PLATONISM’S INFLUENCE ON CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY

Thank you oh so very much for your beautifully insightful post, dearest sister in Christ!

Plato's Being and Becoming certainly puts the greater duality in focus, i.e. Creator and Creation.

Aristotle's "shift of attention" actually laid the very basis of modern science. But that shift in no way detracts from the profound insights of Plato, into the ultimate nature of Reality.

Indeed. I suspect the intense debate between the two viewpoints - most recently between Penrose and Hawking and previously between Einstein and Bohr - is driven by metaphysical naturalism.

Or to put it another way, many of the frogs we've debated on the forum over the years evidently presume that - since they do not or cannot see what the birds see then therefore the bird's view is false. This is probably yet another case of misappropriating Aristotle's law of the excluded middle.

Conversely, I cannot remember a bird failing to recognize that the frog's view is accurate from the perspective of the frog as the observer.

Borrowing from Tegmark:

A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape.

Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime — the bird perspective — these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti.

If the frog sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix.

To the frog, the world is described by Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta — a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds to a cluster of particles that store and process information.

Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds.

Tegmark, Max, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American, May, 2003

Applying that point to this article, it is frogishly wrong for a Christian to conclude, since he experiences time a certain way (linear and forward moving) - that therefore God must also experience time the same way.

God's Name is I AM, YHwH (He IS), Logos, Alpha and Omega.

Dear Sister in Christ, thank you for inviting me to this "end times" thread! But... As you are aware, my mind, at present, is focused on the opposite end of our time scale. ;-)

I did prepare a lengthy response to a number of points that have been made on this thread, but, upon review, I found it to be slanted toward "creation things"... Slanted so much so, that it appeared to me to be akin to an apparent attempt at "thread hijacking" -- like another FReeper's comment to which I recently objected on another thread.

So... rather than be accused of "attempted hijacking" (or, at least, being "non sequitur", I will forward the comment (still HTML-encoded) to you via FReepMail.

Thank you again for the invitation to this thread, but, for the present, my attention is on other things...

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"I AM" created ("ex nihilo") all, designed and formed ("made") all, and knows/sees/sustains all!! To HIM be the glory!

How can Platonism be true, it goes against the faith
so why relate it to Eschatology? Everyone agrees, yes, there is a mystery to Eschatology and the reason the Church is not definitive about everything concerning the End Times. Good thing, Heaven knows...

God’s revealing, making more explicit through present day prophecy the current end of this period of time and God’s next era, the 7th Day and about the 8th Day. I understand better some things written in Revelation 6, thank you dear God for the messages from Heaven.

About Platonism, Jesus has His glorified physical body in Heaven and so will we at the General Judgment, also known as the Final Judgment.

Catechism of the Catholic Church
1060 At the end of time, the Kingdom of God will come in its fullness. Then the just will reign with Christ for ever, glorified in body and soul, and the material universe itself will be transformed. God will then be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28), in eternal life.

1 Cor 15:28 And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then the Son also himself shall be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.

http://www.drbo.org/

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