To be fair, the religions themselves do not organize the violence and oppression. Indeed, they usually deplore it. Instead, the problems come from political or governmental authorities as well as from self-appointed often illegal, immoral and highly violent groups in the name of a religion. Terrorist killings and destruction, civil war and deprivation of human rights thus become identified with the names of religions -- and are regularly reported on the news.
The artists have no illusions that by themselves they will end the violence, oppression and other difficulties of the Middle East, but they hope to inspire thought and action through their visual conceptions.
Several paintings focus on the bridge itself. A bridge by definition carries a person over a dangerous place: a rushing river, a deep gorge, a highway of whooshing cars. One must trust the bridge to carry him or her safely over the danger.
A different take comes from Isabelle Bakhoum, whose painting features a man walking a tightrope quite a narrow bridge! At each end are symbols for three religions. If the religions remain quiet and still, then he will keep his balance and cross successfully.
If the religions move, jump about and cause the pole to jiggle, then he will find it difficult to stay balanced. Thus, Thomas Morris has objected that one could be unconditionally committed to each of two distinct beings provided that their wills were necessarily harmonious.
For if their wills were necessarily harmonious, they could not require of us conflicting acts. This objection should be discounted, however, because the wills of distinct persons are necessarily opposable. See discussion in section 5 above. But the best answer is probably this.
The devotion that God requires appears, then, to be inherently indivisible. In sum, neither of the two problems presents an unsurmountable difficulty for the argument from total devotion. No discussion of monotheism would be complete which failed to note that some major theistic traditions contain strands which, on their face, seem at odds with their commitment to monotheism. Consider the Kabbalah, for example.
The Zohar after identifies the first principle with the En Sof or infinite unlimited. Because it lacks attributes, the En Sof is incomprehensible and thus, in a strict sense, non-personal although it reveals itself as personal. The hidden God manifests itself in the sefirot, however. A brief discussion of the first three will be sufficient for our purposes. The first is, perhaps surprisingly, characterized as Nothing or the Abyss.
Both Wisdom and Intelligence emerge or emanate from the Crown. The idea exists at this stage in a confused and undifferentiated form, however. Wisdom is sometimes pictured as a fountain which springs out of Nothingness the Crown and from which the other sefirot will flow, sometimes as a seed or germ from which everything develops, and sometimes as a point. But matters become still more problematic in an influential treatise that was composed in Provence around , and falsely ascribed to Hai Goan.
Whatever one thinks of this, there are striking similarities between the two doctrines. But there are also important differences. Nor was this criticism easily laid to rest. Rabbi Azriel of Gerona d. Still, the Kabbalah is only one strand within Judaism.
By contrast, the doctrine of the Trinity, and of the divinity of both Vishnu and Lakshmi, are firmly rooted at the very heart of Christianity and Shri Vaishnavism, respectively.
Perhaps as a result, these traditions have devoted much more thought to reconciling monotheism with elements which, on their face, seem at odds with it.
Or, alternatively, a causally necessary condition of the existence of every contingent being and the causally sufficient condition [in the strong sense] of the existence of at least one of them. For the sake of brevity we will focus exclusively on the simpler case, however.
The argument from sovereignty can be deployed against the Trinity only if the relevant property is regarded as an attribute of each member of the Trinity rather than of the Trinity as a whole that is, of the Trinity considered as a single concrete entity.
The Western or Augustinian Tradition does not. Another view, though, is implicit in the position of many second and third century church fathers, some western Christian Platonists, and the Eastern Orthodox Church as a whole.
But all share a common specific or generic essence namely, divinity , so that each member of the Trinity is eternal, necessarily existent, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the like. Because the creative volition of any member of the Trinity entails that the other two will the same thing, if any one of them wills the existence of a contingent being, then they all will it.
And, of course, the creative volition of any member of the Trinity is also a necessary causal condition of the existence of contingent beings. It would seem, then, that there are three creative volitions, each of which is a causally sufficient and causally necessary condition of the existence of contingent beings. There are thus three sovereign creative wills, and this appears to contradict the monotheistic claim that sovereignty is necessarily unique.
Appearances may be deceiving, however. It is therefore not causally sufficient for the occurrence of s in the strong sense of sufficient condition employed in the argument from sovereignty, namely, that x is a causally sufficient condition of y in the strong sense if and only if, given x alone , y exists or occurs.
In that sense, there is only one causally sufficient condition of the existence of contingent beings, and that is the joint operation of the necessarily concurrent wills of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Either there is only one will which is part of the one divine essence or the distinct wills of the three hypostases necessarily concur. Finally, the third argument precludes the existence of the Trinity only if each member is, in abstraction from the others, an appropriate object of total devotion and unconditional commitment.
Christian attitudes towards the Father, for example, are inseparable from Christian attitudes towards the Son. Christ is worshiped as the Son of the Father, for instance, and the Father is worshiped as the one who fully reveals himself in Christ. The Shri Vaishnavas identify Vishnu with the Brahman. According to Ramanuja ? Indeed, he is the supreme person paratman , creator and Lord, who leads souls to salvation. He is also advitya without rival. They have the same status, in short, that angels have in the western religious traditions.
The space-time world with all it contains is thus related to God as our bodies are related to our souls. The Shri Vaishnava picture of reality is thus clearly monotheistic. Problems are created, however, by the fact that the scriptures on which the Shri Vaishnavas draw closely associate Vishnu with his consort Lakshmi.
Again, while Ramanuja and his great predecessor, Yamuna, have little or nothing to say about Lakshmi in their philosophical writings, she plays a significant role in their devotional works, where she is described as Mediatrix between Vishnu and his devotees.
There were two major resolutions. The first is represented by Lokacarya — Venkatanatha — offers a different resolution. Moreover and most important for our purposes , there is no real or ontological difference between the divine father and the divine mother.
Lakshmi is an inseparable attribute of Vishnu. In short, Venkatanatha preserves monotheism by denying that God and his divine consort are ontologically distinct. An Argument from Omnipotence 6. An Argument from the Demand for Total Devotion 7. Zagzebski , 10—11 Is this argument entirely compelling, though? His argument is roughly this: Necessarily, if anything is a god, its creative volition is the necessary and sufficient causal condition of every other concrete object.
Suppose, then, that Contingent beings exist and there are two gods. It follows that Each is the necessary and sufficient causal condition of the set of contingent beings. From 1 and 2. Therefore, The first is a sufficient causal condition of the set of contingent beings. From 3. Hence, The second is not a necessary causal condition of the set of contingent beings.
From 4. Again, The first is a necessary causal condition of the set of contingent beings. So The second is not a sufficient causal condition of the existence of the set of contingent beings.
From 6. Therefore, The second is neither a necessary nor a sufficient causal condition of the set of contingent beings. From 5 and 7. A similar argument will show that The first is neither a necessary nor a sufficient causal condition of the existence of the set of contingent beings.
It follows that Neither god is either a necessary or a sufficient condition of the existence of the set of contingent beings. From 8 and 9. Hence, If contingent beings existed and there were two gods, each would be a necessary and sufficient causal condition of the existence of the set of contingent beings and neither would be a necessary and sufficient causal condition of the existence of the set of contingent beings.
From 2 through But since The consequent of 11 is impossible, Its antecedent is impossible. From 11 and If p entails q , and q is impossible, then p is impossible.
Thus, It is impossible that contingent beings exist and there are two gods. From Therefore, If contingent beings exist, there cannot be two gods. Necessarily, if any x is God, then for every concrete object distinct from x , the activity of x is a causally necessary condition for its existence, and if there are in fact one or more contingent beings distinct from x , then the activity of x is causally sufficient in the strong sense for the existence of at least one of them. Suppose, then, that There are two gods and contingent beings are possible.
It follows that There is a possible world, w , in which contingent beings exist from 16 , and that, because each god is necessary, Both gods exist in w. Hence, Each god is a necessary causal condition of the existence of each contingent being in w , and each god is the sufficient causal condition in the strong sense of the existence of at least one contingent being in w.
But, It is impossible that each god is a necessary causal condition of the existence of each contingent being in w , and each god is the sufficient causal condition in the strong sense of at least one contingent being in w.
For, as we have seen, if one god is a necessary causal condition of the existence of each contingent being in w , the other is not the sufficient causal condition [in the strong sense] of any of them. Hence, It is impossible that there are two gods and contingent beings are possible, that is, it is necessarily true that if contingent beings are possible, it is false that there are two gods. If a proposition [e. But, It is logically possible that contingent beings exist. For they do exist. Hence, It is necessarily true that it is logically possible that contingent beings exist.
What is possible is necessarily possible. Therefore, It is necessarily false that there are two gods. From 21, 23, and the principle that if one proposition entails another and the first is necessarily true, then the second is necessarily true. My exclusivity may rule out your God, in other words, but even your God is better than no God at all. So while the tradition of rational inquiry involves explanation about explanation, the tradition of exclusive monotheism involves belief about belief.
If reason is second-order explanation, faith is second-order belief. Explanation and secularism may actually take in the same territory. Where reason finds regularity in nature, faith extols miracles that overturn that regularity. In place of skepticism, faith exalts credulity. We may find some hints about the psychological wellspring of this old antagonism by comparing Greek thought with Chinese thought, which is often credited with having developed a separate scientific tradition around the same time as the Greeks.
Yet we hesitate to call the Chinese tradition one of free inquiry, since Chinese inquiry was sponsored, and therefore controlled, by the Chinese state. Greek philosophers, by contrast, were independent writers and thinkers, not bureaucrats. The Chinese tradition retained a holistic outlook, braiding natural and supernatural influences together even as it evolved in quite sophisticated ways. That allowed a measure of control, since one of the big advantages of supernatural causation, long recognized by the powerful, is that it can be arbitrarily dictated by authority, or indeed by anyone aspiring to authority, as for example Paul and Muhammad did.
The nascent discipline of evolutionary psychology offers scientific support for this analysis. It may have been this law which provided the legal context for the prosecution of Socrates several decades later. Natural causation, evidence like this suggests, has the unsettling and potentially anarchic drawback of not being subject to human agendas.
As Geoffrey Lloyd shows in his book The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China , the Chinese tradition stressed practical application over theory, technology over explanation, results over understanding. The great sinologist Joseph Needham, a strong defender of the Chinese achievement, recognizes this in explaining why China never underwent a Scientific Revolution comparable to the one that began much later in the West.
It may well be that here, at this point of tension, lies some of the secret of European creativeness when the time was ripe. We might even say that faith and reason both find their origins in the psychological consequences of this recognition. There may be something in that, although the distinction seems a little too clear-cut. Most of us, I should think, are to some extent pulled in both directions. The most searching questions about the origins of faith hardly ever get asked: Why did belief take center stage, when properly performed ritual, not inner conviction about truth, was sufficient for the worshipper of the pagan gods?
And how on earth did we get to the seemingly unlikely idea of one exclusive god? Why was this idea so anomalous at first, and why is it so dominant now? They were like outlaws in the Old West once the frontier was tamed. Anticipating the critique made later by Muslims, Celsus thought the idea that God might have a son to be downright blasphemous.
The gods had originally been flamboyant characters with clear-cut and quite distinct identities—promiscuous Zeus was known for having children with any mortal woman who caught his eye.
If paganism, too, was centered on belief by the second century as Celsus and other sources suggest , what differentiated Christians from pagans in this crucial period of Christian growth?
If the pressure of reason had transformed paganism, too, into a kind of monotheism, what was it that gave Christian faith an edge? A worshipper of Isis was still open, for example, to worshipping Apollo—indeed, all the more so now that they were seen as representing different faces of the same ultimate divine presence.
But I would suggest that exclusivity did more even than this scholarship has observed. Inclusive monotheism rolled the pagan gods into One, but like them that One remained firmly grounded in the old holistic world. Pluriform or uniform, the gods of nature could never fit comfortably in a world that had split the natural from the supernatural.
Their worshippers had left them behind in this regard. In the late second century ad, as E. Dodds and many others since have noted, social and political turmoil turned this sojourn into a stampede.
Only an exclusive God could fully meet the demands of a society in the grip of supernaturalism, because only an exclusive God could be said to stand above nature rather than merely being part of it. And since these demons were thought of as holding the natural world in their grip, the old gods were still the gods of nature.
In this specific religious context, exclusivity constituted the precise adaptation that allowed faith to hit upon its most resonant message, the triumph of the unseen over the seen. By the time of Jesus, both pagan and Jewish miracle-workers were a dime a dozen. But Christian faith emphasized miracles in a way that was stunningly original in its rhetorical coherence and sophistication.
The Gospels, the New Testament as a whole, and all of patristic literature are saturated with the wonder-working abilities not only of Jesus but also of his followers, through whom Jesus was said to work. This process seems to have begun with St. With this stroke, Christianity finally offered a coherent response to the challenge of radical naturalism initiated by Thales and first articulated by Hippocrates.
For more than a thousand years, until the Protestant Reformation, miracles stood as the unquestioned benchmark of religious credibility—and credulity—in the Christian world. It went hand-in-hand with the demotion of nature itself. And neither can be adequately explained without reference to the original rise of reason in classical antiquity. Yet the deep connections among reason, exclusivity, and supernaturalism go unremarked by the scholars who have described the latter two phenomena, seemingly without noticing the first.
Where is the E. Dodds of the new millennium? Strikingly, the issue at stake was not whether miracles occurred, but whose miracles were divinely sourced, and whose were merely demonic or magical. Certainly, both the Hebrew God and the original pagan gods had been seen as capable of working wonders. But the scrutinizing lens of reason magnified the miracle to gigantic proportions. The stronger the bonds of nature are perceived to be, the stronger must be the power that bends or breaks them; the more concrete the boundary between natural and supernatural, the bigger the thrill of transgression.
This psychological effect set the stage for the new prominence of miracles starting just before the Christian era. In the same way, it also ratcheted up the power and the glory of the new Christian God, whose totalizing authority makes not just Zeus but even the Old Testament God look rather anemic—if bad-tempered—by comparison.
If we do wish to look for something that acted on religion in a way similar to steroids, in effect pumping up our conception of God and the divine, reason is a good place to start. There are likewise fruitful connections to explore between reason and the rising appetite in late antiquity for ethics and morality in religion. Nature is demonstrably amoral, and nature gods are hard to corral into a moral enclosure. A marginalized minority of a marginalized minority, Jewish apocalypticists were double outcasts, excluded from the official power structures of Jewish life.
Not surprisingly, they preached that the world was ruled by evil powers, and that those powers would soon be overturned by divine vengeance, most often in a great eschatological upheaval. A world dominated by evil powers is the common thread that runs between exclusivity and apocalypticism, and recent scholars like Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman emphasize that both Jesus and Paul were apocalyptic preachers.
Ehrman thinks that even in the time of Jesus, not all Jews were exclusive monotheists.
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