But there is one thing that God cannot know, which He can only learn through his human creation and our experiences: what it is to be self-aware while finite, transient, and imperfect.
God is defined by Christian theologians as Infinite, Eternal, and Perfect. God has no upper limit to His Existence; He defines the Boundaries of all Existence. This is what I believe was meant when God purportedly told Moses on Mount Sinai, "I Am That I Am." Only by establishing a Creation that is finite, transient, and imperfect, where Free Will (The part of the Kingdom of Heaven within you) allows for chaotic, inexplicable tragedies to occur regularly, can God understand what it is to not be God.
One thousand years ago, theology in the West was the "queen of the sciences," as one might expect in the Age of Faith, as Will Durant called it. But it was a science which would not admit of skepticism, or consideration outside of the iron strictures of whichever faith held dominance over the area the theological question was being considered in. There was not testing of new hypotheses, or even thought problems concerning contradictory dogma: the faith, and the Church that defined it--Christian, Islamic, or Judaic--served the secular authority to their fullest extent as a control mechanism. It otherwise risked retaliation and deposition. King Henry II of England's Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas - Becke t, forgot that relationship, and paid for it with his life.
Five hundred years ago, theology in Europe was no longer "queen of the sciences," but still dominated philosophy, especially as Europe found itself in the midst of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Sir Thomas Moore, Ignatius Loyola, Michael Servetus, and Giordano Bruno, were all movers and shakers during this period of upheaval, as Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Inquisition racked Europe until the end of the Thirty Years War.
But science had begun to be taken over by men who believed first and foremost in observation and rational thought: men like Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Francis Bacon, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Galileo, and Newton. Some of these men also embraced traditional philosophy: Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal. In philosophy, we also see the beginning of the divide between traditional philosophy and science, or "natural philosophy," together with the diminished importance of theology, beginning with the writings of Michel de Montaigne . With the rise of science, we also see the beginning of what would be called the Enlightenment, as human self-awareness and knowledge begin to take precedence over belief for the first time since the fall of Rome.
By the Eighteenth Century, science was questioning the traditional view of the universe, and philosophy had developed doubts about what was humanity's place in the world. Thomas Hobbes reiterated the view of Paul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo, propounding a view that saw humanity as inherently flawed; a beast needing to be tightly controlled by the state if it was not to destroy itself. He was joined in this negative view of humankind by men such as David Hume and Edmund Burke. But men such as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the majority of the French Encyclopedists, viewed humankind differently, and this positive viewpoint profoundly influenced America's Founding Fathers. Those Founding Fathers--in particular Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and James Madison--would have been at the forefront of late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century Philosophy, except they were far too busy with the practical application of their ideas to the founding of the United States of America.
Thomas Paine came closest to writing a systematic philosophy with his works The Crisis, Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. James Madison's contribution to The Federalist Papers insured that Hamilton, Jay, and the rest of the crypto-aristocrats in waiting would not be able to use the new Constitution as their justification for establishing an aristocracy. Madison's insistence on a Bill of Rights made it nearly impossible to use the new "Federal Government" to establish an oligarchy in the new Republic's immediate future, although John Adams attempted to establish such a system during his Presidency. Benjamin Franklin's aphorisms in Poor Richard's Almanac, as well as his anonymous pamphlets and letters, were the basis under which America's colonists began to consider leaving England's domination, and helped inspire the French to reconsider their monarchy.
But it was Thomas Jefferson who was America's first great philosopher, even if he never created a systematic philosophy.
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