It's not a chapter review, but could resist ...
Found this quote today and thought it was interesting. Any thoughts?
Peter De Vries
"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."
-Mike
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Keep in mind that theology has not been on my mind in quite some time (I am considering coming back to it as a second career a la mid-life crisis, thoughts?).
ReplyDeleteBut, if I had ever learned anything during my stay at the Wimberly school of religion, is that it is imperative to have a clear definition of terms. What does it mean for God to exist or not exist? Are God's qualifiers for existence different than ours?
Anywho, these are the questions that came to my mind after reading the quote.
-Joel
Disclaimer: I realize I'm about to put too much thought into what was probably a satirical quip.
ReplyDeleteI'm tempted to read it in light of Kant's (I hesitate to mention IK when I know there are others on here who know him much better than I do) 'moral proof' for the existence of God. So God saves us in some sense because we believe in God. Of course, the Shoah/Holocaust puts a dent in that argument. Maybe someone who's done more with Kant than just reading (okay, skimming) his moral proof can help.
Hmmm, I think I am with Joel. I would probably want to parse some of this out a bit more.
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking about what we mean when we say that God does or does not exist quite a bit the last year or so. It seems to me that we tend to presuppose -- De Vries surely does here, as do the so-called "new" atheists, incidentally -- a certain unnamed, maybe even sublevel, metaphysical system when we make such statements. I would want to pull that system out of the tacit dimension and talk about it before I even touched omnipotence.