Are There Multiple Paths To God?

I watched the rest of the story. As the rabbis pointed out, the idea that God is omnipotent and omniscient is a medieval notion derived from Aristotle, and was unknown to Judaism. Neither the Jewish God nor the Greco-Roman deities had these properties.Therefore, the notion that God is responsible for all the tragedies of the world seems misguided. People get cancer from the operation of natural laws, and if God is the author of those, I suppose, (S)he might be held responsible. Maybe (S)e could have just not created a universe, or have created a different set of natural laws. If scientists who believe in multiple universes are correct, maybe (S)he did. It does seem a bit futile to get stuck on why things are the way they are. Accepting that they are is the first step to developing a mature belief system in which we can find meaning in adversity. My brother, in coping with his horrible death from cancer, liked to say "It is what it is." He went from a good looking honors student and athlete to a living skeleton racked with excruciating pain which lasted for months. One thing he never did was complain. He found comfort in Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and had a strong conviction that, however agonizing it was, his life had the meaning he gave it, which involved facing death bravely in the company of loving family members. I think of God as Ultimate Meaning, which is Love.

 

From what I've read of Aristotle, that seems like a distortion of his views.

 

Maybe it is. Aristotle wrote of an "Unmoved Mover", who doesn't intervene in human affairs. I don't think the notions of omnipotence and omniscience follow from such a concept. But then again, I'm just relaying what the rabbis said. They could be wrong. Or the medieval scholars who developed the ideas could have been wrong. Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastic thinkers were the principal Christian Aristotelians, but Aristote also influenced Muslim philosophers like Averroes and Avicenna, and Jewish scholars like Maimonides. Aquinas drew on the latter thinkers, as well as the Bible, for his ideas about God, which included qualified omnipotence and omniscience
(God's nature prevented Him from doing anything immoral or logically contradictory, and He could self-limit His powers by, for example, giving humans free will.) Christian theologian Diogenes Allen notes that "by the time a theologian such as Thomas Aquinas has finished qualifying the word so that it may be suitably applied to God, it has actually been so redefined that it means the same as "almighty".The rabbis point about omnipotence is confirmed by Allen who writes: "The Bible does not claim that God is omnipotent, even though philosophy and theology usually say that God is omnipotent. "Omnipotent" is the translation of biblical Hebrew and Greek words for "almighty". But "almighty" and "omnipotent" do not mean the same thing. "Almighty means to have authority over all things; omnipotence means to be able to do all things." (Theology for A Troubled Believer, p. 72).

 

my father used to say the stars where the windows of heaving with angels looking out.

i rather thought they looked more like the hobo campfires, of ancient gods who had been made homeless.