Limitless and the Unity of Existence

I went to see a pretty awful movie last night. We went to see a horror film and upon arrival learned that it was sold out. Luckily for movie sales.. not lucky for us.. limitless was due to start at the same time so we chose to watch it instead. Awful... don't go and see it BUT the opening credits are INCREDIBLE. As I was watching them, I realized that it made a nice metaphor for neoplatonism. As the opening credits show, all is unity. We surge through life, with many individual differences, experiencing many individual sense impressions, but in reality, all of these difference originates from one infinite unity.

Enjoy. (to view it, click on the link and scroll down to the video within the article.)

The One and the Christian conception of God

I have always been fascinated by the conception of the infinite. Buddhist refer to the infinite as emptiness, Christians as God, and Neoplatonists as the one. All of these terms, attempt to get at a singular conception that dominates the metaphysics of every religion.

While I don't find the One to be problematic for some philosophies, I have noticed that from Christianity's philosophy on the Infinite, the One, or God arises an issue. Like neoplatonists, Christian philosophy argues that all material things emanate or originate from God, whose Being represents all of creation and the cosmos. God is infinite, meaning that every thing finite is of God but God does not just consist of all finite beings. Wikipedia nicely summarizes the implication of this conception of the One, or God: "all finite things have their purpose in it, and ought to flow back to it. But one cannot attach moral attributes to the original Source of Being itself, because these would imply limitation." Christians however, unlike neoplatonists, do attribute moral significance to the "Source of Being." Christians argue God represents certain characteristics: mercy, wisdom, compassion, omnipotence, etc. Conversely, the Christian God does not contain other characteristics: cruelty, dishonesty, malice, wrath, etc. The Christian God also desires certain behavior from finite being: worship, devotion, chastity, selflessness, hospitality to strangers, etc.

By attributing certain desires and characteristics to God, Christian philosophy contradicts its argument that God is the creator of all things, omnipotent, and the eminence of all creation. An infinite God cannot have finite characterisitcs as this would imply a limitation to God's Being. I realize that this issue is widely discussed as the 'problem of evil' and that this is a VERY amateur attempt at dealing with this issue but I think that Neoplatonists philosophy articulates the problem with Christian philosophy quite clearly.