Step Three was in full swing by the fifth year of his reign, during which Akhenaten devoted an entire new city along the Nile River to Atenism, erecting dozens of temples in his name, filling them with imagery of prosperous harvests to inspire worshippers.
This ushered in the Amarna Period of art, the name of which comes from Tell-el-Amarna, the new capital established by Akhenaten. Step Four changed the way the royal family was depicted in art of the period. Carvings of the royal family gave them elongated bodies, androgynous and much larger than other humans shown in art from the period. Step Five was fully realized by the early s BCE, by which time, Akhenaten had eliminated all other priesthoods within Egypt and made himself the sole connection between Egyptians and the realm of the gods.
All worship of Atenism, all sacrifices, and thereby all profit was suddenly diverted to Akhenaten and his family, removing the status of all other priests and demoting all prior pharaohs to a much lower position than the current king. If you worship that sort of God, you share in that single, though by now hardly unitary, tradition.
The monotheistic tradition of faith seems to focus and amplify the mental faculty of faith, concentrating the idea of the divine into a single, exclusive deity.
Who else but the Jews, those famous monotheists from way back? This essentially polytheistic outlook accords with the frequent mention of other gods in the Hebrew Bible Old Testament , for example. El was the Canaanite high god, but under him served other gods such as the fertility god Baal and the water god Yam. Perhaps Abraham and his kin adopted El as their own, accepting him as the same god who had urged Abraham to leave Ur and seek out the land of milk and honey in the first place.
Nor, like El before him, does Yahweh appear at first to have been thought of by the Hebrews as a divine creator, at least not according to the picture we get from the last century or so of biblical scholarship.
Scholars believe that not until the eighth century bc was the first biblical account of creation composed starting at Genesis , and that only a couple of centuries later did an anonymous priestly author write down the full-blown version we get starting at Genesis 1. By that time, the Jews were rejoicing in their return to Palestine after the Babylonian Captivity c.
Enjoying a sense of revival and optimism, the Jews built the Second Temple in Jerusalem; Jewish priests acted as ambassadors to their Persian rulers. Jewish life comes down to earth at this point. The days of the prophets are fading. From here on in, the Jews will be concerned less with further prophecies than with the proper interpretation of past ones. In the coming centuries, the Jews did indeed take the final steps down the long road to true monotheism.
Neither they nor their new conception of faith evolved in a vacuum. Right around the same time that the Jews were celebrating their release from the Babylonian Captivity, the ancient Greeks freed themselves from a very different sort of captivity.
The crucial first step was a fully alphabetic writing system, which the Greeks invented and began using around bc. Earlier alphabets had been missing vowels. The Greeks took one of them, the Phoenician alphabet, and added new letters for vowel sounds, making the whole thing a much more flexible and precise instrument. Here begins, if not the march, then at least the toddle toward string theory and space telescopes.
For writing and thinking go together, and the dawn of this new literary age was simultaneously the dawn of reason. Within a mere couple of hundred years or so, we see a Greek thinker named Thales of Miletus taking the novel step of trying to explain the material world in secular, naturalistic terms, and of publicizing his ideas so that others could critique them. This is not to say that no one had ever thought rationally before, of course. All humans have the capacity for rational thought; clearly there exists something we might, for consistency, call the mental faculty of reason.
It comprises an innate ability for symbolic logic, which we humans use in something akin to the way dolphins use sonar. Thales and his immediate successors came from Ionia, the coast of what is now Turkey, where the mainland cities of Greece proper had established a number of prosperous colonies of which Miletus was the acknowledged leader. But their explanations always came back to religious mythology. Thales and his successors struck off in a fundamentally new direction, that of secular explanation.
Within a generation or two, they established free rational inquiry as a recognizable movement, a culturally coherent literary and intellectual tradition, in which ideas and concerns were passed from identifiable individuals in one generation to identifiable individuals in another, with each generation building on the work of those who came before. And as any student of ancient philosophy can tell you, we see the first appearance of a unitary God not in Jewish scripture, but in the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote in the early fourth century bc.
Moreover, its origins go back to none other than Thales, who had proposed that nature can be explained by reference to a single unitary principle that pervades everything.
Thales thought everything boiled down, so to speak, to Water, which he seems to have seen as an inherently divine material substance with no agency in nature; his immediate successors posited their own monist principles, including Air, Fire, and the Infinite. Divine but not divine agents, these ideas straddled the line between religious and secular.
Adding limited agency to this tradition, Plato in his dialogue Timaeus described what he called the Demiurge, a divine Craftsman who shapes the material world after ideal Forms that exist on a perfect immaterial plane. Centuries would pass before the Jews assimilated Greek thought, and scholars suspect that it was Hellenized Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria who imported the Greek idea of a single unitary God into the Jewish tradition. So one indisputable thing the last century or so of scholarly work has uncovered about faith and reason is that they are hardly the rigidly separate traditions we commonly take them for.
Even more surprising, perhaps, is how quickly monotheistic faith followed, starting with its first glimmering in the thought of Thales himself. As we perceive order in nature, it seems, we also gravitate to the One. This extraordinarily powerful idea was, in fact, entirely unprecedented.
For thousands of years before Thales, humanity encountered only one undifferentiated world, a world still inhabited today by some, it is true, though their numbers are dwindling. In this holistic world, matter and spirit are the same: people, places, objects, and events merge and mingle with the gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons who animate them. We saw a vivid example of this outlook during the solar eclipse over Asia in July , when some local authorities closed schools and urged pregnant women to stay indoors to avoid ill effects as the evil spirit swallowed the Sun god.
The epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey , reflect the oral traditions of this sort of world. These poems established the classical Greek religious pantheon, in which the gods gleam brightly in the sunlight and the sea, rumble through the land as earthquakes, and darken the sky with clouds or eclipses. With the help of his ally Athena, goddess of wisdom, Odysseus gathers his wits enough to swim along the shore, desperately looking for a place to land.
Like the Olympians, the little river is amoral and not much interested in the human world, but it is susceptible to a properly formulated plea for sanctuary Greek custom held that sanctuary had to be granted to a self-declared suppliant. River and deity are one and the same. Yet surely, if y is essentially omnipotent, and s is within the range of its power as it must be if y is essentially omnipotent , no contingent circumstance of this sort could make it impotent with respect to s.
Premise 1 thus emerges unscathed. Since the proof is valid and its other premises appear unexceptionable, the argument from omnipotence seems sound. But if God is understood in the second way, Ockham thinks that it cannot be shown that there is only one god. Even if Ockham is right about this, it does seem impossible that there be two gods. For it appears to be a conceptual truth that God is unsurpassable.
If he is, then, if there were two gods each would be unsurpassable. If there were two unsurpassable beings, however, our devotion and commitment should be divided between them. Since they are equally perfect, it would be inappropriate to be totally devoted or unconditionally committed to either one of them. But if it would, then neither of them would be God. So if it is a conceptual truth that God is unsurpassable, he must be unique. There are at least two possible problems with this argument, however.
First, the inference from 6 to 7 might seem suspect. The truth of 10 implies the falsity of 7. Because the two cases are dissimilar.
In the first, neither obligation is indefeasible; each can, in principle, be trumped by other stronger obligations. While I indeed have prima facie obligations both to return the gun and to not return it, the only actual obligation I have in the circumstances that were described is the obligation to not return the gun. By contrast, both of the obligations referred to in 7 are indefeasible. Their indefeasibility appears to be part of the very concept of divine worship; part of what it means to be God is to be such that no other obligation can take precedence over our obligation to be totally devoted and unconditionally committed to him.
Both are therefore actual, and not merely prima facie, obligations. That I am obligated to worship both deities thus seems to entail that I can worship both deities. The inference from 6 to 7 seems sound. Another possible problem concerns the truth of 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.
Some scholars compare the idea of divine unity to monotheism. Assman calls it "evolutionary monotheism"; Durdin calls it "philosophical monotheism. Put another way, ancient people may have viewed multiple gods from different cultures as all emanating from the same holy source.
It was in this context that religious movements began demanding exclusive worship of one God. In the 14th century B. He closed temples and destroyed images of other gods. And some scholars believe it was up to a thousand years later that early Israelites began worshipping only one god: Yahweh, said Matthew Chalmers, a theorist of religion at Northwestern University in Illinois.
It was a transition that took centuries, and it would be centuries more before the belief that only one God exists became cemented in Judaism, Chalmers said. It's important to note that these people didn't think of themselves as monotheists or polytheists. These movements didn't deny the existence of other gods. They just demanded that people stop worshipping them. Similarly, early Christians didn't explicitly declare other gods nonexistent; they began referring to them as demons, Chalmers said.
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