subject: How to read the perceptible to arrive to the intelligible! [print this page] How to read the perceptible to arrive to the intelligible!
How to read the perceptible to arrive to the intelligible!
Unles you are the Oracle of Delphi you cannot make any prophecies concerning the world. But with all the Greek wisdom the Oracle of Delphi on Mount Olympus did not make a lot of penetration into the sight of the universe.
It made so many prophecies but nothing near reality and nowhere near the truth. It never touched on God as the creator and originator of the universe. Platonic thought does not make the correlation between God and the creation of the universe. Aristotle came near to God but never identified Him with creation.
God, in the Aristotelian thought is only a prime mover, a first cause but never the creating factor in the universe. He is eternal just as the universe and He makes celestial bodies move eternally as well. What kind of God is this, whose function is limited to move whatever is already in orbit?
Greek mind, although advanced fro its epoch, falls very shortly and blindly to the act of creation that is needed to bring about celestial bodies and ordain it in its orbits. God simply, in Greek genius, found celestial bodies where they are and he enjoys carrying on moving it for his own pleasure.
The ideational Platonic theory of ideals stops, in Platonic thought, simply at its level. The attempt is neither undertaken by the giant Plato nor by his master Socrates nor by his disciple Aristotle to discuss its origin, its presence and its finality. It only touches on ideals as representing reality, this is the intelligible which is represented, i.e. moved once from reality, in the perceptible.
These ideas, unknown in origin and finality, remain obscure ideas that explains nothing of the universe and nothing of its presence.
Greek thought is sterile to God and the impossibility of the universe without such a power. Would Hellenic philosophers, whether atomists or vitalists be so blind to the evident?
Why did not they figure out a creating-cause, or an external finality, that made what they see and identify as sensible-perceptible. Their intelligible falls short of Go identification. The most Aristotle can figure out is that it is necessary for a God to move things. The crippled genius Stephen Hawking, in body and soul, and mind above all failed to see even this superficial reality and rejected the necessity for a God. Well he forgot to explain how himself came to be in a wheel chair with a distorted body and soul.
And you reader! What part do you give to God in all this?
