(^) Auxiliary proofs: of the unity, perfection, infinity, incorporeality of God; of
creation ex nihilo (rejecting the eternity of the world substance); of the immortality
of the soul. These proofs are the key to distinguishing arguments for transcendent
monotheism from arguments for polytheism and pantheism. Some of these proofs
began with the late Christian Neoplatonists; they developed most widely in me-
dieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy.
- Monotheism is not a primordial concept of popular religion; nor does it come from
professional priests, whose politics tends toward compromise into pantheons. It
takes the drive toward abstraction in a competitive intellectual community to
purify the concept of divinity into ontological monotheism. This is why monothe-
ism tends to appear well into the middle generations of an intellectual sequence.
But there is nothing within intellectual dynamics to stabilize at the point of
anthropomorphic monotheism. Where it occurs, such monotheism is the result of
the combination of internal intellectual trends with external social conditions of
the kind noted by Weber and Durkheim. These are, respectively, the dominance of
an imperial state (or in the case of the war confederation of ancient Israel,
aspiration to such a state), which raises the primary god of a pantheon above the
others (Weber), and the universalization which goes with increasing social differ-
entiation (Durkheim). Comparative evidence is presented by Swanson (1962). - A deep trouble like the Indian satkaryavada versus asatkaryavada, however, would
divide the attention space into only two positions, whereas the law of small
numbers provides room for three to six. Deep troubles are the most important of
the factors dividing the attention space, but not the only one. - For instance Epicureans, dropping to a lower level of concreteness, solved the
problem of causal relations among independent atoms by fiat, asserting that the
atoms swerved into one another’s courses, thereby setting off the formation of the
visible universe. - A shift is visible at the point where Christianity began to formulate a theology at
a generalized level. The disputes about the relations among the parts of the Trinity,
which took up much of the attention between 190 and 530 c.e., were a version
on the moderately abstract plane of theology of the deep trouble of the plurality
of substances. The first of these disputes, the Monarchian heresy, may be regarded
as the discovery of a puzzle space on which an intellectual community of Christian
theologians could form. In this light, the outburst of heresy fights was an indication
not of the weakness of Christianity, but of its institutionalization. - Buddhism also developed a theist side. Mahayana added the worship of Boddhisat-
tavas plus a sequence of future and past incarnations of the Buddha, including the
doctrine of the Buddha’s three bodies, one of which is the body of the universe.
But these movements toward anthropomorphism did not produce the conception
of a creator God; and the doctrines of Mahayana philosophies denied that there
was any world-substance to be created. - The traditional practice of intellectual historians when noting parallels among ideas
is to search for ways that influence could have been transmitted (e.g., ways in
which Hume could directly or indirectly have heard of al-Ghazali’s discussion of
causality). For reasons argued earlier (Chapter 8, notes 6 and 15), such influences
Notes to Pages 835–843^ •^1031