 |
 |
|
| You are here >> Index >> Boethius |
|
 |
Unit Overview This unit has been written by Adrian Brown for the Science and Religion in Schools Project. Please note that this unit was written in July 2009 and comments about text books may become out of date.
Background Boethius has suddenly become popular again. OCR’s decision to include him in the new and widely used A2 Religious Studies: Philosophy of Religion Specification caused something of a minor panic. Very few teachers knew of him; fewer had read him; virtually none had considered teaching about him. Publishers responded quickly and included some material in the latest iteration of their standard textbooks, the most notable being those works by Ahluwalia (Folens, 2008), Taylor (Routledge 2009) and briefly in Tyler and Reid (Philip Allen, 2008). A more thorough recent treatment of Boethius is that in the admirable Philosophy of Religion for A2 level by Wilkinson and Campbell (Continuum, 2009).
The particular issues arising from Boethius’s discussion of the nature and attributes of God concern the philosophical problems arising from the belief that God is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Boethius discusses eternity and the foreknowledge of God in Book 5 of his work The Consolations of Philosophy and considers whether a good God should reward or punish his creatures. Boethius’s discussion is not comprehensive or complete, but it has been highly influential in shaping subsequent reflection.
The discussion is predicated on a necessary consideration of what is
meant by human free choice and the relationship between our supposed
free will and the supposed foreknowledge of God. This in turn raises
questions of the relationship between what God knows and what such knowledge
might or might not have to say about known choices made by others. Are
these really free choices, or does foreknowledge of them in some way
determine the result of apparent choice? Embedded in all of this is
the question of how we understand time. How does God relate to our experience
of time? Should we speak of God, in a distinction made clear by Wolterstorff,
as eternal or everlasting? What precisely is the distinction between
these terms? Is the claim that God is ‘beyond’ our time,
which most theology asserts in some way and links to the idea that God
created and sustains spacetime, something that entails the claim that
God is ‘timeless’ in His own being? Furthermore, is there
mileage in suggesting that God experiences some kind of temporality
within Godself? How might we speak of this? Do we need to postulate,
and neologisms are very tempting here, some kind of ‘Supertime’,
‘Godtime’ or ‘Trinitime’ to begin to describe,
by analogy, the dynamic inner life of God. This is important if we take
seriously the Christian Trinity that the Biblical text seems to suggest
and which is arguably the best available and historically the most developed
model of God we have. This Trinitarian God is clearly more that the
Deistic deity beloved of many The nature of the long essay in this unit on Boethius is to stimulate students and teachers to think theologically and philosophically about the issues thrown up by Boethius’s discussion. It is deliberately provocative in places and should not be seen as a simple textbook article to be regurgitated. One of the endemic problems with so many basic introductions to the philosophy of religion is that they do not invite the reader to do very much thinking! In a world where regurgitation of standard material seems often sufficient to gain marks in examinations this is rather sad. The enduring worth of studying this kind of material ought to be more than mark gathering. Philosophy is not meant to be easy and it is in the nature of the discipline that not inconsiderable conceptual ground clearing is essential. The truth may be out there, even if it seems inaccessible to us at present. There are certainly no answers until the questions have first been understood! It is salutary to reflect on the eschatological caution implicit in Hick’s famous discussion of verification and enjoy the questions for now even if some of the answers remain elusive as we peer through the frosted glass of our present reflective life. (1) Blaise Pascal, The Pensées, Tr. J.M. Cohen, Penguin Classics, 1961, 287pp; Andrew Moore, Realism and Christian Faith: God, Grammar and Meaning, Cambridge, 2003, 269pp, 0-521-52415-6 Aims of the topic At the end of the topic the most able students will have understood that:
Some will not have progressed this far but should have a basic grasp of the central issues presented in the material. At the very least they ought to be able to recall basic factual material. As always there will be differentiation based on the degree to which some go beyond this and show an ability not only to understand the material but to make an informed and nuanced evaluation of the same. Key Questions
Learning Outcomes: Students will understand:
Resources
References See Resource Sheet 2: Essay Images Credits (this page)
|
| |
| Top
|
“Even
if things are foreseen because they are about to happen, and they
do not in fact happen because they are foreseen, nevertheless necessity
lies either in that future events are foreseen by God or that things
foreseen happen because they are foreseen. This alone is sufficient
to eliminate the freedom of the will …. 
The
material here is designed to go beyond the above and engage a little
more fully with questions that have fascinated those working on the
dialogue between science and religion. John Polkinghorne’s work
is particularly interesting and accessible in this regard. The material
presented here is also designed to be immediately useful in the classroom
and includes an extended essay for students and teachers that has assessment
material to accompany it in terms of a comprehension exercise and a
crossword. Both come with answers supplied!
philosophers.
The God of the philosophers is arguably unrecognizable and unknown in
the experience of the religious believer. This raises and underlines
the perennial question of the relationship between the God of the Philosophers
and the God of Scripture, often carelessly conflated in discussions
at A-level but resisted by many subtle thinkers from Pascal to Moore
(