Hegel as Sorcerer: The "Science" of Second Realities and the "Death" of God

Self | November 10, 2008 | Jean F. Drew

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the link!

[hosepipe]

[ In summary we could say that created reality is not being but meaning. It is dependent and refers to God and created things are only the bearers of meaning and in no way self-sufficient. In this we no longer need to have being and meaning as two different things. Ontology and Epistemolgy are united. Here then we avoid the notion that only meaning refers to God but being only refers to itself. The two layer level of ontology is the uniquely Christian ontology that refers all created reality to its dependence on God. ]

This is nonsense.. Its possible that know that.. Maybe a diversion?..

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for sharing your concerns and views, dear the_conscience!

The link for the Stanford article is here.

In reply, I again aver what I mentioned earlier at post 215 and 211: context, context, context.

The discussion at Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not Spiritual. It is philosophy. One cannot hold Plato's feet to the fire on Spiritual matters. That doesn't mean his contributions were worthless or not according to God's will.

For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.

Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. – I Corinthians 2:11-14

Plato did not have God's gift of Spiritual discernment which all Christians receive. God gave Plato the gift of wisdom. Faith and reason are complementary, but reason cannot substitute for faith.

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.

For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.

And my speech and my preaching [was] not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. – I Corinthians 2:1-5

In context, Plato's insights are very helpful to me especially in the never-ending debates concerning mathematics, physics and cosmology.

But Plato's thoughts do not substitute for the words of God. The words of God are spirit and life, the words of men are neither spirit nor life:

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life. – John 6:63

Nevertheless, the words of men are helpful in context - whether Plato's, the founding father's, the_conscience, etc. But they are not and can never be, spirit and life.

To God be the glory!

[hosepipe]

[ It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life. – John 6:63 ]

Indeed it the spirit that gives LIFE....
The flesh does not give life but sustains it..

[the_conscience]

Thank you for your response AG.

The discussion at Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not Spiritual.

All facts are God's facts. There is no dichotomy between physical facts and spiritual facts. This is dualism. Now surely secular philosophy interprets facts incorrectly but that doesn't change that all facts are God's facts.

One cannot hold Plato's feet to the fire on Spiritual matters.

Of course we must since he is responsible for rejecting what God revealed through nature, his conscience, and God's providential ordering of history. Everyone's feet are held to the fire!

That doesn't mean his contributions were worthless or not according to God's will.

I agree.

Plato did not have God's gift of Spiritual discernment which all Christians receive.

He had the Law within his heart which is enough to convict him.

God gave Plato the gift of wisdom.

Define Wisdom.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.
Prov 1.

But Plato's thoughts do not substitute for the words of God. The words of God are spirit and life, the words of men are neither spirit nor life:

God made man a rational/moral being with the ability to interpret nature, his conscience, and God's providential ordering of history so that man is left without excuse about his knowledge of God. His special revelation of himself in Christ as inscripturated does require the assurance of the Spirit of Christ, yes. The problem with Plato's thoughts is that he failed to interpret the facts as having their entire basis in the one self-sufficient God who determines all facts.

[the_conscience]

From an earlier post:

What "is" God?.... or... Who is God?.. is the same question..

No, "what is god" is a platonic god. The Christian God is whom.

This is nonsense.. Its possible that [you?] know that.. Maybe a diversion?..

A diversion from or to what?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply, dear the_conscience!

All facts are God's facts.

Indeed, a thing is true because God says it.

By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. – Psalms 33:6

Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times [the things] that are not [yet] done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure: - Isaiah 46:10

But on this point, I must disagree:

There is no dichotomy between physical facts and spiritual facts. This is dualism.

It is not dualism that man as the observer is unable to discern the difference between physical and spiritual matters. Indeed, if the Spirit of God does not indwell the man, he cannot discern the things of God, they are foolishness to him:

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. – I Corinthians 2:13-14

The deafness of the natural man is not dualism. The people Jesus is addressing below were physically hearing Him (pressure waves, sound) – but they could not spiritually hear Him:

Why do ye not understand my speech? [even] because ye cannot hear my word. – John 8:43

Conversely, those who have the gift of “ears to hear” are able to hear Him:

And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father. – John 6:65

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: - John 10:27

But blessed [are] your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. - Matthew 13:16

The natural man cannot comprehend God's thoughts:

For my thoughts [are] not your thoughts, neither [are] your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For [as] the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. – Isaiah 55:8-9 You continued:

me: One cannot hold Plato's feet to the fire on Spiritual matters.

you: Of course we must since he is responsible for rejecting what God revealed through nature, his conscience, and God's providential ordering of history. Everyone's feet are held to the fire!

Of a Truth, God holds everyone’s feet to the fire. But man did not receive the baptism of the Spirit until Pentecost. Plato had long since left this mortal realm.

There is no way a natural man like Plato can receive Spiritual Truth. Even the Hebrews who had witnessed God’s many miracles and received the Law in a display of power could not receive Spiritual Truth because they did not have the gift of “ears to hear.”

And Moses called unto all Israel, and said unto them, Ye have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt unto Pharaoh, and unto all his servants, and unto all his land; The great temptations which thine eyes have seen, the signs, and those great miracles: Yet the LORD hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day. – Deuteronomy 29:2-4

Plato didn’t witness any of those signs. All he had to work with was wisdom – the wisdom of men, not the wisdom of God. Jesus Christ is the wisdom of God.

But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. - I Corinthians 1:24

But man cannot know God through his own wisdom:

For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. - I Corinthians 1:21

Again, I aver that God gave Plato the gift of wisdom - not the wisdom of God, Jesus Christ – Who we receive – but the wisdom of men. Every good gift is of God. Even Plato's very life was a gift of God - as is yours and mine. And we Christians can appreciate Plato's efforts within the context of the revelation of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Jeepers, even Nebuchadnezzar was given the gift to praise God. That he was a heathen did not ipso facto falsify what he said here:

Nebuchadnezzar the king, unto all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth; Peace be multiplied unto you.

I thought it good to shew the signs and wonders that the high God hath wrought toward me.

How great [are] his signs! and how mighty [are] his wonders! his kingdom [is] an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion [is] from generation to generation. – Daniel 4:1-3

And again, Paul pointed to the wisdom of the Greek poets (certainly not Christian) here:

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. – Acts 17:28

And again, Caiaphas – certainly no Christian – was not wrong when he said this:

And led him away to Annas first; for he was father in law to Caiaphas, which was the high priest that same year. Now Caiaphas was he, which gave counsel to the Jews, that it was expedient that one man should die for the people. – John 18:13-14

And again, Gamaliel – certainly no Christian – was not wrong when he said this:

And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God. – Acts 5:38-39

A broken clock is right twice a day. Blind squirrels find acorns. Atheist scientists make useful discoveries.

Likewise, men like Plato or Aristotle or Socrates or Heraclitus or Euclid - who never knew Jesus Christ – have passed along to us their insights which are useful even to this very day.

Again: context, context, context.

Plato is not God and is not to be worshipped. He is not a saint, a religious leader or a theologian. He did not, indeed he could not, speak with Spiritual insight. He did not have the gift of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

But his insights into universals are relevant to this day. Every time a mathematician uses a variable in a formula, he attests to the universality of the formula. Truly, the only closed cosmology (Tegmark’s Level IV) is closed precisely because it is radical Platonism.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

God made man a rational/moral being with the ability to interpret nature, his conscience, and God's providential ordering of history so that man is left without excuse about his knowledge of God. His special revelation of himself in Christ as inscripturated does require the assurance of the Spirit of Christ, yes. The problem with Plato's thoughts is that he failed to interpret the facts as having their entire basis in the one self-sufficient God who determines all facts.

Plato, more than any Greek philosopher known to me, was focused on the “beyond” of the physical. I would not say that Plato is without hope, nor would I speculate what God’s judgment will be.

For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. – Romans 9:15

For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and [their] thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;) In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel. – Romans 2:14-16

But without faith [it is] impossible to please [him]: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and [that] he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. – Hebrews 11:6

What happens to Plato is entirely up to God.

To God be the glory!

[hosepipe]

[ No, "what is god" is a platonic god. The Christian God is whom. ]

What is Spirit or even spirit?.. Who is Spirit or spirit we know already..

[ A diversion from or to what? ]

Exactly.. nonsense is a ruse..

[hosepipe]

Wise counsel in #248.. lets hope it is heeded.. by many..

[betty boop]

For Plato escaping the world of particularity was to achieve the ideal world of the Forms. Knowledge was not possible in the world of becoming only can man have knowledge by participating in the world of eternal truths, abstract reasoning, only conceptual knowledge of the ideal world was participation in the divine. Thus this ideal world of abstract concepts is set apart as something that both God and man can participate together in…. Christianity teaches something wholly other than an abstract ideal world in which God and man participate.

Well of course it does one_conscience! But don’t blame Plato for never having heard of Jesus Christ, since he lived ~400 years before the coming of our Lord. Plato had no awareness of God as Personality. Until the Incarnation of Christ, God as Person was not made fully manifest to mankind. Instead, Plato was aware of God as the Beyond of the Kosmos, the Source of its life (being) and order. He sensed Him as “Mind,” as the divine Nous. And thus he reasoned that, since man also possesses nous, divine–human conversation is possible. (Many Christians would testify to this.) And because the world is divinely ordered by Nous, it is discoverable by means of human nous. (That presumption lies at the very root of modern science.)

It’s as if Plato is to be blamed for repudiating Christ — which he never got an opportunity to do since our Lord did not come until four centuries after his death.

I have noticed a decided antipathy to the great classical thinkers among many Reformed Church sects/confessions; and by extension, antipathy for the scholastic philosophical tradition of the Roman Church, as if it had claimed for itself a “new, improved revelation” to be super-added to the Holy Scriptures (it does not make that claim and never has). Your characterization of Thomas Aquinas as somehow arguing that God is co-extensive with His creation appears utterly false to me. You realize, of course, that this would be a prescription for pantheism. Saint and Doctor Thomas, Trinitarian to his roots in spirit and intellect, would never make such an egregious mistake.

Thomas — as all the great doctors of the Church, e.g., Augustine and Anselm — is on bended knee to the “aseity” of God, His a se, complete, total, eternal self-subsistence and self-completeness, needing nothing to be eternally perfect. He is Creator and sustainer of all that there is, the tetragrammatical god YHWH, “I Am That Am,” the Father of Being, “beyond” the world of created things, and inaccessible to human reason; He is the Logos of creation, the Son of God Who is the Word of God, for whom and by whom were all things made, the Alpha and the Omega; He is the Spirit of God with us, bringing us into relation with the Son and, by His sacrifice, restoring us to our Father.

As for Plato’s position on the matter,

In the Republic, the beyond is imagined as the ultimate creative ground, the Agathon, from whom all being things receive their existence, their form, and their truth; and since by its presence (pareinai) it is the origin of reality and the sunlike luminosity of its structure, the Agathon-Beyond is something more beautiful (kallion) and higher in rank (hyperechontos) of dignity and power than the reality that we symbolize by such terms as being, existence, essence, form, intelligibility, and knowledge…. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, the beyond is the truly immortal divinity from whose presence in contemplative action the Olympian gods derive their divine and men their human immortality. In the puppet myth of the Laws, finally, “the god” becomes the divine force that pulls the golden cord of the Nous that is meant to move man toward the immortalizing, noetic order of is existence. In this last image of the noetic “pull” (helkein) Plato comes so close to the Helkein of the Gospel of John (6:44) that it is difficult to discern the difference. — Eric Vöegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” Collected Works Vol. 12.

It seems where you see a dualism — e.g., the division of man into body and soul, and the dualism of form and matter — I see a complementarity. A complementarity is a situation where one has two seemingly mutually exclusive entities, both of which are necessary to the total description of the system which they together comprise. The fact is that, although we can conceptually separate body and soul in order to study them, a living man cannot be separated into the entities body and soul and still live. He exists in spatiotemporal reality only while they are conjoined. Here I take you to task for the same error you charged me with in my earlier discussion of the Great Hierarchy of Being, that I was focusing on the four partners as if they were separable — which they are not. To see them as separable is to miss the point that it is their mutually dynamic relations that constitute spacetime reality as human beings experience it.

As my dearest sister in Christ Alamo-Girl puts it, what is needed for understanding here is “context, context, context.”

In closing, I’d only like to suggest that “the uniquely Christian ontology that refers all created reality to its dependence on God” had been anticipated by Plato.

Thank you ever so much, one_conscience, for your excellent, thought-provoking essay/post!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your encouragements, dear brother in Christ!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you, dearest sister in Christ, for your beautiful essay-post and that insightful excerpt from Voegelin! And thank you for your encouragements.

It’s as if Plato is to be blamed for repudiating Christ — which he never got an opportunity to do since our Lord did not come until four centuries after his death.

Personally, I find Plato's insights to be the best a man's can be absent the direct revelation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Based on Justin Martyr's description of the various schools of Greek philosophy he reviewed before becoming Christian, Plato's was especially concerned with the divine. Seems to me Plato would have been ecstatic to know what we Christians know.

This dispute reminds me of Euclidean geometry which is still useful to us even though we know space/time is warped. Likewise, Newton's theories are useful despite what we have learned by Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Precious few great thinkers had that quality of work. Plato is one of them. So is Aristotle.

[betty boop]

Seems to me Plato would have been ecstatic to know what we Christians know.

Seems that way to me, too, dearest sister in Christ!

Michael Novak recently wrote, "What Jewish and Christian revelation adds to philosophy, which philosophy has sometimes gained a hint of but hardly dares to assert on its own, is that God reveals himself as the love that impels us to show love to one another." Plato got as far as he could possibly get, absent the revelation of Christ. It seems to me he got pretty far. I believe if he had lived in the time of Christ, he would have confessed Christ, just as the philosopher (and saint) Justin Martyr later did. FWIW

Thank you so very much for your insightful essay/post!

[spirited irish]

Thank you so very much for the ping. There’s a wealth of good info on that thread, and I appreciate your pointing me to it!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for your encouragements, dearest sister in Christ, and thank you for that beautiful excerpt!

I agree that Plato went as far as he possibly could. And I agree with Novak that (even today) philosophy hardly dares to assert on its own the revelation of Jesus Christ.

[Woebama]

Per your comments regarding Plato and spiritual discernment. These are David and Joshua, so I’m not comparing them to Plato, but throwing this out for consideration. Pre-Pentacost Holy Spirit Examples:

1 Samuel 16:13 (New International Version)

13 So Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers, and from that day on the Spirit of the LORD came upon David in power. Samuel then went to Ramah.

Numbers 27:18 (New International Version)

18 So the LORD said to Moses, “Take Joshua son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit, [a] and lay your hand on him.

Footnotes:

Numbers 27:18 Or Spirit

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for those beautiful Scriptures and for reminding us of Joshua and David!

Here’s another:

And Saul sent messengers to take David: and when they saw the company of the prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing [as] appointed over them, the Spirit of God was upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied. – I Samuel 19:20

Who but God knows which people - great or small - He has touched to accomplish His will?

Praise God that since the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, starting at Pentecost, we Christians are actually indwelled by Him:

And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. – John 1:33

And as I began to speak, the Holy Ghost fell on them, as on us at the beginning. Then remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said, John indeed baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost. Forasmuch then as God gave them the like gift as [he did] unto us, who believed on the Lord Jesus Christ; what was I, that I could withstand God? – Acts 11:15-17

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; [Even] the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. – John 14:16-17

But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. – Romans 8:9

To God be the glory!