86 CONCEPTIONS OF ULTIMATE REALITYGreek monotheism
Greek,^3 understood as including generic, monotheism can be defined as follows:
1 The world has always existed.
2 God exercises neither strong nor weak providence.
3 The world does not exist because God wants it to.
4 Whatever is everlastingly true is necessarily true.
5 That God exists is necessarily true.
6 That the world exists is necessarily true.
Nonetheless, the world depends on God in two ways. First, God is viewed as
immutable, unchanging, and perfect; the world is mutable, changing, and imperfect.
There being mutable things is a state of affairs dependent on there being an
immutable thing. There is one-way dependence but no creation, not merely in the
sense that the world did not begin to exist but also in that there being a world is not
something that God chose to be the case or could have prevented. Second, God is
perfect, having no potential, the realization of which would bring about divine
improvement or self-realization. By contrast, the world is imperfect; it has unrealized
potential, the proper realization of which would improve the world. The things in
the world are also imperfect, and they have unrealized potential, the proper
realization of which would improve them. Anything that exists has a nature or
essence, a set of properties that makes it the kind of thing that it is. The essence of
a thing in turn determines the sorts of other properties a thing can have and hence
the sorts of events in which it may participate. What something can be an effect of,
or a cause of, is a function of what properties it has. Mutable things have essences.
An essence defines a natural kind, and members of a natural kind can be better or
worse exemplars of that kind. Some bananas and some beavers are better – better
as bananas and as beavers – than others. Some bananas are bruised, fragile, overripe;
some are not. Some beavers are crippled, ill, or brain-damaged; others are not. Any
thing has potentialities, accessible ways of changing, realization of which will further
or frustrate the degree to which it is a good example of its kind. Each mutable thing
strives by nature to be the best something of its kind that it can be – to exemplify
magnificently what something of its sort can be. In this respect, it is as if each thing
tries to be as like God (viewed as the perfect member of the kind unmoved mover
or immovable cause of motion) as it can be, given the sort of thing that it is.
This view has a curious result. On it, the world can depend for its existence on
God, and seek its fullest realization as a thing of its sort, without God even knowing
that there is a mutable world let alone knowing about any individual thing in the
world. No providence occurs, no historical persons or events bear ultimate religious
significance, and no worship or prayer has any point. This sort of monotheism is
abstract; it will seem cold, if not dead, to any Semitic or Hindu monotheist. Yet