I feel like there's some fundamental disconnect between what I think I'm trying to discuss and what you think I'm trying to argue, so I'm going to give this another attempt. I'll repeat again at the outset, in the hope that it might help you understand where I'm coming from better, that I am neither presenting an argument for monotheism or even for theism. In fact, I'd rather critique monotheism. You get closest to what I'm trying to do here:
Shall I conclude that rather than argue in favor of monotheism, you've opted instead to attempt to dismantle the original inquiry?
I did say as much in the very first sentence of post #6, to which you responded, so I feel like the fact that you didn't reach this conclusion until the end of your response does not amount to a failure on my part.
However, I'm not trying so much to dismantle the question as to suggest that the question involves presuppositions which will lead to misunderstandings, if one is attempting to look objectively at later arguments for monotheism. What I do not mean is that therefore somehow monotheism succeeds. I just think the topic is philosophically interesting and worth a more nuanced take. Obviously, we understand that the OP is made by an atheist and has a particular rhetorical goal, i.e to challenge theism by specifically exploring logical failures of monotheism. A perfectly fine goal. But if the form of the question entails a misunderstanding of the philosophy behind monotheism and its arguments, that is also interesting.
So does it follow that polytheism isn't the belief that there exists more than one god, but rather the belief that the nature of divinity is such that there couldn't possibly be only one god because a sole, solitary deity would be inherently contradictory?
Polytheism is as modern of a term as monotheism and it can be argued that, for example in its application to the philosophies and religions of India it has often been misapplied, but not in this way. Perhaps it would help to clarify that it's not a question of "monotheism" by necessity having a particular definition, but of a contingent historical fact.
It is the evolution of monotheistic religions, their dependence on Greek philosophy, and their structure as explicitly philosophical metaphysical systems that leads me to discuss monotheism as tautological (which needs further explanation which I'll get to), and those considerations don't apply in the same way to historical examples of explicitly polytheistic religions.
A tautology says the same thing twice and so far, you've not demonstrated that mono+theism is at all tautological.
The term tautology has a few related but slightly nuanced meanings. One of them involves the idea of arguments whose deductive conclusions rest entirely on analytic inferences drawn from prior premises.
Perhaps it would be clearer if, rather than saying that "monotheism is tautological", I said that all the arguments for monotheism are stated as tautologies. What I mean by that is that the arguments depend upon defining God in certain ways, where then the arguments are purely deductive conclusions drawn from the definitions.
The link to the SEP article on monotheism in my previous post hopefully makes that clearer. I did not intend to suggest thereby that monotheism was
true, but as the Wikipedia page on tautologies in rhetoric puts it:
"a tautology is a logical argument constructed in such a way, generally by repeating the same concept or assertion using different phrasing or terminology, that the proposition
as stated is logically irrefutable, while obscuring the lack of evidence or valid reasoning supporting the stated conclusion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric)
The arguments from the SEP page again clarify this I think. The brief example of an argument from omnipotence above is a perfect example also. I am not sure how else I can demonstrate this claim. By noting that arguments for monotheism are tautological, I was attempting to point out a weakness, but also an interesting history.
So you're urging us to conceptualize a question about monotheism in the context of polytheism?
No, I'm suggesting, that the question as stated conceptualizes the problem in a way that is more amenable to a discussion of polytheism than monotheism, because its prior conception of God is more akin to a prototypical polytheistic conception of a god.
Wouldn't most monotheists insist that their deity doesn't exist apart from the world as well?
From the standpoint of basically all classical monotheistic theology, the most fundamental principle of monotheism is that God is utterly transcendent and therefore God's existence has no dependence on the world. That the world in fact does exist and therefore both God and the world exist is also something that monotheists would take to be true, but they would characterize the existence of God to be ontologically quite distinct from the existence of the world. Thomas Aquinas goes as far as to say that God's relation to the world is purely
logical rather than being
real, because he thinks that to posit a real relation between God and World would diminish God's transcendence. The Cappadocian Christian church fathers put it that God was "beyond existence" in their attempt to emphasize a similar idea.
Wouldn't more than one Chaos be more ... I dunno ... chaotic? Only one Chaos seems rather orderly, don't you think?
Chaos is the proper name of a deity in Greek mythology. By referencing the deity I'm not arguing based on the connotations of the English word chaos, but the actual cosmogony related to the Greek Χαος. c.f.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(mythology)
Perceived unities. When a unity falls in he forest, does it need to be perceived to make a sound
My use of "perceived" may have given you the wrong impression. I don't mean a sensory perception but something more like an intellectual intuition, or the conclusion of an abductive argument.
I wish I were capable of giving a concise overview of the history of this intuition and its impact on western philosophy and religion, but I think it's beyond my capability. Suffice to say that it is a very Greek way of thinking, and that monotheism as a later philosophical development of the Abrahamic religions owes the majority of its philosophical structure to the Greeks. Since I've just been reading it, I'll quote from Camus' short book on Christian metaphysics and Neoplatonism, outlining Plotinus' intuition of "the One", which is a Greek antecedent which profoundly influenced Byzantine Christianity's theology:
"If the world is beautiful, it is because something lives in it. But it is also because something orderrs it. This spirit that animates the world is the World Soul (anima mundi). The superior principle that limits this life within determined structures is called Intelligence. But the unity of an order is always superior to that order. Thus there exists a third principle superior to Intellignce, which is the One"
(Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, p.90. c.f. Plotinus' Enneads VI)
The bolded is a concise statement of this sort of principle of Greek philosophical thought which underlies the theology of monotheism. To be clear again, I'm not arguing that this principle is self-evident or correct, I'm saying it's useful to be aware of this history and way of thinking when trying to make sense of monotheistic arguments.
So monotheism is no more than a hunch, correct? And what makes a monotheistic hunch more logical than a polytheistic one again?
I would say that the intuition that there is some underlying unity to the intelligible order of reality has a certain useful validity to it, or that it seems compelling. It doesn't imply
theism but the original point of bringing up this history of Greek philosophy is that it is interesting that, in a sense, the principle of rationality of metaphysical naturalism involves a similar intuition, but refined to remove the superstition and supernaturalism of theism. There is a certain abductive reasonable-ness to the intuition, apart from the theistic conclusions. Also this is where I chide you for being a bit obnoxious in your response, when you appear to be attempting to scold me for not making a very good argument when I stated at the outset that I wasn't making an argument.
Something like "Jesus was God and Not God simultaneously?"
That would be a good example of a contradiction. As an aside, the reference to Trinitarian Christology is an interesting diversion. I think it's a slight mischaracterization to portray trinitarianism as holding that Christ is simultaneously God and "not God", but it is very much true that trinitarianism involves an epistemological principle that rejects, at least in a sense, the principle of non-contradiction. Trinitarianism is explicitly non-rationalist in its formulation. For that reason I tend to agree with Jewish and Muslim theologians that trinitarianism isn't quite monotheistic.
In any case I meant that by the middle ages at latest they all became monotheistic in the modern sense and remain so. It is just an interesting historical point that they were not always so.
