Professor Angie Hobbs gave the first talk in our new series of interdisciplinary talks 'God and the Good: Thinking Religion and Ethics' on 11th October 2016 at Sheffield Cathedral.She explored the tradition in Plato and the Stoics that a) God is rational; b) the cosmos is rationally ordered according to the laws of mathematics and physics and c) that each human contains a microcosmic spark of divine reason and that it is our divine duty to try to develop this reason as far as possible through the philosophic good life and thereby assimilate ourselves to God as far as a human can. Angie contrasted this particular tradition in Greek thinking with alternative Greek traditions, which either view the gods as capricious and whimsical (Homer) or believe that, whether rational or irrational, the divine should be worshipped from afar and that it is hubristic of humans to try to assimilate themselves to it. She touched on some of the histories of these traditions and looked at their implications for current debates in science and elsewhere.
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