Category Archives: Existence of God

Existence of God – 7

Existence of God – 7

Following the last set of posts on the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA), we have…well, what do we have?

Suppose you are skeptical – that may be fair.  Which premise do you object to, and why?

For the skeptic, that is the only course of action here.  The logic can’t be denied (unless you want to deny logic).  Even for a hobbyist of philosophy, that’s pretty easy to see.

Let’s just say, for the sake of explanation, that you don’t like the first premise, “Whatever begins to exist has a cause.”  You think, vaguely (as I do),* that quantum mechanics must reveal some exception to this rule, or that somewhere down the line, we’ll find something truly astounding, which can’t be anticipated by this kind of logic.  Maybe in a Universe with different rules of physics, there are also different rules of logic.

Aside from taking the opportunity to use a phrase like “atheism-of-the-gaps,” what I would point to is the notion that we don’t need 100% certainty of the argument for it to be successful.  We just need the premises to be more plausibly true than their denials.

Is it more plausibly true, I would ask, that “Whatever begins to exist has a cause,” or rather, “Some things begin to exist without a cause”?  If you think the second statement is true, or just more plausibly true than the first, what example would you give?

If you can’t give an example, why think that some things begin to exist without a cause?  Why prefer this over the premise, “Whatever begins to exist has a cause”?

Suppose you can’t find any exceptions or successful objections to either premise.  Is this any reason to jump to the conclusion that you must believe in the God of the Bible?

No.  I am one of the two Catholic guys, but my aim here is not to make you a Catholic, or Christian, or Jew.  What I aim to offer is that belief in God is more rational than the absence of belief.  That, I think, is one of the fruits of the KCA – the conclusion, it seems to me, is much more rational than the denial of the conclusion.

Keep in mind, Krauss offers that the multiverse is (perhaps) more rational than the absence of the multiverse.  Nevermind that there’s no evidence for its existence^ – it is simply a hypothesis to make sense of the evidence we do have.  And I have no interest or need to deny that hypothesis, except that we may be able to explain things without it.

Though no objections have surfaced in previous posts as of this writing, I realize some may come up when there is time for various readers to comment.  I’m interested in that conversation.

However, for the sake of this series, I want to continue with this assumption:  The KCA is more plausibly true than false.  Now what?

 

*In a bit of permitted confusion, what I mean to say here is that I think vaguely about quantum mechanics, but not that QM will someday prove that things can begin to exist without causes.

^As far as I have read/heard.  I suspect we’ll all know it if any evidence does materialize.





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Existence of God – 10

Existence of God – 10


Last time, I introduced the analogy of God being related to his creation like an author is related to her story. Since we have dealt primarily with the attribute of God being all-powerful, I raised one of the classic challenges to God’s omnipotence, and proposed that we address it with our analogy.

The challenge is this: Can God make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it? As we saw, if God cannot make a stone that large, then there is something he cannot do, and therefore he is not omnipotent. Likewise, if he can make the stone, but can’t lift it, there again is something he cannot do, and therefore he is not omnipotent.

How does the theist escape this?

I think I have one vague way leading to one clear way.

Let us first suppose an author, whose abilities within the context of her story will (hopefully) help us see the way out. She is, for all intents and purposes, presumed to be all-powerful in the context of her story.

So let’s ask the question a different way: Can an author create a rock, within the context of her story, which is too big for her to lift?

The vague answer is this: The question makes no sense. We see, clearly, that she can create and destroy galaxies, entire Universes, with mere words. Can she not create a rock any size she likes? What does it matter if she can “lift” it? Can’t she always lift it, no matter how big she has created it? Are we to suppose, in the context of her story, that she will ever strain against the weight of any rock, or that she will ever strain against the effort of building a still larger rock?

And this leads to our clearer answer, which harkens back to the posts on infinity.

Let’s say she sets out to create that rock (in the context of her story), a rock so big that she cannot lift it. She builds a rather large rock – a boulder, let’s say. She then describes herself picking it up and lifting it. She’ll need a bigger rock.

So she builds a rock the size of a mountain. Again, she can lift it without effort.

She builds a rock the size of a continent. She lifts it.

She builds a rock the size of a planet. She lifts it.

She goes on, building them to the size of a solar system, a galaxy, a supercluster of galaxies, increasing the order of magnitude of this rock by hundreds and thousands at a time. At no point does she ever strain to create the rock, and at no point does she ever strain to lift it.

Soon, compared with the original rock, she is building rocks beyond description, except by numbers. She builds a rock that is 1 x 10^100, then the 1,000th power, then the 10,000th power, then 1 x 10^10^123, which is actually beyond human comprehension of any kind except that we know how to read numbers. Still, there is no difficultly either in creating it, or lifting it.

In effect, I would venture, the answer to the question is – well, she is infinitely powerful in the context of her story. There is no finite end to this challenge. I see no point at which she could no longer create bigger rocks, nor any point when she could not lift the rock she has created. The question pertains to infinity, and so the answer is neither “yes” nor “no.” It is better to say, perhaps, that it is not applicable.

Or, if it is not enough to equate “infinitely powerful” to “all-powerful,” I don’t know what anyone can be looking for when they say “all-powerful.”


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Existence of God – 11

Existence of God – 11


(Not going to lie, it took me three tries to type out that subject.  You might really be in for it this time).

In our last post, I compared God to a common author, and applied the analogy to the classic riddle, “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?”  This, of course, is a challenge to the coherence of a property like “omnipotence” (being all-powerful).

William Lane Craig gives us more to think about, however, than omnipotence alone.  If the KCA is successful, it also gives us a God who transcends space, time, matter, and energy.  Furthermore, God is the “First Cause” of the Universe, the one who brought it into being.

How does this comport with our analogy?  ”Nicely,” it would seem.

Who or what else, for example, can be said to bring a story into existence except its author?  The story does not write itself…

We quickly run into a kind of obstacle, perhaps only a matter of scope.  In our world, it is obvious that any given author is not THE first cause, but has a prior cause (the author’s parents, for a start).  So, for the purposes of our analogy, we are speaking of the author and her story as a kind of closed system.  In the closed system, the author simply exists.  Then, she begins a story, and she is indisputably the first and only cause of that story.

So the author speaks (or writes), and with mere words, a new world comes to exist.

And she may write of men and women, for example, animals of all kinds, trees and rivers and mountains.  Her story may follow the passage of a few moments, or days, years, even eons.  It may take place within a single building, or span continents, planets, galaxies – even other dimensions.  The driving forces of her story may be merely physical (the classic “man vs. nature” kind of story), or else she may tell of great movements in human civilization, or hitherto impossible technologies, and have in motion all manner of interests and objects.

That is, she speaks into existence the kinds of matter, time, space, and energy she wishes.  (And she might create other realms as well).

Does she not, then, transcend all of this?

To borrow some biblical ideas – are not 1,000 days like a single day for her, and a single day like 1,000?  Can’t Chapter 1 take place over the course of a single minute, and Chapter 2 the course of a century?

Hasn’t she called the sun into existence and commanded it to shine?  Whatever animals exist – hasn’t she also called them all up?  And the characters – hasn’t she fashioned them herself and, we might say, in her own image?  (Can an author ever create a character she cannot, in some part, relate to?  A good psychologist might have something say about this).

Is it any actual effort at all for her to be present at all places of her story at once?  (She does not even need to multi-task – after all, the story goes nowhere without her, and by necessity must wait until she attends to it).

This is enough to set the mind reeling, and perhaps your mind is doing better than mine in seeing the potential usefulness of the analogy.  But come humor me and my tortoise’s pace.   You may have noticed, for example, that I give a few examples of omnipotence, which we have already introduced as an attribute of God, and here at the end I switched to the attribute of omnipresence (being present everywhere).

The KCA does give us the impetus to think of God as transcending – rising above or going beyond the limits of, says Webster –  the Universe.  This would seem to get us started on omnipresence; we’ll consider it at greater length in the next post.

 

 







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Existence of God – 12

Existence of God – 12


If God can be compared with an author, how shall we think of God’s omnipresence?

This may be one of the more difficult “omni-” attributes that we have to think about.  We’ve thought a bit about omnipotence, and we have omniscience waiting in the wings; these two are already “invisible” traits.

That is, if I say to you, “Superman is stronger than any human being,” you don’t have any trouble with that.  His strength is not necessarily apparent, but lies in wait, and we only see it when he’s doing something.  Then, we compare what he can do with what the strongest human beings can do, and we see that he is stronger than they are.

Or take the root of omniscience, intelligence*.  Let’s say I invite you into a room full of Stephen Hawking look-a-likes.  They are chatting amicably, and amid the computerized chatter I ask you to pick out the real Hawking, who is one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in the world.  You can’t easily tell which one is he – his intelligence lies in wait.  But a good way to find out might be to ask them all to give a quick exposition on whether black holes lead to new universes (they don’t, according to Hawking).

Now ask either Superman or Hawking – where are you?  The answer will be a single location in three dimensional space.  You can only be in one place at one time.

Presence as an attribute, in other words, does not lie in wait (unless you’re a ninja).  It is the obvious thing about you, that you are somewhere, and only there.  It can be an alibi or a damning piece of evidence – but it can’t be both at the same time.

How then is God omnipresent?

We are often – I am often, even until the present moment – tempted to imagine a vast ghost of a being, invisible to us, perhaps like a really thin gas.  This ghost permeates the Universe, though we have trouble with this, and not just because it’s eerie.

For a start, can this ghost see?  Where are its eyes?  Is it entirely composed of “spiritual” eyes?  Or, are its eyes focused on us, and the long train of its flowing being extends from here out into space?

Or would we insist that God is not in space – therefore not omnipresent – because we don’t have any direct empirical evidence of him?  The opposite is a bit jarring to think about:  Some exterior physical presence existing in such a way that you are always and constantly aware of it.  (I imagine the body of a nondescript white male in 19th century clothes multiplying himself along the streets of, say, London).  This would make us all speak and act as though we were paranoid, no?

If the being has to be imagined “in” space, that is, as part of physical space, then maybe we have the wrong idea.

Rather, I suggest that the author is omnipresent within the context of her story, and we might take our cue from her.

Now, the author is something completely apart from her story and even our human authors are not made of up of the same “matter”  as the content of their stories.  So there is an implicit – shall we say necessary? – separation between the author and her story.

In this sense – as we saw with God – the author does not maintain a “physical” presence in her story.  I am grateful not to have to misconstrue her in such ways (I’m a married man, after all).  Isn’t she, nevertheless, present in her story?  If so, in what way?

 

*Here I use “intelligence” to mean something like “an ability to know.”  Of course it can also connote “an ability to learn” or something suggesting that the objective of learning has not been achieved, but could be.  This distinction will enjoy (or suffer) more treatment in future posts.







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Existence of God – 13

Existence of God – 13


We have said what omnipresence is not; let’s see if we can hone in on what it positively is.

What do we mean, for example, when the person we are speaking to is staring off in the distance and we say, “You look like you’re 1,000 miles away.”  (Or, “Earth to Suzy!” – but this is more obviously out of fashion).

Or again, think of the phenomenon of video conferencing. One party may be in New York, the other in San Francisco (or Tokyo, or Berlin). Yet we see and hear them – are they present? How would you explain your answer?

If so – take it back one step. Imagine you are only able to talk on the phone. Is the other party present to you?

Now both of those require communication, so let’s bring it back yet another step. Say you have an infant, and the child is now fast asleep. You walk in to enjoy the moment (and to make sure the baby is still breathing). Are you present to the child, who is unaware of your physical presence, and is not communicating with you?

So “to be present” seems to include (but not require) communication; it seems to include (but not require) physical proximity, or a representation of one’s self in physical proximity to the other; it seems to include (and perhaps require?) awareness of the other, even a kind of active observation. Perhaps other things besides.

You may even be thinking back to the last post, and saying to yourself: Well, I can be in multiple places at once. I might be in Peoria, and in a video conference with people in Johannesburg, Calcutta, and Detroit.

Perhaps you can; the wider the net, the easier to make my point.

Because we see that, while you can project a representation of yourself all across the world (think of television stars appearing on millions of television screens at once), this is a kind of loophole. Such images do not represent our full presence, our true consciousness. That, almost by definition, is a yes or no question – Are you fully present here? – and if it is “yes” in one place, it is “no” in every other place.

So, presence might be seen as a function of consciousness – whatever your consciousness attends to, there you are present.

 

I have one grizzly challenge to this idea, which may only serve as a distinction.  Let’s say you are stationed at a military base in a foreign country.  You are on the phone with your spouse, and so “present” to your spouse.  Your consciousness attends to that person, and not, say, to the grumbling person behind you waiting to use the phone.

Suddenly there is an airstrike, and you are killed.  How can we maintain that you were present somewhere else, yet vulnerable to death here, at the base?

It would seem that your body is the “host” of your consciousness.  Your consciousness might attend to anything at all – a person across the ocean, a person across time (if you are reading the biography of Alexander the Great, for instance) – but it depends, in the ordinary sense, on your body for its function.  The body is an “accident” of your consciousness, in the philosophical sense, and so is vulnerable to physical “accidents” of time and space.  (Your body is, itself, the “base” of operations for your consciousness).

The distinction here shows us how the author is free to be omnipresent; and it becomes all the more clear, I think, how this can be possible for God.







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Existence of God – 14

Existence of God – 14


This helps us understand, at least as a start, how the author is present in her story. She brings her consciousness (complete with talents and passions, ideas and shortcomings) to bear on the story, and therefore is present in it. Can we extend her presence throughout the story? Is she indeed omnipresent?

It would seem that she is, and we won’t stop there; it would seem she is necessarily omnipresent in her story.

What does this mean? Let’s assume that she wrote a book with 32 chapters, and didn’t skip any numbers. We can start by saying – as she tells the story, perhaps – that she is present in the context of the story, during Chapter 11. After all, her consciousness is directed toward the telling of the story, and the story does not tell itself. Nothing happens unless she speaks.  If Chapter 11 was told, she was necessarily present as it was told.

Now, could she possibly skip Chapter 25 – just not tell it – and nevertheless have it exist? Of course she couldn’t, not in the context of her story. And so if Chapter 25 does not exist, she would not have been present for it. (We can’t, therefore, demand that she should be present to something which does not exist).

Conversely, if she does not speak Chapter 25 into existence, then it simply does not exist. Our imagined Chapter 25 depends entirely on the author for its existence, if it is to exist at all. (We, existing on the same plane of reality as the author, realize she has “skipped” Chapter 25. But in the context of her story, there simply is nothing there that was skipped).

Or, let’s consider the claim more closely. It seems to me that the challenge to omnipresence is not in location, but in time. That is, how can any consciousness – God’s or otherwise – not only be everywhere at once (easy to imagine, even for ourselves, if time stands still) – but everywhere at once, at every moment?

That is, I can imagine myself – if time could actually stand still – moving about and inhabiting every possible location in space. Then, when I’ve visited them all, we move forward one moment, and I make another circuit through and among all those same points. This, at least, is what we might imagine for the author.

Indeed, let’s slow down, so that later we can “speed it up.”

JRR Tolkien, for example, is omnipresent in Middle Earth. That is, he is present at every location where The Lord of the Rings is taking place, and wherever he is absent, that place simply does not exist. (If there is a location in Frodo Baggins’ mind – the Shire, for example – which Frodo might think about even if he can’t visit it, then it is Tolkien who permits and facilitates that thinking – so that the Shire exists inasmuch as Tolkien permits it to exist, and Frodo can no more imagine it existing than Tolkien permits).

We might say that, when the Fellowship is broken up, and Frodo and Samwise travel separately from the rest, that Tolkien might seem to have a hard time following them simultaneously. But he doesn’t; it need not stress the limits of his consciousness any more than telling a single storyline. And why not?

Because time itself, in Middle Earth, is subject to him (to his will, we might say). He may write Book One and then take a year off, in our time; this will not affect Frodo on his journey. When Tolkien picks up his pen again, not a moment will have elapsed in Frodo’s time (unless Tolkien wishes it to be so – but it need not be so).

Let’s try to lay this out clearly: An author may take 10 years to tell a story which lasts 10 minutes. In the context of her story, that author does not need to delay her characters or their sense of time one bit. Her characters will have no idea, none at all, that it took the author 10 years (in her time) to tell their story; for them, only 10 minutes have passed, and that is all. They are only 10 minutes older.

The converse could be done, as well – an author might, in 10 minutes, tell a story which endures for 10 years. That is, her characters will experience 10 of their own years passing during the course of the story, while the author has scribbled down the whole tale in a mere 10 minutes of her own time.

And back to that original challenge of being in multiple locations at once:  Tolkien could tell us about simultaneous events because he had control over time.  He could tell us about one event, then tell us about another, and simply explain that they were happening simultaneously; and exactly because he willed it, it would be so.  When those characters all meet in the same space and time, they will relate their stories and realize (and not suspect any disruption in the space-time continuum of their world) that their stories were occurring simultaneously.

This shows us how the author can bend and manipulate space and time in her story, and at least one way in which they seem to be related.  The author has existential control over all things in her story; nothing exists without her permitting it.  Moreover, she has control of all “space” in her story, in part, because of her control of time.*  In the next post, we will begin to “speed up” this analogy of space and time, and see how God might do likewise in our Universe.

 

*The interesting thing about our restrictions on time is that we typically expect time to pass in a story just like it does in our world.  That is, we borrow the mechanics of “our” time, and translate them to any story we read (unless we are otherwise instructed).

But we are seldom, if ever, instructed to completely abandon our sense of time.  An author may have her characters traveling through time, or traveling at warp speeds (which is the same thing), and yet the duration of their travel is supposed to have elapsed just as we expect time to elapse on our world.

I suspect there is too much work to be done in constructing a completely new sense of time, to facilitate the adoption of that new time by the readers, and then to make the whole gimmick useful and satisfying enough that the readers will have appreciated the expense of their efforts.  And so we borrow time, which makes my work with this analogy easy:  The author could create a whole new sense of time, but they typically use ours.  In that way, we can see how the author transcends that time (in the context of her story) and how she might compress and expand it, relative to our time, in order to serve her purposes.


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Existence of God – 18

Existence of God – 18


In the last few posts I drew from the thought of philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who has worked in epistemology (study of knowledge) and metaphysics (study of the things that undergird reality, or ultimate reality), among other areas.

In other words, he thinks and writes about what we know, or at least what we think we know.  In fact, it’s that latter clause which is, in a sense, the whole reason that “epistemology” exists.  We might say that Plantinga has tried to figure out what we know, or can know, about the ultimate reality.

And what do you do for a living?

Plantinga began his work when western philosophy was not very friendly to theists – he says that any philosopher who was also a Christian was careful to conceal the fact, and kept his nose buried in his work.  It seems to me that such an environment must have been a kind of crucible for a Christian philosopher, who would have to make his beliefs stand up in a rigorous and hostile world.

He did ultimately reveal his Christian faith, whether or not he ever hesitated in doing so – God and Other Minds, Warranted Christian Belief, Faith and Rationality, among others, comprise his philosophical output.

So what do I want with the man?  A private audience, for a start.

In the meantime, I want to borrow his notion of belief in God as “properly basic.”  Whereas I have borrowed the Kalam Cosmological Argument from William Lane Craig in preceding posts, and dwelt on the implications of the argument, Plantinga offers that we can know God exists without ever having to “prove” it by argument.  He argues that no argument is needed to rationally believe in God.

Indeed, he notes that most people who believe in God seem not to arrive at that belief by argument, by carefully constructed syllogisms.  Rather, it is as if they have another sense, another cognitive faculty which responds to the proposition, “God exists”, as though it were evident without any other support.

You can read Warranted Christian Belief to really dive into Plantinga’s thought; else, stay tuned, and I’ll give you the backwash version.

 


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Existence of God – 28

Existence of God – 28


We have investigated the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, and likewise the notion that belief in God may not require an argument at all, but might be properly basic. The former does not address God’s goodness, per se; the latter assumes it, for the purpose of demonstrating the model, and deals with objections relating to God’s goodness.

In fact, at the end of the last chapter, the quality of “goodness” figures as a defining attribute of God, one that would not be doubted even in the face of terrible evil. From a certain distance, this might be seen as an incoherence; then again, from a distance, a car might look like a cow. If one keeps the distance, but merely circles, one might constantly confuse whether they are seeing a cow, or a car. But if we drive right up, the view should become clearer.

 

First, the argument, again from William Lane Craig:

Premise 1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.

Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.

 

As WLC notes, the argument itself does not say that God, then, is the basis of objective moral values and duties; however, “such a claim tends to be implicit in premise (1) and emerges in the defense of that premise against objections.”

To illustrate the point – wait for it – the analogy of the author seems to serve rather well. Consider: Begin with an author, a composite of body and mind, and nothing else. Take away the body. All that remains is the mind. [This is like God, “in the beginning”].

Now, if anything in this scenario is “good,” what is it? Of course there’s only one thing it could be, and that is the mind. [If anything is good, God is good].

The author begins her story, and the various things she brings into existence are good or bad depending on their cooperation with her [Whatever God wills is good] and their implicit participation in her goodness [We are made in the image of God, and good inasmuch as we reflect that image].

In this way, we can see how God would be the basis of objective moral values and duties. The argument, then, essentially works backwards to this point. That is, do we observe objective moral values and duties?


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Existence of God – 10.1 (an aside)

Existence of God – 10.1 (an aside)


This is a brief addendum to the last post, which I hope was easy enough to follow for anyone still reading the series. I’m sure I don’t always make it easy, and I’m hoping by the exercise of writing these things out that I will become better at articulating them.

Moreover, the subject of infinity is challenging enough, and I find myself in a peculiar position of understanding somewhat more than I used to, and yet not very much at all. There are things like “infinite set theory” that are beyond the scope of anything I have studied, though I hope to approach such things in the future.

But what can be said now about infinity as it relates to God and the large stone?

In the last post, I am essentially describing a “potential infinity,” a series of ever larger numbers that can be supposed to go on forever. One never reaches the number “infinity,” because it is impossible to count to infinity, but the fact that the series can go on forever is what makes it “potentially” infinite. For all we know, there is no end to the series, just as, for all we know, there is no end to the future.

To ask whether, in the end, God was either unable to make the rock or unable to lift it is like asking whether the last number you count before infinity is even or odd.  There’s no answer to the question – we might say the question is the “wrong” question.

In this way, I offer that the theist has escaped the riddle. But, then, what about an actual infinity? Couldn’t the skeptic say, “Well, God, create a rock that is actually infinite in size – then, can you lift that rock?”

In the post on Hilbert’s Hotel, I give a well-known argument against actual infinities. The argument stands on the basis that an actual infinity leads to logically absurd conclusions. Rather than accept those conclusions, we instead reject that an actual infinity could exist.

So, our author (and God) might reject outright the challenge to build an actually infinite rock. The existence of such a rock would lead to logical absurdities which are not useful to the telling of a story.

They might, of course, be useful to the telling of a particular kind of story – science fiction, for a start – and that’s an interesting subject to explore. Again, we are not saying that an actually infinitely sized rock is logically impossible, or that the conclusions are logically contradictory. Rather, we are saying that the conclusions are absurd, not seeming to have any relation to the world we find ourselves in.

If it is possible to create a rock of actually infinite size (residing, as it surely must, in a Universe of actually infinite size), then the answer whether it can be lifted is probably only known to an all-knowing creator (he says with sheepish grin). I do suspect that such a Universe is only a possible one, and not necessarily one God has or would actually create; at least, it seems not to be possible in this Universe, and just as well, since the story of that Universe is probably far less useful to God’s purposes.

In any event, even with this caveat, it would seem that a consideration of actual infinities renders the riddle absurd, and therefore it does not fare better here than it does with potential infinities.  Even if we have to retreat to the notion that God only do one thing or the other, this simply means there is one less thing that any one can do, and God can still do all things that can be done.







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Existence of God – 43

Category Archives: Existence Of God Series

Existence of God – 43


So what can the analogy offer us?

In defense

There is, and long has been, a field of study and engagement called “apologetics.”  In the course of this series I’ve taken some of the arguments used in this field and applied the analogy to them, as a way of understanding them.  Now we apply the analogy to the field itself, albeit briefly.

Indeed, only to say one thing:  Apologetics, properly, is a defense of faith in God (or of any idea one might wish to defend). But it is not a defense of God.

Consider a story our author is writing, and one of her characters – call him Tom – becomes aware of the author’s existence. This would make for a curious story, one with potential and pitfalls; never mind the literature.  Now that Tom is aware of the author’s existence, and her unbelievable power, and her extraordinary good will toward her characters, he is compelled to share the good news with others.

It should not surprise us to find, however, that some of these others are not convinced, and in fact they offer thoughtful reasons why they do not believe there is an author (or if there is, why it does not matter).  Among these reasons, they even doubt whether the author could possibly be good, given some of the terrible things that have happened in the story.

Whether or not there is a God, clearly, in our illustration, there IS an author.  That being the case, what should Tom’s objective be?  Must he prove the author exists?

This, of course, is quite a curious thought.  Let’s answer:  Of course not.  The truth – THE truth – is that there is an author.  Of course the author exists; the failure of an argument to produce complete certainty does not challenge the existence of an author.

Considering that, consider this:  What argument could Tom offer to the skeptics?  Wouldn’t there always be some way to doubt his arguments?  If they were radical skeptics – as many new atheists are – could the author do *anything* which would convince them of her existence?  I daresay, no.  But this is the foolishness of cynicism.

Moreover, to those who would say the author is not good, what ought Tom to say?  There is no need to prove that the author is good.  The author must be good; if she is not, then nothing is good, and the objection makes no sense.

So what defense is needed?  It is to defend the belief that the author is good.  It is to show the belief to be preferable to competing beliefs, to rebut criticisms and objections.

And what if Tom cannot convince a single other person?  Is he, then, the illogical one?

Of course not.  It would seem to be a flaw in the thinking of these others that they cannot believe like Tom does, since we know he is telling the truth.

Now, apart from appeals to a non-believer, what can a believer profit from this point?

We see, first of all, that there is a kind of special light by which we come to know God.  That is, to know that God exists (to know an author exists) does not require special knowledge – it can be arrived at by reason.  To know Who God is, to know what He is like, requires something for which reason is only a servant – that is, faith.

How else would we come to know God, enter into a relationship with Him, and love Him?  Indeed, how else to know the ways, and the height, depth, and breadth of His love?

For the cynic, in a sense, is correct – there is no scientific way to prove that my prayers for safety, or courage, or understanding, have been answered.  Science, though, is not in any position to offer this confirmation.  Its silence is not a damning one – it’s a dumb one.*

The rebuttal is simple, because it exposes the emptiness of cynicism:  How do you know anyone loves you?  If you are married, how do you know your spouse loves you?

Of course, one could cast doubt on any answer you might give.  So she has made a lifelong commitment?  Big deal – that is probably to her advantage in some way, she will get to satisfy her goals; besides, you can’t prove it will be lifelong.  So he sends you flowers?  Again, this is no sure sign of love (the cynic wants to say) – after all, doesn’t he want something in return?  If not, isn’t it at least to his benefit, to the sense of peace he has in his life, to keep you happy?  And how do you know he’s not just keeping your attention off this other thing he’s doing, which he knows you would disapprove of…

Here, even a liberal and a conservative can get together in defiance of the cynic – we do, in fact, know love when we see it.  Science is not the proper love-detecting tool.  A person is.

In a like way, this is how we can know God loves us.  Prayers are answered.  We can see it.  Let the cynic cast his doubts; you don’t have to bite.

Faith is what permits a person to see what God is up to.  It is the thing that has opened Tom’s mind – for, why was he looking for an author in the first place?  How could he arise from his story consciousness, and become conscious of a greater reality?  It is a leap past what we can completely understand, but it is not unintelligible.

The beauty of faith is that, so long as it is sincere, it takes very little to see what God is up to.  The cynic will never see it – by his own volition.  (How good is God that He lets the cynic have what he wants?)  But let the cynic quit his miserly insistence on pure materialism and the impoverished deliverances of mere scientism, and all the world opens up to him.  Thus do the meek inherit the earth.

*I know at least one cynic who wants to say that science/reason would positively rule this out, but this cannot be done without begging the question, or ill-defining the terms, or – as I say – using a tool not fitted to the task.


Existence of God – 42


The usual charge, against which we want to consider the existence of God, is that if the arguments for God’s existence were, at any point, all shown to fail, then belief in the existence of God would (should) also fail.

This charge requires a lot from the believer, because it is meant to suppose that if logic should cease to be logic, then we should be logical (who knows under which definition) and cease our belief in God.  Let me put the charge in an overly simplistic way.

If it can be shown that 4 + 5 = 10, and not 9, then we should all change our answers to that question from now on.  And not only to that question, but to every question which depends on that answer, and again, to every question which operates by the same mechanics.

In a word, we must question all calculations pursuant to the previously believed 4+5 = 9, and addition itself (how did we make that mistake before?  Have we been making it in more than one place?), and subtraction (is 9-5 no longer equal to 4?), division, multiplication..all of mathematics…and perhaps some logical assumptions besides.

But of course, 4 + 5 will never equal 10.  No amount of special pleading, or question-begging, or emotional appeal could ever change the answer, even if you wanted to sue me for it.

Now, the objection will be that the conclusion “God exists” is never as obvious as “9” is for the arithmetic above.  And that’s the start of another conversation.

As for this conversation, for the believer, it is about that obvious.  My contention in the last post is that logic is not central to one’s belief in God; that logic, in its academic forms, is not necessary for faith.*  Rather, the logical arguments for God are a kind of refuge or platform in a certain context, or an exercise in the breadth and depth of one’s mind, or even a devotional activity of those inclined to love Him with all their minds.

On the other hand, I have never bothered about the logical structure of my experiences with God in any academic sense.  I have tried to understand them, yes, and that with a gasping desperation.  In that case, however, I am more an adventurer than a thinker, more a disciple than a student.**

Those experiences seem to supersede human rationality.  For example, to feel you are in the presence of God is not something arrived at deductively, and so we are not afforded logical certainty.  It is, instead, something received, not arrived at.  If someone brings you a gift, you do not trouble with the logical certainty that the gift exists, nor with the existence of the gift-giver.  You simply receive it, and perhaps try to understand inasmuch as it helps you to appreciate the gift.

Indeed, it is tempting to have these rationalizations, to understand completely.  For skeptical minds, this gives us something to sink our teeth into.  Yet, it is important that the experience retains this flavor of being ultimately indescribable, or else, we are limited to what we can understand.  (This, really, is the downfall of skepticism, and to persist is to be a cynic).

It is better if we take the logic and the poetry together, a balanced meal of spiritual sustenance comforting to the soul.  We want the chicken with the breading, the salt with the asparagus.  This is what the analogy has offered me – it brings together a full meal, one I am still preparing, and often eating.  It seems like elven bread to me, the least nibble filling my stomach, nourishing me for days; better, it is like a multiplication of loaves and fishes.

I don’t promise it will do the same for everyone; this is not a sales pitch.  But if you are heavy on heart, and hungry for the meat of logic, you might find your protein here.  If your mind is weighed down with the complexities of argument, the leaven of a fanciful notion can lighten your spirits.

 

*Don’t forget the posts on Plantinga for a detailed reflection on this.

**This, of course, is not an unreasoning position, but simply an organic one, a less technical way of reasoning.


Existence of God – 41


This series of posts on the existence of God is something of an extended thought experiment on my part.  Several years ago, while walking along a one-lane country road under a thousand stars, I took up a mental exercise.  My goal was to come up with a good answer to the riddle, “If God is all-powerful, can He create a rock so big that He can’t lift it?” without consulting any other thinkers.

I had an intuition that the question just didn’t make sense, that there was either confusion or misdirection involved.  But I couldn’t readily see how it was confused; I wasn’t prepared to articulate a response.

As I turned the question over a few times, I reflexively looked up (this is how I remember the stars, and a hint of a cloud in the hazy gray on dark blue).  Now, obviously God is not “up there” – but I knew that.  Looking up is more of a posture – like kneeling – for the sake of the human being, rather than an attempt to locate God.  Looking up demonstrates with the body what is happening with the soul.

But that was the spark – “God is not up there,” I thought, “as though He had a body.”

Now that is interesting.  If God does not have a body, how would He go about building and lifting rocks?

So there was this gap between the spiritual and the physical, and I did not know the way across.  I pondered that for a while.

Then I thought of an author and her story.  I don’t know whether there was any step between my question and the answer, or if there was, whether it would make any sense to apply language to it.  There is a common understanding that the mind works without “showing its work” – indeed, showing one’s work can be very tedious.  Or, most people are familiar with the phenomenon of working through a thought process so fast, it almost seems instantaneous.  Of course it’s not, but it is much faster than trying to lay it out one step at a time in clear language.

Anyway, once that thought struck me, the riddle fell apart.  Of course an author can move things in her story without having a body within the story.  She can really do anything in her story, she really is, indeed, all-powerful.  (My larger response to the riddle is in the linked post).

I looked up again, and the sky was new.  Rather, not completely new (this was not a vision), but it somehow stirred.

No, God was not up there, and even if I could touch the sky, I would still not be touching God.  Yet, He was immanent.  It was His sky, and He was sustaining it in existence, even at that moment.  That was the “nearness” to God that I felt.

It could be mistaken with a vision because some of the scales had fallen from my eyes – I saw something I hadn’t seen before.  But for those who are more sensitive to God – the purer in heart, perhaps – this is just an ordinary way of seeing.  God is always “in the sky.”

That glimpse, that narrow opening, has been a marvelous gift.  We have seen how it can aid in understanding what God is like, and some of the current arguments for God’s existence.  Of course, in my life, the intellect is bound up with the spirit, and again with the heart.  Thinking about God’s omnipotence inspires awe, as well as a certain pride, as a child is proud of his strong father.  Likewise, I don’t want to believe a falsehood, no more than your everyday skeptic, and so the logical validity of arguments for God’s existence give a kind of assurance which – contra the usual charge – does not stand on its own, but is simply supplemental.  I’d like to explain that further, and perhaps the next post is a good place for that.

 


Existence of God – 40


We left off noting that there is a seeming conflict between God’s omniscience and human free will.  By the end, we noted that mere knowing, as we know past events, would not challenge the free will of those people involved in the events.  But what about knowing future events?  How does such knowledge interact with free will?

Now, on the one hand, the following is a common view about future events:  That is, if I could somehow know exactly what you were going to do tomorrow, down to the finest details and based on my present capacities, the only natural way I could know this is if you were a determined creature, if you did not really have free will.  Call this Statement A.

There are two assumptions here, and one is hidden.

The clear assumption is that I could know all of the pertinent information about the Universe so as to predict (exactly) what you will do tomorrow.  But there just is no way of having all of this information (head nod to quantum uncertainty).

Let’s think about it a step further before considering the hidden assumption.  Namely, I present Statement A, above, both as the only conceivable way I could (as a mere human being) know your actions in the future, and as a regular statement of the case on the part of determinists.  In other words, they would say that if we just could know everything – like, everything – we could predict exactly what you will do in the future.  We could predict, in fact, with sufficient processing power, the remaining history of the Universe.  In that case, it’s not so much a prediction as a reading forward of history, rather than our usual reading backward.  It would be that much a matter-of-fact.

This, I note, is essentially what omniscience is, to know everything that can be known.  The determinists think that if the position of God could be established – and plenty of determinists are theists – then this would sufficiently demonstrate the absence of free will (except on the part of God).

If God exists and is omniscient, there is no free will.

Or, you have the recent derivation of “open theists,” who say that God does know everything that can be known, but there are things about the Universe which even God cannot know.  An example of this is that God does not know whether I, for example, will be saved.  But then, no one does – it simply remains to be seen, by every being who wants to know.

If God exists and there is free will, God’s knowledge is not as all-encompassing as we once imagined, though it still encompasses everything it possibly can.

In the first case, we essentially have an Author who has written all of the characters’ lines:  This God can know absolutely everything, because He has decided it.

In the second case, we essentially have an extraordinary play-by-play announcer, who knows absolutely everything that can be known, but who really does not know what is going to happen next, at least no better than a kind of cosmic chessmaster.

The hidden assumption concerns knowing and time.  Or again, in other words – it assumes the natural way of knowing is the only way of knowing.

We start to address this assumption by noting that the human perspective is limited.  Not only do we not have all knowledge, but we really don’t know how much we don’t have.  Moreover, our abilities to predict…anything…are notoriously bad.  I refer you to Freakonomics for an interesting primer on this.

More to the point:  If such a thing as omniscience can be instantiated, it is fair to say such a capacity is truly incomprehensible to us.  Small wonder it afflicts us with paradoxes.

But let us consider it, again with the help of our analogy.  For any character in a story, what he knows is only that set of information which the author enables him to know.  That is, he may walk around and gather information just like we do, because the author has put him in an environment like ours; and the author might also imbue him with knowledge, whether a priori or of a revealed sort.

Now, compare this finite set of information with the author’s knowledge.  She knows everything that can be known in that world.  She knows every detail, every plot point, every character, every eventuality.  She even knows which characters were imagined but not included in the story, or plot twists that were rejected, or whether there will be a sequel.  There is an unbridgeable gap between the character’s way of knowing and the author’s way of knowing.  Though the author could reveal, or lead the character to learn, much of what she knows, the character will never know these things like she does.

In a similar way, I propose that God’s way of knowing is just fundamentally different, and greater, than ours.  We do learn, and information gathering has accelerated in recent history; and still, however much we can know, God knows more.  There is no way to cross that chasm – we can chase Him, but we’ll never catch Him.*

Again, I really am not in a position to solve the dispute, but I offer this:  I propose that God experiences time differently than we do.  This much is already clear, in a rudimentary way, in the case of the author and her characters.

Of course, I propose it without a mechanism for understanding it, at least not one that lines up properly.  But I think it is fair to say, even from our use of the analogy, that if God exists, there simply must be things beyond our understanding.  What I have tried to show here, in a short summary is that:

God’s transcendence of time may be like our retelling of a true story.  The characters in the story retain free will even as the author/narrator retains omniscience.  If I am in the middle of the story, and know exactly how the story will end, this does not rob my characters of their free will.

In other words, mere knowing does not entail determinism.  It might appear that way for finite creatures – if I were to know the seemingly unknowable, one could only imagine this by way of a calculation, by deterministic patterns, by a restriction to mere physical forces of all future action.  But that conclusion is conditioned by my finitude; it does not apply to a transcendent Creator.

This cord we’ve been examining – the intertwining of love, sin, and free will – lends itself to some devotional reflections (or, for my less religious friends, to some spiritual application).  After so many posts, it is probably about time to make that transition, though I can’t promise to stay away completely from these more abstract reflections.

 

*Isaiah 55:9


Existence of God – 39


We have seen several threads wound together into a cord, and these include love, and free will, and the potential for evil.  In other words, it is free will which makes both love and evil possible.  One could not love without the faculty of free will – it would not be love if it were automatic, determined.  However, since it is a choice to love, it is also a choice not to love – and this is the way that leads to evil.

Free will has remained at the periphery for most of this series, and even as it has come up, it has not been dealt with head-on.  We should consider it now, since we saw in the last post how it marks a divergence in the use of our analogy – that is, the author cannot really bestow free will, while God can.

I should also say, in brief, that I am simply taking it for granted that free will is real.  That argument – free will vs. determinism – has been alive for some time, and I have no ambition of settling it here.  It is settled, to my mind, for the obvious reason that no one takes determinism seriously; moreover, to take it seriously is a bit of a paradox.  After all, if you wanted to get serious about determinism, what would be your first step?  (Of course you would do that).

I also take for granted that an author, whatever her considerable talents may be, cannot really bestow free will.  She may indeed have a character acting in ways the reader may not expect, as though untamed; she may present the character with a dilemma, and no clear choice; the character may seem to be entirely original; yet ultimately, the author herself decides.

Now, the divergence is apparent.  Has our time been wasted, then?  Is the use of the author analogy invalid?

I don’t think so.  It is, again, like any other analogy – useful to a point.  The components do not all line up exactly, nor should we expect them to.  We are only looking for a guide, a device, even a working model through which we might understand things outside of our immediate experience.  You know, it’s just an analogy.

Furthermore, there is a kind of exception here, which fits within the analogy, though it departs a bit from our original parameters.  Consider some fantastic, true story in which you were the main character.  Now, place yourself in our hypothetical closed system – your mind, and nothing else – and tell the story.

As you do, you’ll describe some of the actions you took, some of the things you said – in other words, you’ll relate the free choices you made in the story.  The question is, does your perfect knowledge of those decisions, as you tell the story, in any way challenge your free will as you made the decisions, within the story?

The answer is, of course not.  Assuming you were free to make those decisions in the first place, it makes no sense at all to argue that your decisions have been “determined” as you tell the story.

But this is a little like a snake biting its own tail, so let’s de-couple the author from the character:  Imagine you are telling a story about a child.  These stories often feature the remarkable, charming, silly things that kids do and say, which adults do not do or say.  As the child was acting and speaking, he was making free decisions.

As you tell the story an hour later to your friend, the decisions may have the appearance of being “determined” since they are now fixed parts of the story.  But it would be nonsense to take this appearance and apply it to the original actions of the child, simply because the story now is fixed.

Very well so far.  It is clear that this all ties back to the apparent conflict between God’s omniscience (knowing all things that can be known) and our free will.  The challenge usually starts, “If God can know all of our decisions and how we will act, then we are not really free to choose.”

Obviously, knowledge of how a person did act (in the past) does not challenge his free will whatsoever.  So much for the past tense; the challenge, it would seem, is in the future tense.

 


Existence of God – 38


We now have a platform – such as it is – from which to observe what it means for God to be all-loving.*  As mentioned above, here we are taking just one angle, and it can be no more than a guide.  The analogy is not the reality.

If souls – or centers of consciousness, if you like – require a medium to communicate (indeed, a medium through which they can be fully actualized), then God must set the stage.

Our author likewise creates a world in which to tell her story, and we imagine that she is creating for the sake of the characters themselves, and not for an audience.  Or, in a sense, the characters are also the audience.

Now the good of the characters is for each of them to realize their innate potential, that which the author has invested in them.  Though we don’t have time to fully articulate the point this is more than an semi-inspirational notion.  This is, rather, the notion that some part of their being lies in wait, requiring perhaps the right circumstances, or an act of the will, or even the impetus of the author herself, in order for that potency to be actualized.  “Be all you can be” is a nice slogan, but it imposes a limit of only those roles the Army can provide; it does not exalt the very being of a person beyond this world.  At best, in the sense we mean it, the Army could only be a stepping stone, however deep or shallow that might be.

To love the characters, then, is to desire and provide for their good – to aid in their self-actualization, to fulfill the purpose for which they were created.

Can the author, then, be all-loving?  We have said she created the characters for their own sakes, and the story is told for them.  She must simply desire – and provide for – the fulfillment of their purposes.

But this is trivially true, isn’t it?  Even in a bad story, the author wishes for the characters to fulfill their purpose – usually, entertaining an audience – and she tries to provide for it, even if she is not quite effective in achieving entertainment.

Maybe this isn’t perfect love, then – for if, despite the author’s best efforts, the characters fail to entertain, then they truly have not achieved their purpose, nor seen their potential actualized.  It may be truer than expected to say that the more an author really loves her characters for their own sake, the more they are likely to achieve the purpose she has for them.  But the waters get muddy here, and we have some ground to cover.

Our better author, then, who creates her characters for their own sake – can she be all-loving?

If I may skip to the point, this seems to pivot on the concept of a villain.

Of course the author will love the hero – at least this love is more readily obvious.  The villain embodies the problem of evil, which we have reflected on at some length, and so poses the chief obstacle here.

The villain, in fact, is almost a utility, a force and source of drama, and even to respect a villain enough to make him “three-dimensional” is uncommon.  He is, in a certain sense, already actualized, fulfilling his purpose from the start:  He is evil, because the hero needs something to conquer.

If that is true, this is a peculiar kind of love indeed; but can we say it is not love?  In what respect, since he is the author’s creation?  It is not his purpose to be “good,” according to the standard of the author’s will.

This is not far off from the problem of evil, and even the narrow way many of us – or even all of us, some of the time – conceive of the world.  Politics is finally useful:  To the liberal, conservatives are wrong, evil; and vice versa.  And they are largely irredeemable, we think, and thus only obstacles to be conquered.  Imposition of our (good, right) will upon them is the only suitable course of action.  Otherwise the world is doomed – the story will end the wrong way.

We, however, need not be restricted by this view.  And whatever we do, God is absolutely not so restricted.

Here, God shakes the earth, loosens the analogy from the reality, and it is done by the introduction of a simple and terrible faculty:  Free will.

The author, even the best author, can only hope to imitate free will, to give us the impression that a character really is choosing from among options, that he may do something unexpected according to our understanding, that he is in some sense untamed.  But God truly gives it, and from our minds and hearts spews all the good and evil that threaten the world in a suffocating tumult.  Chesterton has rightly said:  We are always at war, and sometimes peace breaks out.

The love of an author is thus limited, because she cannot bestow on her characters the ability to love her back, much less to love each other.

But God – with God, there are no villains.  Even he who appears to be a villain may change his mind.  The purpose of a soul is that exaltation of his being, and evil does not provide it.  Evil is a regression, a descent to a lower state of being.

God is pure actuality, and we retain some measure of potency within us.  Our betters on earth may help us on the path to self-actualization:  I testify that a good woman can do this for her husband (and he hopes he does likewise for her).  A good teacher, a holy man or woman – even a child can be the better of an adult in certain ways.

But to achieve full actualization – whatever that “looks” like – requires one who is fully actualized.  In other words, only God can love us so perfectly, so completely, so fruitfully.  Only that which draws us near to God can be thought of as an act of love, because there we find our true fulfillment.

*Indeed, it is not false modesty to say this is a shabby platform.  It is, even according to its builder.  I would like to build a better one, eventually, if my thoughts could be clear and constructive enough.  Still, with the reader’s charity, we can at least have a look at things.


Existence of God – 37


In the last post, we saw how an author typically borrows the Universe she lives in to create her own world; well and good.  We also saw that this world is created in the first place to communicate something abstract, which could not be created without a fitting medium.  From there, we began to explore particular instances of this dynamic – namely, what is the significance of particular physical things?

I pointed to a gun, which is signifies the means to defend oneself, and/or to attack.  It might be said to convey the soul’s desire for self-preservation; or again, to impose upon the existence of another being.

Also mentioned was the idea of a talisman – let’s say a mailbox.  In our world, the mailbox has a mundane significance:  It is a channel for printed communication.  But our author might write a story granting the mailbox a magical significance:  Perhaps it tells fortunes, or dispenses memories which may be swallowed up and assimilated into the experience of the consumer.

Now, what about love?

Love, I would like to assert, is desiring and, where possible, providing for the good of another.  And what is “good?”

Good, I might say, is that which is directed toward the fulfillment of a thing – what might also be called the actualization of a thing’s potential.  And now, we are bound either to an endless cycle of abstractions – which would ultimately mean nothing – or we find a terminus, a ground of good.  Good itself, if you like.

Let us take the author as the terminus, as we did in a previous post.  The author creates a main character, charming and impetuous, short and slim.  What is the good of that character?  How would the author (or any other character) love this main character?

We would have to know, somehow, what the character was created for.

Now, setting aside our hypothetical author for a moment, who we said created for a unique purpose, let us look briefly at a common author.  A character is often created for any number of reasons, including a kind of self-projection, or thought experiment for the author, or even for the purpose of targeting a certain audience.  The unifying – perhaps the highest – reason is that the character was created for the good of the story, to entertain, to captivate, move, inspire.

In this way, most characters are reduced to utilities.  No reader much minds them, except as they might reflect real people, or as far as they provoke and inspire.  They are a medium for delivering a feeling, a thought, a conviction.

Consider now our hypothetical author and her unusual purpose:  She creates her characters for their own sake.  She calls them into being, from nothing into a kind of existence (again, within her story).  Perhaps she shapes them a certain way, invests them with traits and talents, burdens them with troubled pasts.

Now, what is the good of such characters?  How might they be fulfilled?  What is the potential that may be actualized?

We might, in this context, phrase it another way:  What is the highest existence these characters can attain?

The upper limit:  They cannot ever have the same ontological status as the author.  That is, they can never have being in the same way the author has being – the author possesses it more fundamentally.  If the author ceased to exist, so would they; moreover, the author might continue to exist, but cease to think of them.  Then, too, they would die.

This is the unbridgeable gap between the Creator and the created.

Very well.  Respecting this limit, what is the highest existence these characters can attain?

I think we must say that they can have as high an existence as the author can possibly devise.  Consider that:  If you created a character this very moment, what is the highest existence you can imagine for them?

Would it be to make them royalty in their lands?  To give them the ability to fly?  To give them endless worlds to explore?  To make them a being of pure light?  To annihilate them in an experience of Nirvana?  (And what, exactly, would Nirvana be?)

If we consider the author as all-powerful, we might see how the author could be forever inventive in this way, or at least inventive for a long time.  Of course, this mere inventiveness – this endless string of novelty, or (merely) exalted sense of being is not quite the same as the Beatific Vision.  The difference is critical, and shows us how even our hypothetical author does not really show us the breadth and depth of God.

But it is enough to say, by way of analogy, that if the author creates the characters for their own sake, she fulfills them by an exaltation of their being, and not by a measure of their usefulness for some other purpose.


Existence of God – 36


With the cautionary words of the last post in place, we proceed to creation – all things seen and unseen – and the analogy from a story.

Now, the thing we must keep in mind is that when God creates the Universe, he does it out of an overflow of love, and not for his own need or want.  Rather, if it can be imagined, he creates for the good of that Creation, for the sake of those sentient beings who will inhabit it (and for other things besides – is it not better for a tree to exist, rather than not to exist?).

This differs from the typical purpose of storytelling:  A story is told for an audience.  So, here, we must imagine that our author is telling her story for the sake of her characters, and if it were not for their sake, she would not tell it.

And that, at least, is a cursory look at what it means to be all-loving.

Returning to the point, we have an author who wills to create characters and give them life.  Now, just how could she do this?

It will help to draw a distinction, in this world she is creating, between the abstract realm and the physical realm.  That is, she can begin to create a character who is charming and impetuous without having to decide whether the character is tall or short, fat or slim.  Then the question is, how will we know this character is charming and impetuous?

Can a person be charming without speaking?  Without having a body?  Even if a person can be charming without speaking and without having a body (as some would describe God), can a person be those things without a medium through which to convey them?

That is, we experience God’s charm through some coincidence, or by the impression of natural beauty, or else by a sense of peace at an unexpected time.  If you existed only as a mind, without a Universe, how would you convey charm?

That an author chooses a medium analogous to our own is not important (and more than analogous – in imitation of our own), so much as that it is also a medium.  She can’t tell the story without some analogue to our physical realm.  The characters need a “place” in which to dwell, with “matter” they can manipulate for their (abstract) purposes, and “time” in which to carry out their (abstract) plans and desires.

Moreover, they need a realm within which they can relate to each other.  These relationships are often the chief focus of drama (apart from “man v. nature” stories) and the means by which they find and communicate (abstract) meaning.

There is no relationship, therefore, between you and your significant other, apart from the physical world.  But the purpose of your relationship – love, hopefully – is abstract, transcending the physical means you have chosen to convey it.

(I pause now as I am positively inundated with possible lines of thought.  It is like standing on the South Pole and deciding to move north – you can choose from countless angles which way you want to go).

The physical realm – this very moment – gives me a means by which I can communicate with you, and perhaps all activity in the physical world is communication of one kind or another.  Habits and drives pose an interesting challenge here, but this is not the direction we want…

And so our author, at any rate, creates a world for her characters.  Typically, this world will imitate our own, but it often attempts a departure of one kind or another – whether in geography, cumulative history and culture, or some other significant way.  As I said before, the only important thing is that it IS a medium, or else her characters could not relate.

Imagine it this way – she creates a character who is impetuous and charming, and another who is shy and harsh.  Now, without creating a world – remember, no bodies, so no speech, no vision, nothing physical – how shall they interact?

One might even ask at what point they will achieve personhood – surely the quality of being charming is not equivalent to personhood.  What must be added?  (Yet another question for another day)

Perhaps, with so many directions to take, there was something hidden in our point of departure – that is, the earlier thought, that “There is no relationship, therefore, between you and your significant other, apart from the physical world.  But the purpose of your relationship – love, hopefully – is abstract, transcending the physical means you have chosen to convey it.”

The author, in choosing to imitate the real world, takes many things for granted, and this is just one way we can see how any human author is inferior to God.  Nevertheless, the author takes on – or challenges – the (abstract) significance of things in the physical world.  For the author, those physical things in the story really do mean something (abstract).  In more mundane stories, a gun means essentially the same thing it means in our world; but a talisman is something our world finds mundane, while the story finds it magical.

In the next post we’ll develop this a bit further, and attempt to bring together the abstract and the physical.


Existence of God – 35


Before wrestling with what it means for God to be all-loving, we might find some benefit by shifting the emphasis.

Namely, we’ve focused primarily on God, appropriately so, in consideration of the analogy of an author.  We have seen, for example, how the human author shows herself to be all-powerful in the context of the story; so, by analogy and at least to that extent, we may say that God is all-powerful in reality, and there is nothing impossible or incoherent about such a notion.

But what about the story?  What about creation itself?

The first word I would offer is a word of caution:  The analogy should not be applied too stringently.  It is more of a guide, a way, an open door.  It is not a complete map, much less the journey itself.

So, for example, I think it would be fun to ponder the notion of “elementary particles” within any given story, and what, if any, significance there might be here.  Indeed, I do think there could be some.

However, it is important to see two things:  Whereas the analogy is metaphysical, elementary particles are proposed as simply physical realities.  The analogy will not teach us physics – we cannot observe the world of “War and Peace” and discover something about the force of gravity.  (At least not anything which Tolstoy had not already discovered himself, from…observing the real world).

The second is also a basic distinction:  God is the greater mystery, the more fundamentally real subject of our discussion.  The author is not an exact analogue to God – even if we can confirm a truth about the author, it might not necessarily show us something about God.  Rather, God is the One we are groping for, as if in the dark and cavernous space of the entire Universe, and we are hardly able to leap off our own pale blue dot.  The analogy may give us an idea of what we are looking for, perhaps how the search should proceed, perhaps even correct our course from time to time – but it is not the same as contact with the living God.

There is, rather, something wild and lonely and exhilarating about that journey, and it is never enough merely to consider the map in comfort.

So with that arduous caution in place, we’ll take up creation in the next post.


Existence of God – 34


As we conclude our reflections on the moral argument for God’s existence, I want to pursue the analogy of the author and see what else might be understood about moral grounding, and the moral argument.  In the last post, I reflected on God as “that which is good, if anything is.”  From here, we saw how morality may be seen as a sense of our relationship to God, of our closeness to Him and our momentum toward or away from Him at any given moment.

In this post, I want to explore the difficulties in positing both atheism and objective morality.  We have done this in brief, of course, when considering what else could step in for author – in the context of our analogy – and be the ground of moral ontology.  Here we will look at this problem in some detail.

Let us assume, then, that the story is underway – but so far as anyone can tell, either within the story or outside of it, there does not appear to be an author.*

If there is no author, where shall we begin to determine what is good?  Following the pattern of the previous post, let us consider what there was “in the beginning” – for again, surely whatever existed solely and necessarily must be good, if anything is good.

What first comes to mind is what naturally came to mind to atheists up until the early to mid-20th century:  The Universe is eternal.  It is a brute reality, exists without explanation; even beyond the dawn of the Big Bang Theory, Carl Sagan saw fit to say that “the Cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.”

Of course, it became clear that this is not true of our Universe – it had a beginning, before which there was nothing.  (Recall that, even in the case of a multiverse, the same rule applies – it must be expanding, and any Universe with an average expansion greater than zero must have a beginning in the finite past).

And it seems true enough of any given story, as well.  It is not clear that we can imagine a beginningless story, no more than we can now start one.**

So we are speaking of a story that has a definite beginning, as all stories have, though we are inclined to deny an author.  But let’s allow a more modest wording – let us say the existence of the author is at least unclear, if not improbable.  In any event, as we consider the ground of morality, we exclude the possibility that the pre-existing author is that ground.

Very well, what is left?

We may have something like Plato’s forms, mentioned in the footnotes last time.  That is, “the Good” just exists, and we find that people act according to it, or else are otherwise animated by it.  Likewise, perhaps, for “Justice.”

The first difficulty encountered is that, even if these forms are permitted, they still do not rule out the need of an author to tell the story.  Sure, an author may have her themes, which in some sense exist independently from her (or do they?), but they themselves do not write the story.  Yet, we have granted that a story is being told, and we have agreed to let go the idea of an author.

But this is the problem, isn’t it?  Isn’t an author (some intelligence, at any rate) required to conceptualize a theme?  By merely asserting the existence of a theme (or form) we don’t seem to get around the need for these forms to come from somewhere.  It is not, even at face-value, any better than asserting an author.  In any event, an explanation of the existence of a theme (or form) would be necessary.

Now, assuming both that there is no author and that these themes exist (we are far afield from any plausible cause for believing such a thing, but let’s chase it down one leg further), it becomes unimaginable to believe that a spontaneously arising story with spontaneously arising characters should also follow along with a theme, much less that anyone should find the confluence to be a valuable thing.  After all, this incomprehensible fluke would still be a fluke – why be troubled over whatever is “Good” or “Just”?  They have no greater explanation for their existence than I have!^

We have previously seen how moral ontology could not arise from evolution, so it requires no more than a passing glance – even if the characters in a spontaneously arising story did begin to develop ideas about what is “good” and “evil,” these things obviously correspond to no transcendent ground.  Moreover, they must assume – without justification – that the survival of the characters (and/or their species) is an objective good, rather than a subjective one.  It is hard to see how that would be the case in this particular story.

This concludes our reflection on the moral argument in particular, but the concepts here will provide a useful basis for understanding God as “all-loving.”  It also marks one of the first significant weaknesses of the author analogy, though the analogy is nevertheless useful in seeing the greatness of God.

 

*While some thinkers grasp that atheism entails a kind of paradox like this, that is, something defying our understanding of everything else in and about the Universe, it has seemed to me that most casual atheists do not.  They take the Universe for granted, and shift the burden of proof – “Now let the theist prove that God exists.”

**The burden of proof is shifted back.

^I take the perspective of both a hypothetical reader (yes, reading an authorless story) and an uncommonly self-aware character.  From either of these perspectives, can there be anything valuable about the confluence of two spontaneous phenomenon?  One might wonder at it, but would it make any sense to heed it, or to read into it, or to think it applies to one’s own life in any way?