“The price to the faithful has been much, much higher because so often now, armed with Aristotelian logic, believers demand that God must be logical – and thus they anthropomorphize God, missing the power of God.”
Bingo! And that anthropomorphization of God coupled with “logic” (not rationality) has produced a view of the divine economy of salvation which is, whether Latin or Protestant, profoundly different from that of Eastern Christianity. Its not so much that anthropomorphization per se of God causes the problem. The OT is full of that. Its the combination of an overblown anthropomorphization, itself a product of Aristotelian logic as you point out, with Aristotelian logic itself which has caused what we in the East see as having great potential for error or at a minimum a distortion of what exactly “salvation” or “theosis” means. Aristotelian logic is ALWAYS the product of human thought processes. Of course God gave us rational minds to use them, but it does not follow that the logic our rational minds can use will allow us to understand or even come close to fully explaining even the divine economy of salvation, let alone God Himself.
My usual example of the phenomenon on this forum is the never-ending debate over predestination v. free will, which is to say that Aristotle's law of the excluded middle cannot be applied to God. He gives us both prophesy (and fulfilled prophesy) - and commandments. It is not an either/or.
Aristotle's preoccupation was with "creature." His "departure" from Plato pretty much consisted of making creaturely form immanent to the creature (to put it crudely, a "bottom-up" approach). The idea of transcendent, universal form is eclipsed (the "top-down" approach). His focus on individual creature to some extent loses the greater context in which creatures exist, which is transcendent Being (ousia).
For Plato, the "being things" exist because they are participations in divine Being. This insight, while not entirely lost in Aristotle, is downplayed.
I certainly agree that Aristotelian logic is not the instrument of choice for any valid knowledge of God. Its method requires entities about which valid propositions can be constructed. But God Himself is not such an "entity." God is not, nor can be, an "object" of an intending consciousness, which can be directly and comprehensively observed, about which valid propositional statements can be made....
For God is (strictly speaking) "non-existent reality" -- by which I mean He is not subject to the categories of space and time but is, as Plato said, "Beyond" (i.e., utterly transcendent to) the world (or Cosmos). Neither Aristotelian logic nor the scientific method can deal with this tremendous immensity.
Yet still some people demand to have "proof of the existence of God" on the basis of precisely such instruments of thought. As Eric Voegelin has written, "'The existence of God is in doubt because there is no doubt about the existence of the fool'; that is the only reason the existence of God is in doubt." Yet the fact that God doesn't reduce to the size of the capabilities of methodological naturalism is the excuse for the claims that he isn't really real. So the takeaway is: Stop looking for a fiction!
I find this fascinating. For you know, "you have to know that certain things are true in order not to want to know that they are true." This isn't ignorance; this is a refusal to apperceive.
This to me explains the Dawkins mentality on the subject of God. The "God is dead" crowd always seem nervously loitering about His supposed coffin, like so many would-be undertakers, trying to assure themselves that He is, indeed, STILL dead. LOLOL!!!!!
Well put. I agree rather wholesale.
Exactly. Thank you Kolo.