Topics Religion

Question Philosophy never seems to debate multiple Gods like the Vikings and the ancient Greeks had as well as Hinduism. These could be dismissed as silly, discredited ideas except Hinduism still has numerous believers. It seems no more ridiculous to me than the Father, Son and Holy Ghost scenario. Why is monotheism alone debated by religious Western philosophers? (Atheist ones will only consider a Prime Mover or Argument from Design creator but why is this? Is it because of over 2000 years of Abrahamic Gods, messiahs, and prophets with the attendant respectability these, believers would say, bestow?)

Accepted:
March 13, 2008

Comments

The reasons are no doubt complicated, and insofar as what's called for is a historical explanation, my amateur guesses are no better than the next amateur's. But we can still ask what might give the monotheistic notions a special philosophical interest. And when we ask this, I think we see fairly quickly that monotheism per se isn't the issue. Rather, it's the details of the way that the monotheistic traditions have developed their idea of God.

Let's start by contrast with the Greek gods. What's striking about them is that they're so thoroughly physical. They live in a particular place, they have physical bodies, and they have a variety of physical limitations. Suppose we discovered that somewhere atop some misty mountain, there really were such beings. That would be fascinating in all sorts of ways, but it's not so clear that there's much philosophical interest here. They would just seem to be rather remarkable physical beings. We might wonder how they manage to do what they do (I can't turn myself into a swan, for example), but we might well just consider this to be a puzzling scientific problem.

Insofar as the gods of polytheistic traditions are like the Greek gods, the same point applies. (Whether this is a good way to think about Hinduism, by the way, is quite another matter, and my sense is that it isn't.)

For better or worse, however, the way that God is thought of in the monotheistic traditions isn't like this. God isn't just another physical being. God is supposed to be ultimate in a way that no mere mountaintop dweller could be. Unlike Zeus, God is supposed to underwrite the whole of physical reality. The idea that Zeus possesses necessary existence makes no sense because Zeus is the wrong kind of being even to be a candidate for that status. But God as the philosophical tradition has often understood God, isn't a spatio-temporal being at all, and so the peculiarly metaphysical discussion of whether God does or could exist necessarily can at least get underway. The Greek gods aren't perfect in any interesting sense; the God of the philosophers is often held to be a perfect being. That leads to all sorts of philosophical possibilities (variations on the ontological argument, for example) and perplexities (is necessary existence really a perfection? Is omnipotence a coherent notion?)

Now of course, things are more complicated than this. Christianity claims that God is in one respect like Zeus: God actually took on physical, fleshly form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Whether or not you think this is ridiculous, it raises philosophical puzzles in a way that Zeus doesn't. For Zeus was only flesh and blood, albeit very unusual flesh and blood. The claim that Jesus was at once fully God and fully human cries out for philosophical analysis in a way that the claim that Zeus could make his body into the shape of a swan doesn't.

You also mentioned the Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But remember: the doctrine of the Trinity isn't like saying that there are three distinct gods. It's the claim that there is one being who is at the same time three persons. Defending that claim calls for peculiarly philosophical moves.

None of this is to say that monotheistic notions of God are the only ones that could be philosophically interesting. But notice: that very issue itself raises philosophical questions if we set it in the context of the monotheistic tradition. Suppose we say, as many theologians have, that nothing short of a perfect being could be worthy of our worship, and hence nothing short of a perfect being could deserve the title "God." Could there be more than one such thing? It's hardly obvious that the answer is yes. Or suppose we think that the reason there are contingent things in existence is that there is some non-contingent thing on which they depend. Could there be more than one such thing? What sort of metaphysical picture might go with a polytheism of necessary beings?

And so whatever historical contingencies might lie behind the attention Western philosophers have paid to monotheism, part of the story is surely that the monotheistic traditions offer up a notion of God that's philosophically complex and that raises all sorts of philosophical puzzles. Whatever charm Zeus and his pantheon may have had, philosophical intrigue doesn't seem to have been part of it.

Two small additions to Prof. Stairs' answer.

First, it is interesting to note that even the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, most of them anyway, although 'officially' polytheistic, generally just talk about one 'god'. That is, their philosophical inquiries push them towards monotheism, rather than monotheism pushing them towards a certain type of philosophy.

Second, some recent philosophers have investigated the philosophical significance of ancient polytheism. Most famously, perhaps, Nietzsche, with the account of Apollo and Dionysus in his 'The Birth of Tragedy'. This is one example of a 19th and 20th Century trend (including Schelling, Bachelard and Heidegger) to interpret what we often now consider 'mythology', or the four substances of ancient science, as an embodiment, articulation and even exploration of philosophical ideas. The philosophical issues that arise in this way will be quitedifferent, of course. Arguments for the existence of gods, or problemsin the conception of omnipotence, creation, omnescience, are all besidethe point. I would guess that similar types of analysis have been undertaken with respect to Hinduism but I'm not familiar with this area.