On Maimonides – Peter Adamson in LRB:

“Time has a way of turning radicals into authorities. Thomas Aquinas was provocative during his lifetime because he sought to ground Christian theology in Aristotelian philosophy. Marx was exiled, Socrates poisoned. Moses Maimonides, known in the Jewish tradition by the honorific ‘Rambam’ (for Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, his real name), was celebrated centuries after his death as a towering figure in both philosophy and law, but in his own day was a controversial figure. The Provençal rabbi Abraham ben David (‘Rabad’) criticised him for, among other things, his insistence that God is not embodied. After his death in 1204, Jews living in Montpellier helped persuade the Christian authorities to burn copies of his greatest philosophical work, The Guide to the Perplexed. Rabbis at Acre condemned him in 1288.”

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“Maimonides dismissed it as a forgery. For him, indulging in any corporeal description of God was unacceptable, because it could be proven through the laws of eternal motion that God has no body. This created a problem for those who wished to read scripture literally. How could the word of God conflict with what had been proved to be true?”

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“In The Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides claims that there is no way to determine which of these three positions is correct. This might seem to cast doubt on Aristotle, but Maimonides points to a passing comment in a treatise on argument theory in which Aristotle says that eternity is a difficult matter and open to disputation. Seizing on that remark, Maimonides argues that Aristotle, too, must have realised that the issue cannot be settled by reason. In this, he was followed by Aquinas, whose Summa Theologiae cites the same Aristotelian passage to the same effect. Aquinas also adopted Maimonides’s overall solution to the problem of eternity (if we can call it a solution). Maimonides seems to find the Platonic idea of eternally pre-existing matter unattractive, but declares the contest between Aristotelian eternalism and biblical creationism a draw as far as rational argument goes. Jews can believe in creationism, he thinks, because it seems the more straightforward way to understand scripture. And in addition, a temporal creation goes well with the idea that God freely chose to make the universe, instead of producing it through some sort of automatic process.”

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“We might not be able to prove the existence of God, but it is still rational to accept it by faith if we have removed all ‘defeaters’ to theism. For example, the theist has to rebut the argument that the presence of evil in the world is inconsistent with the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent deity. It can be rational to believe without absolute proof, but it can never be rational simply to ignore arguments showing that your beliefs are false.”

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“Though this even-handed procedure is most commonly associated with Maimonides, a Muslim contemporary, Ibn Ṭufayl, was making the same argument: that God’s existence can be proven whether we assume eternalism or creationism. Ibn Ṭufayl was an associate of Ibn Rushd and the author of a remarkable narrative called Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān, whose eponymous hero grows up on a remote island and works out the fundamentals of philosophy through independent reflection. Ḥayy realises that he can prove the universe has a creator even if it did not begin at a fixed moment in time: Since matter in every body demands a form, as it exists through its form and can have no reality apart from it, and since forms can be brought into being only by this Creator, all being, Ḥayy saw, is plainly dependent on him for existence itself ... Thus he is the Cause of all things, and all are his effects, whether they came to be out of nothing or had no beginning in time and were in no way successors to non-being.
For philosophers devoted to the authority of Aristotle but nervous about the clash between his cosmology and the creationism of the Abrahamic faiths, it was reassuring to think that God’s existence could be established either way.”

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“This means that we can’t talk about God in himself at all. There are two caveats to the rule, both inspired by ideas that reached Maimonides from the Islamic theological tradition. First, we can talk about what God does, the acts he performs in the world. This is permitted because what we are really talking about is effects in the world, rather than God. Second, Maimonides allows us to speak of God in negative terms, for instance by saying that he is not a body, not in place, not sitting, notstanding and so on.”

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“Maimonides claims that by the end of this process one would have a concept of a ship not unlike that of someone with a positive understanding. More plausibly, he says that it is at least some advance to learn that God is not a body, not a soul, not affected by any cause and so on: ‘The more you can prove inapplicable to God, the better; and the more you affirm of him, the more you anthropomorphise and the further you stray from real knowledge of him.’ I take this wording and some of the translations above from the new translation of The Guide to the Perplexed by Lenn Goodman, a historian of philosophy, and Phillip Lieberman, a historian of law; this is the right combination of expertise for tackling Maimonides. Another specialist in philosophy, Shlomo Pines, published an edition in 1963 prefaced by an influential, and to some notorious, essay by Leo Strauss, which argued (to oversimplify) that what The Guide to the Perplexed doesn’t say is more important than what it does say.”

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“His transitional remarks are well served by Goodman and Lieberman’s colloquial English, as here: ‘My own approach, in a nutshell: I say that either the world is eternal or it began.’ Here ‘in a nutshell’ stands for a long phrase in the Arabic that would slow things down. Having several very different options in English is no bad thing, and is perhaps fitting for a philosopher who was not afraid, on occasion, to tell his reader: ‘Choose the view you please.’”

Read the article here.

Most probably we should talk about ourselves as we ought to talk about God. We should be able to tell what we are not (we a not a chair, although people can sit on us from time to time) and our actions. (I cheated on my significant other last Tuesday afternoon from 2:24 PM till 4:58 PM.) This will make the world a better place.
Of course, complications can still asire.

I’m not an alien.

Well, we think you are.

And yes, God without a body is preferable to a God with a body. This is the weakest point of Christianity. Luther tried to solve it, but well.