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Comment by bobthechef | Hacker News Reader

> It's just as much of an anthropomorphization as the article accuses traditional conceptions of God of.

For the record (just to clarify the overall context), the traditional conception of God, in the Catholic view, is not anthropomorphic. From metaphysical analysis, God is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, the Subsistent Act of Existing Itself[0]. You see this declared in the Torah in Exodus 3:14[0]. Faith only enters into the picture with the identification of the God of Scripture with the God of philosophy, but it is not much of a leap given the agreement between the two.

That God is personal does not imply anthropomorphism. That the Logos became incarnate does not imply anthropomorphism.

Also, w.r.t. "God without denying His transcendence", the traditional Christian view of God is one who is both transcendent and immanent.

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1003.htm#article4

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+3:14&ver...

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> For the record (just to clarify the overall context), the traditional conception of God, in the Catholic view, is not anthropomorphic. From metaphysical analysis, God is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, the Subsistent Act of Existing Itself[0].

You may say that God is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens but if you then say that Ipsum Esse Subsistens is jealous, merciful, leader of heavenly armies... which is the traditional conception of God in the Catholic view then we most certainly are talking about an anthropomorphic conception of God.

> That the Logos became incarnate does not imply anthropomorphism.

The belief that one's deity chose to assume the physical form of a man: isn't that about as anthropomorphic as you can get?

> The belief that one's deity chose to assume the physical form of a man: isn't that about as anthropomorphic as you can get?

In my opinion, no.

Anthropomorphism (as commonly understood) means to ascribe human characteristics to things not human; we don't talk about anthropomorphizing your grandma, but we do talk about anthropomorphizing a constellation.

Now if you believe, like the Rawlsians suggest, that there are pre-incarnate spirits floating around and these then decide to inhabit specific bodies according to a lottery, then this is also not an anthropomorphism, but is rather a creation account of how humans come to exist.

You may not believe it's accurate, but it's still a creation account. It is no more an anthropomorphism than saying that man was molded into being from a piece of clay into which God blew his breath. That is not an attempt to anthropomorphize clay.

Finally if you believe that God literally became a man, then this is yet another origin account of a specific man. It's only if you don't believe that he became a literal man that you can speak of anthropomorphizing. Suppose he was an angel that only looked like a man, but wasn't really a man. Then anthropomorphism would be correct. But if he really was a man, and not just like a man, then it's not anthropomorphizing.

So the miracle of incarnation describes a creation account of one specific man, much like the creation of Adam from dust is a creation account of another man. If you are extending the label of "anthropomorphizing" to one, then you should also extend it to the other, at which point you've left the commonly understood meaning.

That's an interesting point of view. Thank you for sharing a well reasoned argument.

My pleasure - it's an interesting question!

Catolicism belief is without further discussions in Trinity - Holy Father, Holy Son and Holy Spirit(which had earlier representation of anthropomorphic Jewish God).

Since no one really has read a Bible, I can remind the source:

>>Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

>>"So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."

According to Bible - God created humans in his image - this is very problematic passage for Christianity, if there is an alien life out there, because apparently they would not be createad by a God.

Any deviations from anthropomorphic nature of a God in Christianity does look like a herecy. Because any other deviations from Christian religious dogmas basically brings to the result, where Aztec god that requires sacrifices and Sol Invictus, not to mention Allah and Yahweh are the same immanent transcendences of a God.

I don't really follow your train of thought. When we say someone is brave as a lion, does that mean we lionmorphize the person? I invite you to read about the many different schools of thoughts in the scholastic-tradition (catholic/eastern/Anglican etc) rich variants of Christianity. Some were seen as heretical and became doctors of the church... etc

Edit: The bearded guy in the sky notion of God is the least popular in my circles (Catholic/Muslim/Hindu mostly)

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