Is God an Author? (user search)
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  Is God an Author? (search mode)
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Question: Is God an Author?
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Author Topic: Is God an Author?  (Read 1183 times)
anvi
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« on: November 11, 2011, 01:18:42 AM »
« edited: November 11, 2011, 01:21:00 AM by anvi »

You mentioned the Vedas, Teddy, and that gives me license to bring up a curious debate that took place in the history of the Hindu philosophical tradition on this issue.

Everybody who did classical Hindu scholastic theology agreed that the Vedas were without error.  But two philosophical schools disagreed about why.  In the school of classical Nyaya (Hindu "Logic"), the familiar position was taken that the Vedas were without error because their author was God, and since God's knowledge is perfect and God never misleads people, the books he "wrote," the Vedas, could not contain error.  But another school, who were official orthodox "exegetes" of the Vedas, called the Mimamsikas, argued that the Vedas were free from error precisely because they didn't have an author!  Their main argument for this was that, whenever any text is found to be in error, the error must be accounted for as the mistake of the author.  Therefore, if there are texts that contain no error, this must be because they were authorless!  Smiley  The Mimamsikas ultimately thought that the Vedas were written down by ancient sages who "heard" the resonance of divine being vibrating in the cosmos, and from that resonance, the perfect syllables, words and sentences of the Vedas sprang forth spontaneously, and the sages wrote them down.  That is why, for this school, the Vedas are called "sruti," a revelation of ultimate truth that was not overtly authored by anyone, but as the word "sruti" means, "heard."

It's a curious and, to me, amusing argument, but an interesting one nonetheless.
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