understand nature correctly or the Bible either. I wrote on that topic in 'Creation & Cosmos - The Literal Values of Genesis'.
Some Christians tend to lump Gnosticism and the esoteric ideas of Philo of Alexandria in the mystery religions category and explain why it’s all wrong. That is intellectually insufficient for accuracy. I of course believe the traditional approach to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even so the entire idea that the material world is in some way in contradiction to the Biblical remarks about creation and/or miracles is something I disagree with enough to have written several essays on the topic in 'Creation and Cosmos; The Literal Values of Genesis'.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/creation-and-cosmos-the-literal-values-of-genesis/ebook/product-21723672.html cost: Free
I disagree with the idea that the material world is in some way more real for Christians than a spiritual world ultimately. That is, developing a metaphysics to explain the existence of the material world is a reasonable philosophical and theological approach; though with Barth we may stipulate that only revealed knowledge can provide information about God to man. Reality is relative. However natural philosophy accounts for the material world is less than secondary in the God to human relationship. Like Peter joining the Lord to walk on the water it is the relationship that matters, not matter as a substance.
God is spirit most people would agree. People may be fancy dirt clods yet God is Spirit able to mold and shape the cosmic dust. Modern physical cosmology presents several versions of what comprises physical reality. The material world no longer has a simple explanation in naïve realism. Instead what might be considered spiritual atoms that Leibniz conjectured about comprise the building blocks of what is viewed as matter. Leibniz's spiritual atoms that he called monads is just one way of viewing the smallest particles-what Democritus called atoms. Physics has gone beyond that and describes particles as waveforms coinciding and entangling within a field (the Higgs field) in such a way that they become like standing waves that seem to be substance or matter. Because these developed in a coherent way in a field with physical laws of order including entropy and motion (time) a Universe appears to exist for sentient beings in the field-phenomenon they perceive ad call matter.
Hence some cosmologists say that for all intents and purposes this Universe could be a hologram. The appearance of the reality of matter that we consider to be almost naïve mass and energy is shaped by our human immersion in the field. Our interpretation of the waveforms is a consequence of the development of our perception faculties as we process mass and energy in the field to sustain our existence. So what we call matter is more of a field phenomenon with rules of behavior such as gravity than a substance. These are not great insights in the 21st century. I have written about this elsewhere quite a bit and won't go too far into the topic of 'what is matter and the Universe' here.
Certainly there are various theories about what the building blocks of mass and energy are and where they originate. Because human beings perceive matter in a particular way as beings immersed in a field (compare this to fish living in an ocean) they may consider the field phenomena as something called a, b, or c. The term is something of a linguistic convention. There is supposed to be a connection between word and object, so whatever the smallest particle or largest containing field is what one might want to describe regarding matter. Neo-Platonists, physicists and many Christians don't believe that God is made of something in the Universe or matter and energy (for different reasons).
Kurt Gödel and others would have regarded the nature of ultimate reality as something that can be described from within the created or existing reality. The individual parts cannot describe what the sum is. If one lived on the surface of a map one could not see view the entire map without being above it to look down upon it, etc. God is thought to be spirit who created mass and energy, the Universe and such by many Christians. Neo-Platonism isn't so much a religion as a physical and metaphysical theory about the nature of reality and God, one that looks for the truth about things. It is useful to have some sort of cosmological theory even for apologetics.
If one regards Neo-Platonism as a plausible metaphysics shadowed today by contemporary cosmology it is not a religion any more than Newtonian or Einsteinian mechanics. Barth would have regarded it as natural philosophy, and natural philosophy is not a way to God and eternal life through the salvation of the Lord obviously. One simply is interested in speculating about cosmology and metaphysics even from a theological perspective-Augustine wrote about the nature of time of course. The Gnostics were also perhaps spiritually minded people interested in Platonism, however without the truth of the Lord foremost in their thought they easily would have lapsed or moved into all manner of wrong ethical assumptions. Narrow is the gate to salvation.
While Gnostic religious approaches to Christianity might have left out important facts, the Neo-Platonic element comprising metaphysical accounts for existence shouldn't be capriciously jettisoned. Perhaps some Gnostics finding the world's material existence to be a secondary manifestation from some higher reality that doesn't mean that the temporal world is not real, or that the events that occur within it are not meaningful.
Some say the world in Gnostic theory was created by a demi-urge. That is a term that we Christians find rather pagan and somewhat amusing. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus (a second century Alexandrian philosopher) was the foremost writer of the philosophy. In 54 tractates called The Enneads Plotinus described a complete cosmology and order of creation of the Universe.
He thought that The One (God) in some mysterious way emanated everything that is the Universe. Emanations remind one of the waveform theory of mass and energy today-not really so silly. Plotinus wondered how or why The One would issue anything to start with. What reason, what cause would The One have to bring anything into existence when he was already perfect?
The One did not require spatial extension, mass, energy or time. He did not have need of questions or answers because he was omniscient. The entire topic is very interesting to consider. Christians too can wonder about ultimate questions of why God exists to start with and since he is The Ancient of Days, how he always existed for all of eternity before the creation of any temporal Universe?
These are mysterious questions for temporal beings with finite intellect and who are not omniscient. We discern the relation of humans in the Garden of Eden to these kinds of ultimate paradigm questions and might wonder what relationship finite human beings have to the One-why did he create finite beings?
Plotinus probably was influenced by Christianity. It is hard to say. If Paul and others viewed Gnosticism as a heretical syncretism distracting from the meaningful course of following the Lord they were probably right. Attributing the sources of Plotinus' ideas is not simply in some of the fine points.
The One is not a demi-urge that created the Universe for Plotinus. Instead, The One somehow issued The Intelligence who created everything else. That paradigm is somewhat comparable to another aspect of God-one of the Trinity besides the Father, doing the works of creation. We tend to view Jesus Christ as being the member of the Trinity who created the Universe, yet we might as well say The Word. The book of Genesis and John account of creation enable us to understand that God can allocate creation work to His Triune nature. It is not reasonable to believe that the Intelligence in The Enneads could not be an equal approximation of The Word.
In the beginning was The Word, and...In The Enneads the One issues The Intelligence. A Universe is created in stages. We see that the Universe in Genesis is created in stages and the description as a kind of general outline is put into movements or categories called days. Physical cosmology theory develops forms for particles to exist in rising from waves into larger and different, lower temperature clumps.
I think the important point is that Christians and Neo-Platonists believe that matter and the material world was created by someone else of a different nature-Spirit. Neo-Platonists might believe that one could ascend from the material world to more esoteric realms of spirit, and we as Christians believe that one cannot do anything with that sort of paradigm. God and for us God as Jesus Christ has the key to allocation of material and spiritual location.
In physical cosmology theory space-time in principle is reversible yet the mathematical improbability of doing so make it unlikely. Multi-verse theory tends to regard everything possible in that every possible Universe that can exist must exist somewhere. Christian philosophers might consider that for the Omniscient, omnipotent God all Universe that can exist, do exist too. Yet like Plotinus we might wonder why God would create a Universe to start with since the beginning and end of all possible Universes is already known unto God?
The not well kept secret for many is something Spinozan bordering on pantheism-everything that exists is God or contingent being of God. God created all things of his substance, yet not all created things are God. Evidently the differentiations in quantity and form limit the nature of sentient beings and material things to a particular context-a reason why pre-determinism works and some are saved with others with a different destiny. In quantum physics the quality-quantity questions also determine the content of mass, energy and were it is going. The remarkable thing is that all of these ideas about form and spirit, temporality and being work well together theoretically.
Gravity has a particular direction, yet no one knows what it is made of. It could be a graviton that travels at light speed like the gravitational field, yet it could also be a quantum entanglement statistical effect of concatenation of mass quantum characteristics. Christians have an operating live, kingdom of God idea about experience wherein there is a different material nature for the world. Christian ethics are supposed to be consistent with the ethics of the kingdom of God, and not simply worldly as if they were unreasoning beings pursuing impulses immersed solely within a physical field and nothing else.
It seems that evolution of a spiritual nature brought about by the work of the Holy Spirit and intervention of the Lord was a method God devised to start with to bring human intelligence further out of the muck of creation. One wonders if God would have been satisfied with just creating senseless rocks or dumb animals and if the present sad situation of original sin of a fallen nature doesn't have a learning curve intent for the development of intelligence and independence in it too. One such that human beings can be fit to exist for eternity as sentient beings in the kingdom of God.
One should be careful about dismissing Neo-Platonism categorically along with Gnosticism since it may echo aspects of reality presently difficult for some to get a grasp. Neo-Platonism doesn't require a belief in an alternate or do-it-yourself approach to salvation alternative to the no-works, grace only salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ. I think there are many though that just take a little Neo-Platonism and lose track of the Lord and think about astral traveling and so forth, it might save on fossil fuel use and global warming gases, yet even if it were so would be flitting about realms of a natural Universe missing out on renormalizing a right relationship with God through the mission of the Son. None are worthy-no not one.
Preponderantly, except for most Muslim countries where all souls are in effect required to submit to a neo-Spinozoan uniform Mohammedan orthodox monistic theology of God with empirical exhaustion, the heresy of non-differentiated sameness of God is not a popular point of view so far as people have an opinion about God in-the-world.
The naïve theological monism effacing even consideration of the possibility of philosophical material-spiritual dualism or pluralism within monism might have been possible governments in a seventh century culture reacting to a plethora of eccentric mystery religions and oppressive neo-theocratic rival governments yet is untenable to enlightened thought today. Paradoxically the Cathari and Gnostic approaches to the sameness of the material world as evil have much in common with the simplistic extreme monism of Mohammedanism, yet Mohammedanism has the most repressive religious intolerance of other sects and faiths of all the world’s major religions as it seeks to force the world into same-sect monism.
Taghut is a Muslim term for non-conformity to extreme monism. Taghut refers to the selection of Satanic media will-to-power. Religious pluralism and the subtleties of the trinity are, to same-sect monists, satanic-a term better reserved for the broadcast media same-narrative out-of-body view of politics and social reality greasing the insinuation of concentrated material wealth and power through corporatism and pseudo-socialism. Broadcast media are a political dualism in support of infrasexualty, adult life aborting civil wars and birth control to redistribute power through their actions, propaganda, displacement and all with plausible deniability.
While Paul criticized Gnosticism, it is not actually plain what it was that was being criticized. He did not recapitulate the Gnostic philosophy as might a history of philosophy. It took away from the historical context of the Lord Jesus Christ perhaps and moved toward an esoteric sort of Zoroastrian approach to what Hegel might have called 'realms of absolute spirit' if he were commenting on Gnosticism at all
One may critique the Gnostic style gospel of Thomas as being without Jesus in an historical setting. Evidently some of the things Jesus said are placed into something more of a Neo-Platonist context. That would be a rather abstract and somewhat fictitious approach. A narrative approach without historical context to affirm Neo-Platonist paradigmata could make Richard Nixon seem like a Yoda from extra-dimensions.
It is understandable that some would do so believing first in Neo-Platonism and secondarily interpreting what they learn about Jesus Christ within that paradigm. Plainly one is better finding the gospel of the Lord as presented in the canon first before reading about Neo-Platonism. With the benefit of 2500 years of progress in physical cosmology it is simpler to compare Platonic ideas with what is observable and theoretical physics in regard to natural philosophy and the revealed word of God.
I think the mind-matter duality issue is a problem for some. There are physicalists that view mind as a complex sort of matter. W.V.O. Quine the great analytic philosopher and logician assented to that point of view if asked. It does seem self-evident to many that mind is qualitatively different than matter however. Duality in substances between a material world and a hypothetical spiritual world does not necessarily require that the material world be comparatively inferior to the spiritual world. It does not need to be morally inferior. The fall of mankind does not mean that matter must be implicitly evil or immoral though mankind seems entrapped here as a corrective measure for original sin and Christians do look forward to liberation from the temporal material body to a spiritual heaven with a new and improved kind of body good for eternity.
The body is short lived-like a blade of grass said Solomon. When in Anchorage in the winter of 2010-11I camped in a tent below freezing between late December to April without propane to heat water. I got the flu and pneumonia at a shelter in late December where some people had actual frostbite. Director Crocket of the homeless service Bean's Cafe would later die of pneumonia. It was a tough variety I guess. Lungs become coated with virus and the dry cold makes breathing tough.
I returned Dec 27th to a small tent in a camp shared only with a few Moose part-timers occasionally walking past or sleeping in the snow. I had an abscessed tooth and didn’t know it. It turned out that whenever I ate chocolate it must have made way through a hole at the base of the tooth into the ear area or something. Several times I sort of keeled over to my left side while standing and my mind sort of began to dissolve in quarters something like a computer screen losing parts of its operations and breaking apart before shutting down. I lost equilibrium and nearly consciousness simultaneously though I didn’t pass out once I was on the ground It was something uncomical like the spinning sign in Mel Brook's High Anxiety. It was a terrible experience and occurred at least 15 times that season.
It gave me a different perspective on the mind as a phenomenon equivalent to the body. One’s own sentience is contingent on the brain and I think the entire thing dies with the body. I believe God has the data of what the soul is on his hard drive (a metaphor) and reconstitutes it as easily as I would duplicate a file on the computer I am writing on. God before any metaphysical or physical mechanics in which we humans classify mind, spirit, body, materiality, language or human experience.
When I stopped eating any sort of chocolate and later got the abscessed tooth cut out and the hole on the upper side fixed by an orthodontist I no longer had that worse-than-seasickness experience and my balance returned to normal.
God seemed to regard His creation as a good thing in the beginning. An artist might regard sentient beings as immoral and never find paint or the clay of his sculptures to have some sort of morality at all. Instead the immorality of any artwork would require sentient representationalism of wickedness. So the matter of a spiritual world as a better place can be regarded perhaps as better in several ways or from several points of view if such exists. At any rate matter may be a complex sort of spiritual substance itself that we regard as the practico-inert substance provided by God for human beings to exist in-human beings with a spiritual element of sentience.
Temporal moral values may be implicitly inferior to correct eternal values of Christians in the kingdom of God under direct supervision of The Lord. Duality of mind and matter can perhaps be compared with duality of matter and spirit, or of two different Universes with different physical laws, or of two different quantitative experiences by minds that are founded in spirit of presentations by God. As contingent beings created by God it is sort of difficult to categorize ultimate constructions of God as being made of anything besides His will. Gnostics probably got a lot of Platonic paradigmata wrong and misapplied it to the Lord. Jesus as God required no mechanical causality for his presence that transcends space-time and matter even though he was born in human form. It was and is God’s show.
One may have a philosopher's appreciation of subtleties that comprise the facts of Platonism and a good historical grasp of the way that it influenced thought in the several centuries moving through pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmendides to Attic philosophers, the Peripatetic philosophers and on to neo-Platonic Alexandrian philosophers, and eventually Plotinus.
On the other hand most new age people probably haven't a meaningful grasp of how Neo-Platonism fits into the intellectual history of the west. Neither would they be considering synthetic accretions of Zoroastrianism with Platonism or Neo-Platonism. Consider Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's ideas about Zoroaster and dualism. It is easy to leap to all sorts of wrong assumptions metaphysically with dualism and categorizations about good, evil and so forth. The creation can have good, evil and even matter and spirit without benefit of radical oversimplification or quantification from the secular about its ultimate nature, disposition or composition.
Philosophy is something of an academic discipline these days. Specialists may not actually pursue wisdom so much as technical careers that assume empirical and secular criteria unaware even of the history of philosophy. Even so some philosophers probably try to understand everything including ancient and modern philosophy.
Philosophy before the Lord wasn't a religion so much as an inquiry into the nature and mechanics of reality. Platonism found forms and abstractions of things expressible in language. Humans noticing forms of matter, temporal breakdown or change of matter and so forth thought about it and that was philosophy or Alethea-the pursuit of wisdom- without divine revelation from God.
The spinning bucket thought experiment of Isaac Newton is preceded by more than 2500 years by the pre-Socratic ideas of Parmenides considering the ideas of volume and objects embedded within it such as a sphere (the Earth)-do they displace something that was already there, or is empty space destroyed when matter occupies where it was. Those deep philosophical kinds of cosmological inquiry remain in considering singularities, black holes and such ideas. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus' idea about the One might be associated with the parallel criterion of a singularity of space-time at the heart of the start of the Universe posited through Einstein’s field equations of General Relativity. Philosophy was mostly about physical reality. Christian religion is about revealed knowledge. There is a fundamental difference between the two pursuits and the knowledge content of their data-base.
I believe that one cannot use an argument from design or an ontological argument as a valid way to 'prove' the existence of God. I suppose one could make an existential argument for the existence of God too, and derive some sort of Bishop Berkleyan conclusion. The most one could do though is confirm what the Bible already reveals as true, rather than generate some points about God that could be considered true yet aren't found in the Bible.
It is likely that whatever people discover with natural philosophical inquiry will in some manner be found to cohere satisfactorily with the revealed word of God. I don't think there is a chance that God intends to deceive anyone with a vast disconformity of what seems manifestly true between evident physical causal mechanics and the revealed word of God in the Bible. Sometimes people don't understand nature correctly or the Bible either. I wrote on that topic in 'Creation & Cosmos - The Literal Values of Genesis'.
Some Christians tend to lump Gnosticism and the esoteric ideas of Philo of Alexandria in the mystery religions category and explain why it’s all wrong. That is intellectually insufficient for accuracy. I of course believe the traditional approach to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even so the entire idea that the material world is in some way in contradiction to the Biblical remarks about creation and/or miracles is something I disagree with enough to have written several essays on the topic in 'Creation and Cosmos; The Literal Values of Genesis'.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/creation-and-cosmos-the-literal-values-of-genesis/ebook/product-21723672.html cost: Free
I disagree with the idea that the material world is in some way more real for Christians than a spiritual world ultimately. That is, developing a metaphysics to explain the existence of the material world is a reasonable philosophical and theological approach; though with Barth we may stipulate that only revealed knowledge can provide information about God to man. Reality is relative. However natural philosophy accounts for the material world is less than secondary in the God to human relationship. Like Peter joining the Lord to walk on the water it is the relationship that matters, not matter as a substance.
God is spirit most people would agree. People may be fancy dirt clods yet God is Spirit able to mold and shape the cosmic dust. Modern physical cosmology presents several versions of what comprises physical reality. The material world no longer has a simple explanation in naïve realism. Instead what might be considered spiritual atoms that Leibniz conjectured about comprise the building blocks of what is viewed as matter. Leibniz's spiritual atoms that he called monads is just one way of viewing the smallest particles-what Democritus called atoms. Physics has gone beyond that and describes particles as waveforms coinciding and entangling within a field (the Higgs field) in such a way that they become like standing waves that seem to be substance or matter. Because these developed in a coherent way in a field with physical laws of order including entropy and motion (time) a Universe appears to exist for sentient beings in the field-phenomenon they perceive ad call matter.
Hence some cosmologists say that for all intents and purposes this Universe could be a hologram. The appearance of the reality of matter that we consider to be almost naïve mass and energy is shaped by our human immersion in the field. Our interpretation of the waveforms is a consequence of the development of our perception faculties as we process mass and energy in the field to sustain our existence. So what we call matter is more of a field phenomenon with rules of behavior such as gravity than a substance. These are not great insights in the 21st century. I have written about this elsewhere quite a bit and won't go too far into the topic of 'what is matter and the Universe' here.
Certainly there are various theories about what the building blocks of mass and energy are and where they originate. Because human beings perceive matter in a particular way as beings immersed in a field (compare this to fish living in an ocean) they may consider the field phenomena as something called a, b, or c. The term is something of a linguistic convention. There is supposed to be a connection between word and object, so whatever the smallest particle or largest containing field is what one might want to describe regarding matter. Neo-Platonists, physicists and many Christians don't believe that God is made of something in the Universe or matter and energy (for different reasons).
Kurt Gödel and others would have regarded the nature of ultimate reality as something that can be described from within the created or existing reality. The individual parts cannot describe what the sum is. If one lived on the surface of a map one could not see view the entire map without being above it to look down upon it, etc. God is thought to be spirit who created mass and energy, the Universe and such by many Christians. Neo-Platonism isn't so much a religion as a physical and metaphysical theory about the nature of reality and God, one that looks for the truth about things. It is useful to have some sort of cosmological theory even for apologetics.
If one regards Neo-Platonism as a plausible metaphysics shadowed today by contemporary cosmology it is not a religion any more than Newtonian or Einsteinian mechanics. Barth would have regarded it as natural philosophy, and natural philosophy is not a way to God and eternal life through the salvation of the Lord obviously. One simply is interested in speculating about cosmology and metaphysics even from a theological perspective-Augustine wrote about the nature of time of course. The Gnostics were also perhaps spiritually minded people interested in Platonism, however without the truth of the Lord foremost in their thought they easily would have lapsed or moved into all manner of wrong ethical assumptions. Narrow is the gate to salvation.
While Gnostic religious approaches to Christianity might have left out important facts, the Neo-Platonic element comprising metaphysical accounts for existence shouldn't be capriciously jettisoned. Perhaps some Gnostics finding the world's material existence to be a secondary manifestation from some higher reality that doesn't mean that the temporal world is not real, or that the events that occur within it are not meaningful.
Some say the world in Gnostic theory was created by a demi-urge. That is a term that we Christians find rather pagan and somewhat amusing. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus (a second century Alexandrian philosopher) was the foremost writer of the philosophy. In 54 tractates called The Enneads Plotinus described a complete cosmology and order of creation of the Universe.
He thought that The One (God) in some mysterious way emanated everything that is the Universe. Emanations remind one of the waveform theory of mass and energy today-not really so silly. Plotinus wondered how or why The One would issue anything to start with. What reason, what cause would The One have to bring anything into existence when he was already perfect?
The One did not require spatial extension, mass, energy or time. He did not have need of questions or answers because he was omniscient. The entire topic is very interesting to consider. Christians too can wonder about ultimate questions of why God exists to start with and since he is The Ancient of Days, how he always existed for all of eternity before the creation of any temporal Universe?
These are mysterious questions for temporal beings with finite intellect and who are not omniscient. We discern the relation of humans in the Garden of Eden to these kinds of ultimate paradigm questions and might wonder what relationship finite human beings have to the One-why did he create finite beings?
Plotinus probably was influenced by Christianity. It is hard to say. If Paul and others viewed Gnosticism as a heretical syncretism distracting from the meaningful course of following the Lord they were probably right. Attributing the sources of Plotinus' ideas is not simply in some of the fine points.
The One is not a demi-urge that created the Universe for Plotinus. Instead, The One somehow issued The Intelligence who created everything else. That paradigm is somewhat comparable to another aspect of God-one of the Trinity besides the Father, doing the works of creation. We tend to view Jesus Christ as being the member of the Trinity who created the Universe, yet we might as well say The Word. The book of Genesis and John account of creation enable us to understand that God can allocate creation work to His Triune nature. It is not reasonable to believe that the Intelligence in The Enneads could not be an equal approximation of The Word.
In the beginning was The Word, and...In The Enneads the One issues The Intelligence. A Universe is created in stages. We see that the Universe in Genesis is created in stages and the description as a kind of general outline is put into movements or categories called days. Physical cosmology theory develops forms for particles to exist in rising from waves into larger and different, lower temperature clumps.
I think the important point is that Christians and Neo-Platonists believe that matter and the material world was created by someone else of a different nature-Spirit. Neo-Platonists might believe that one could ascend from the material world to more esoteric realms of spirit, and we as Christians believe that one cannot do anything with that sort of paradigm. God and for us God as Jesus Christ has the key to allocation of material and spiritual location.
In physical cosmology theory space-time in principle is reversible yet the mathematical improbability of doing so make it unlikely. Multi-verse theory tends to regard everything possible in that every possible Universe that can exist must exist somewhere. Christian philosophers might consider that for the Omniscient, omnipotent God all Universe that can exist, do exist too. Yet like Plotinus we might wonder why God would create a Universe to start with since the beginning and end of all possible Universes is already known unto God?
The not well kept secret for many is something Spinozan bordering on pantheism-everything that exists is God or contingent being of God. God created all things of his substance, yet not all created things are God. Evidently the differentiations in quantity and form limit the nature of sentient beings and material things to a particular context-a reason why pre-determinism works and some are saved with others with a different destiny. In quantum physics the quality-quantity questions also determine the content of mass, energy and were it is going. The remarkable thing is that all of these ideas about form and spirit, temporality and being work well together theoretically.
Gravity has a particular direction, yet no one knows what it is made of. It could be a graviton that travels at light speed like the gravitational field, yet it could also be a quantum entanglement statistical effect of concatenation of mass quantum characteristics. Christians have an operating live, kingdom of God idea about experience wherein there is a different material nature for the world. Christian ethics are supposed to be consistent with the ethics of the kingdom of God, and not simply worldly as if they were unreasoning beings pursuing impulses immersed solely within a physical field and nothing else.
It seems that evolution of a spiritual nature brought about by the work of the Holy Spirit and intervention of the Lord was a method God devised to start with to bring human intelligence further out of the muck of creation. One wonders if God would have been satisfied with just creating senseless rocks or dumb animals and if the present sad situation of original sin of a fallen nature doesn't have a learning curve intent for the development of intelligence and independence in it too. One such that human beings can be fit to exist for eternity as sentient beings in the kingdom of God.
One should be careful about dismissing Neo-Platonism categorically along with Gnosticism since it may echo aspects of reality presently difficult for some to get a grasp. Neo-Platonism doesn't require a belief in an alternate or do-it-yourself approach to salvation alternative to the no-works, grace only salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ. I think there are many though that just take a little Neo-Platonism and lose track of the Lord and think about astral traveling and so forth, it might save on fossil fuel use and global warming gases, yet even if it were so would be flitting about realms of a natural Universe missing out on renormalizing a right relationship with God through the mission of the Son. None are worthy-no not one.
