02 June 2015

Introducing demiurgology

According to the traditional Western viewpoint, religions’ God is “all-powerful, all-knowing and the Creator of the Universe.” (William L. Rowe: Philosophy of Religion. An Introduction p. 6) But the world creation can be discussed as a subject of natural sciences (or, at least, as a field independent from religions) as well. So it seems to be acceptable to introduce “demiurgology” to make a distinction between religious and non-religious approach. Notice that demiurge means originally an artisan-like entity who isn’t a god, but he is participating in the fashioning and maintaining of the Universe.
Obviously, demiurgology ask not exactly the same questions as religions. To give an example, Christian theology distinguishes three kinds of arguments for the existence of God: The cosmological, the design and the ontological arguments (Rowe, ibid. p. 19). The first one concludes from the existence of the universe the existence of a Creator; the design argument is based on the presupposition that the order of the world was created by Him. Both of them are applicable to the field of demiurgology–but the case of the ontological argument is different, since it states that we can conclude the existence of a creator by a deductive logic. But the natural sciences’ integral part is induction and the feedback to reality by experiments.
To give another example, the design argument presupposes the validity of the cosmological argument. After all, it is held by theology that the world was created by God, who is responsible for its order and structure, too. In other words: the existence of a created world is a precondition of the existence of order and structure. In the case of demiurgology, it is imaginable that our world is constructed by a superior cosmologist. But it doesn’t make inevitable his/her ability to create the laws/structure of the constructed world. Using a metaphor to demonstrate that sometimes the creation and the design can be independent: A sculptor makes the sculpture, but not the marble.
Or, we can mention as another example again, that according to Kant, one who isn’t perfect is unable to recognize whether our world is perfect (John Hedley Brooke: Science and Religion, p. 281), but a perfect world is only a subset of the possible worlds which can be created by someone in demiurgology.
Similarly, it isn’t a necessity from our point of view, neither a world creator’s all-powerfulness nor his/her omniscience: he/she is perhaps incompetent. And what is even more important: While the ontological argument isn’t interpretable in demiurgology, it perhaps offers opportunities to study some problems that are uninterpretable from a theologian’s approach.

No comments:

Post a Comment