Innumerable Deities is Impossible. Depending.

Ra Del-St As far as innumerable deities, that's logically impossible. Ra D-S Why not polytheism? Because God comprehends in Himself the whole perfection of being. If many gods existed, they would necessarily differ from each other. Something therefore would belong to one, which did not belong to another. This is therefore a privation--and if one has a privation, it cannot be absolutely perfect. Thus, it is impossible for many gods to exist.

M R M Ra D-St Arguing for one God is to participate, as you began to note yourself above, in the world of scholarly subject matters from academic disciplines and their scholarship. That is, philosophical scholarship, which is why "science" itself is a form of modern Christian-based ancient-Greek-eclectic-derived philosophy, not a hammer. As you basically observed. The argument for one God is powerful in the Christian-derived view in which Aquinas took Aristotle´s more esoteric view and gave it Judeo-Christian empiricist foundations.

Yet, Aquinas was far from he end of the story. Merely the beginning of a powerful new phase that famously began launching from Vesalius and Copernicus to Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Locke, et al and etc. In evaluating the meaning of polytheism more adequately, it has taken even longer because of the complexities of intercultural study and interpretive issues. Spinoza and Locke made early philosophical advances in proto-psychology, while Catholic missionaries showed their own academic orientation as monks. As the monk Luther´s inspired Reformation created new options for people, study expanded as with C Wolff in Germany using Catholic studies of China´s Confucius already. By 1790, British W Jones founded the first Asia Society, and Max Mueller became a leading scholar combining language, culture, and religion centered around Indian Hinduism.

While the psyychosocial studies disciplines have advanced the study of religion and cultures, they have advanced beyond scientific physicalism and technophilia to interpretivism and naturalism in academia. Transpersonal psychology, at least, has taken a step in the spiritual-religious direction with some room for the transcendental and "supernatural." Spiritism started by "Allen Kardec" around 1850 made an interesting start evaluating mediums, but the subject is widely contaminated by stereotypes and lack of literacy to obscure its empirical foundations. Yet, the U of Virginia´s Dept of Percep. Studies started by I Stevenson MD studying reincarnation in the 1960s has expanded to medical context NDE (return from death) experiences in which new knowledge was obtained. Thus, empirical data of transcendental experiences exists. Polytheism´s more complex significance is clarified. Just as Christians´ own interpretive issues in contrast to all such knowledge. Gandhi, for example, and related cases confront Christians with their own ideological and cultural materialism that deviates from Jesus´ own standard as the self-identifying Son of God and Man.

How might polytheism be a key concept to develop empirically to grasp how human diversity fuels people´s relationship to even one Eternal Creator God, parent of Jesus. Christian human faults and limitations and the wonderful qualities in all cultures and individuals, from original shamanism to Hinduism and so on, can be studied for their relevance. Polytheist Hinduism predisposed Gandhi to learn outside his law studies in London from interfaith theosophists, with spectacular results in his insights and application, for one. Mrm @ J S I´d offer the results of my observations that the adequate use of the liberal arts and sciences involves the understanding of how people develop different ways of perceiving and relating to God. Eliot D. Chapple was an anthropologist who built on foundations like Pavlov´s neurophysiology of conditioning and Watson, Jones´, and Skinner´s kinds of behavioral psychology. Empirically, then, it isn´t God´s imperfection, but humanity´s diversity that can now feed the bodies of knowledge being developed by University-related culture.