Gilbert Keith:
AnAtheist
To you (and me) Illuvatar is just a figure made up by JRR Tolkien. And to me and other atheists your God is just another figure made up by some other guys.
False analogy.
Tolkien clearly is creating a fictional character and admits to the fiction.
I’m not sure about this.
The theism of the Silmarillion is not explicitly that of the Bible, tradition, and Christian faith - bit the difference is in what Tolkien omits to say; not in what he says. Iluvatar is not clearly Trinitarian, for instance - but there is no statement denying that he (He ?) is.
Is the Torah is truer than the Silmarillion ? Both works are inspired: the puzzle (ISTM) is to work out how the inspiration of the Biblical texts sets them apart from any other inspired works of literature. When literary works are of outstanding quality - the Divine Comedy, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, for example - it seems very odd to say that the Bible is inspired, but they are not, at all. Parts of Dante (such as the end of the Paradiso) are far above anything in the Bible.
What makes Iluvatar less real than the God of Genesis ? I think they are both literary renderings of the God Who is beyond all words. Maybe inspiration and canonicity have a public character as literature which mediates salvation, that the work of any other author can’t have - not because “uninspired” literature cannot mediate salvation; but because such literature lacks the public and canonical character of the Biblical texts.
Which would mean that literary quality, and mediation of salvation, are not essential to the inspiration of the Biblical texts - outstanding as literature though much of the Bible is: since they can be found in other writings, and since the Judaeo-Christian tradition has always insisted that the Bible is different from all other bodies of writings, they could not be. So Biblical inspiration would have to be sought elsewhere. ##
Moses clearly is not creating a fictional character and insists on God’s reality.
As an atheist you cannot make the distinction because you don’t want to admit it. But it’s there nontheless.
Likewise, you cannot admit that Jesus really lived and preached and performed miracles according to those who witnessed all that.
You cannot admit it because you dont want to, but certainly not because the Evangelists and Paul and Peter were making up a fictional Jesus in the sense that Illuvatar is clearly fictional according to Tolkien himself.
Where does Tolkien say Iluvatar is fictional ? Iluvatar may be a literary construction - that doesn’t make Iluvatar a fiction.
How about this:
He’s fictional only in the same sense as Aslan is fictional; in as much as both figures occur in “feigned” realities - the Word was not Incarnate as a Lion, but as a man (in this world, that is). That doesn’t mean that there could not be a coherent reality in which the Word were present among His creatures without an Incarnation, and, instead of taking the form of a man, taking the form of a Lion.
It’s easier to talk about Aslan than about Iluvatar, because Aslan is more richly symbolic; Iluvatar is seen much more directly, so it is correspondingly harder to compare Him with anything; and so, to speak of Him.
Our “real world” may well be no more real - if no less - than Narnia or Middle-Earth, as far as God is concerned. Not because Tolkien and the Elves (say) are equally fictional from our view-point; but because,
in comparison with the God Who is alone uniquely real and Living, nothing is real at all; not us, nor Tolkien, nor Middle-Earth. All things, conceptual, actual, potential, “imaginary” are equally unreal in their nothingness; and all have being at all, only because they are made real, each in its way, by the Living God. ##
