/lit/ - Literature

>>17795834
>And if space and time are divine attributes, then we have to take a pantheist or at least panentheist view of the natural world.
They are not Brahman's attributes in Advaita for the reason that He remains distinct from them. They exist only in the conditional reality and not in Absolute reality where Brahman is to be found, and where He dwells by Himself as the infinite without anything else, without time, space or causation.

>For if time and space are “concomitant effects” or “the immediate consequence” of “God's very being,” then their existence follows of necessity from his. And there are several problems with this thesis.
>First, it would entail that the act of creation was not free (or at least that the creation of space and time was not free). For according to this thesis, God cannot not create time and space. But freedom is one of the divine attributes, knowable even by way of purely philosophical argumentation.
The problem with this argument is that it conflates being free with having volition, those are actually two separate things with different meanings. Freedom itself just means not being subject to confinement, eternal and infinite Awareness that never possessed volition as Its characteristic to begin with is not confined by Its lack of volition, so it's wrong to say that this impedes the freedom of (i.e. subjects to confinement) this Awareness, because not having a volition doesn't prevent it from perpetually accomplishing and fulfilling Its own inherent nature without any obstacle presenting itself. God is not confined by His freedom to eternally accomplish and fulfill His own nature forever without being subject to deviation, change or decay.

>Second, for God to create of necessity would detract from his perfection.
>But then, if his willing of things other than himself (in particular, time and space) is necessary, then by modus tollens he is not perfect.
Advaita says that good and evil are dualistic distinctions which don't exist in absolute reality, so reasoning that Aquinas uses like "hence, since the goodness of God is perfect" wouldn't be seen as convincing by them. You'd first have to argue that Good and Evil exist as fully real things outside human perception of them and that God or Absolute reality isn't non-dual and beyond good/evil, but this is not something which can be demonstrated with logic IMO. It seems an arbitrary and subjective judgement to say that creation following as a necessity of God's existence makes him less perfect, I don't see Aquinas offering a strong argument for it there.