[Alamo-Girl]

I join in the chorus strongly agreeing with Kolokotronis’ remark:

I am convinced that Aquinas was not by any means an Aristotelian, but the language and methods of Aristotle formed a common context for the discussions. Unfortunately his successors seem to have adopted Aristotelianism not merely as a framework within which to discuss Christianity with pagans, but rather accepted it as the way to explain God to themselves and other Christians. This manner of thinking about theology, scholasticism, had a profound effect on Western religious thought and compounded the already existing differences between Eastern and Western Christianity

Just the mention of Platonism in math and physics used to send our correspondents on Free Republic into a tailspin of accusations that betty boop and I were off the intellectual rails.

But I strongly suspect that is because Aristotle’s words (e.g. four causes) have been massaged to fit a modern view of science when he was actually almost entirely in sync with Plato.

One of those posters routinely posted a work of art which had Plato pointing up and Aristotle pointing down:

IMHO, that image is an accurate portrait of the difference as it effects one’s math or science.

In an article on parallel universes, physicist Max Tegmark described the difference in paradigms this way:

Parallel Universes

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.

The Platonic paradigm raises the question of why the universe is the way it is. To an Aristotelian, this is a meaningless question: The universe just is. But a Platonist cannot help but wonder why it could not have been different. If the universe is inherently mathematical, then why was only one of the many mathematical structures singled out to describe a universe? A fundamental asymmetry appears to be built into the very heart of reality.

The shift to an Aristotelian paradigm came with a big price. The most obvious is described in the last paragraph of the Tegmark excerpt, an isolation of science from the quest for knowledge per se. They no longer see the mission of science as Leibnitz said, to inquire into two matters:

Why is there something, rather than nothing?

And why are things the way they are, and not some other way?

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.

[hosepipe]

[.. 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. ..]

True it so easy to forget.. that..

Fiction MUST BE very logical to us, Reality does not have to be logical to us, at all..

[Kolokotronis]

“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.

[Quix]

A fundamental asymmetry appears to be built into the very heart of reality.

= = =

Thanks for this wonderful post.

RE the above sentence . . . It may be that asymetry is necessary for A DYNAMIC flow—for anything beyond static stillness/death/deadness . . . or that may be true in all that exists THAT WE HAVE ANY PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE connection to . . . or . . .

[kosta50]

The Platonic paradigm raises the question of why the universe is the way it is. To an Aristotelian, this is a meaningless question

And a Taoist says: "Life is the way it is even if you don't understand it".

[kosta50]

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

Talk about humanizing God! In order for God to be believeable He must fit our frame of mind, and "make sense." The Age of Reason is such a spiritual dead end.