"If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now."

-Marcus Aurelius

Hypatia wrote:

Due_Kindheartedness wrote:

Hypatia wrote:

I'm suspicious of anyone who tries as hard as Mythicists do to twist the historical evidence to fit a pet theory rather than letting it speak for itself. It's just bad scholarship.

Mythicism is becoming more popular among people though. Most people don't know that Jordan Peterson is probably a mythicist and there are Christians who are saying that he's one of those "sincere seekers of the truth." WTF?
 

Yes, I noticed that about Jordan Peterson recently, but I think it's more an element of his Jungian approach than anything else. If everything is a matter of psychological archetypes, then the historical question disappears into a mess of images and motifs.

I think Mythicism is if anything less popular than it used to be--it's no longer the trendy, daring hyper-skeptical option that it once was. Now you just look like a fringe conspiracy theorist with a minimal understanding of how history works.

Also mythicism used to hold a more prominent position among amacademics from the late 19th to early 20th century. It falling away in the late 20th century, and now being seen as insane by the 21st century is a testament to how shallow of a theory it is.
 

Welcome!

IgnorantSeeker wrote:

RomanJoe wrote:

It doesn't matter if one puts forth the laws of physics as a temporal genesis of the universe. The Aristotelian-Thomist isn't beholden to a temporal prime mover, rather he tries to reason towards an ontologically fundamental prime mover--one that grounds the existence of the universe here and now at every moment. Even if the universe began via some secular notion of scientific laws, the universe itself would still contain essentially-ordered causal series of essence and existence, act and potency. One could also invoke an argument from contingency by the fact that the universe consists of composite beings and is itself metaphysically composite.

Besides, according to a Artsitotelian-Thomistic account of physical laws, such laws can't exist in a vacuum--they are contingent on real beings because they are abstractions of how real beings operate given their nature. Therefore, to argue that phsycial laws are responsible for the genesis of the universe would be to get things backwards because, according to the AT proponent, those physical laws only exist in virtue of there being real phsycial natures to describe.

You've successfully sold me on the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of physical laws, but I'm still lost as to why there cannot exist a multiplicity of unactualized actualizers that might govern different parts of the universe in the here and now. For example, one unactualized actualizer might actualize gravity; another would actualize electromagnetism; a third would actualize the strong force; and a final would actualize the weak force. These four would together actualize the whole of the universe, without one being supreme over the others. This multiplicity of unactualized actualizers could not properly be called God, since they only govern a particular domain of the universe. I know that such a philosophy is unprovable, but I don't see how it is impossible.

Aquinas writes that God cannot be constituted of multiple

…