Bryan posted a series of questions that have plagued philosophers and on which new atheists have been filling their intellectual bellies in a succor of delight of late.
Why God? If we see it as implausible that a universe could exist or come into being out of nowhere or be infinite or uncreated, why do we think that it’s ok or plausible for a being that has all these properties and all these different attributes to be, infinite, uncreated, all powerful and personal and even exist independent and autonomously?
So I offered a reply I thought I would pull out here and expand a bit more.
To say that God is a “cause” means that somehow God is part of the set of all causation. It puts God on the same level as any other object in the universe that we can possibly empirically know. That’s the problem with Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. They are assuming that God must be an “object” like any other object that is at the whims of cause and effect.
However, if we see God as the source of the set of all causation, it is different. God must be outside and fundamentally different than anything that can be caused. This is where my affinity for Orthodox theology and Western Mysticism kicks in. If God’s existence is this way, then the being of God is something that we cannot directly know as an object. Our knowledge of things must parse out reality into distinct and contingent objects and events which cannot be done with the existence of God in God's self. In this way, it is not our mind that “holds” the knowledge of God as much as it is the being of God that holds and sustains what we know.
This is related in part to Avicenna's (Ibn Sina) argument for the existence of God. But I also draw from Kierkegaard here in his relational understanding of the self that is grounded in God. In The Sickness Unto Death Kierkegaard offers this statement: "This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it." In a way then, God's own freedom as a wholly other and non-contingent being is the very source of human freedom and happiness. In other words, grounding one's self in the freedom of God is the way to truly be free.
So out of curiosity, where do you see this idea of God's relationship to causation falling into problems?
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